Stopping The Presses: Evaluating The Effectiveness Of The 2013 Justice Department’s New Protections For Journalists

The Obama Administration ushered in a new era of accountability and communication between the government and those it governs. With the rise of social media and the creation of White House accounts on various platforms it seemed as if the Obama administration was taking his pledge to have the most transparent presidency of all time to serious heights. However, during the first term of the Obama administration, the justice department under Attorney General Eric Holder set some dangerous precedents. The justice department pursued several prosecutions of people who had leaked government secrets and developed a successful formula for these cases by way of the Espionage Act. Out of this behavior, a new landscape for the relationship between the government and the media was formed. After backlash, they conducted a review and used experts from outside the Whitehouse in the media, and academia to provide feedback. They then released a list of protections and new policies to protect journalists to undo the precedents they may have set and encourage future due diligence in the prosecutorial process regarding the role of media in leaks. I am evaluating how effective those protections are and whether they accomplish the goals they set out to meet.Plan II Honors Progra

Peeling Back the Onion of Cyber Espionage after Tallinn 2.0

Tallinn 2.0 represents an important advancement in the understanding of international law’s application to cyber operations below the threshold of force. Its provisions on cyber espionage will be instrumental to states in grappling with complex legal problems in the area of digital spying. The law of cyber espionage as outlined by Tallinn 2.0, however, is substantially based on rules that have evolved outside of the digital context, and there exist serious ambiguities and limitations in its framework. This Article will explore gaps in the legal structure and consider future options available to states in light of this underlying mismatch

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the protection of commercial confidential information and trade secrets in New Zealand law

After many years in which trade secrets law received relatively little attention internationally, we are now seeing a flurry of activity aimed at harmonising trade secret protection, combined with efforts to increase the level of protection provided by law. Internationally, there have been a number of initiatives to increase trade secret protection, driven by concerns about economic espionage, especially foreign economic espionage. ¹This article is about one such initiative, the trade secret provisions in the recently concluded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) to which New Zealand is a party, and the impact these provisions will have on New Zealand law

The economic impact of cybercrime and cyber espionage

Introduction Is cybercrime, cyber espionage, and other malicious cyber activities what some call “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history,” or is it what others say is a “rounding error in a fourteen trillion dollar economy?” The wide range of existing estimates of the annual loss—from a few billion dollars to hundreds of billions—reflects several difficulties. Companies conceal their losses and some are not aware of what has been taken. Intellectual property is hard to value. Some estimates relied on surveys, which provide very imprecise results unless carefully constructed. One common problem with cybersecurity surveys is that those who answer the questions “self-select,” introducing a possible source of distortion into the results. Given the data collection problems, loss estimates are based on assumptions about scale and effect— change the assumption and you get very different results. These problems leave many estimates open to question. The Components of Malicious Cyber Activity In this initial report we start by asking what we should count in estimating losses from cybercrime and cyber espionage. We can break malicious cyber activity into six parts: The loss of intellectual property and business confidential information Cybercrime, which costs the world hundreds of millions of dollars every year The loss of sensitive business information, including possible stock market manipulation Opportunity costs, including service and employment disruptions, and reduced trust for online activities The additional cost of securing networks, insurance, and recovery from cyber attacks Reputational damage to the hacked company Put these together and the cost of cybercrime and cyber espionage to the global economy is probably measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. To put this in perspective, the World Bank says that global GDP was about $70 trillion in 2011. A$400 billion loss—the high end of the range of probable costs—would be a fraction of a percent of global income. But this begs several important questions about the full benefit to the acquirers and the damage to the victims from the cumulative effect of cybercrime and cyber espionage