Yesterday, June 25, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two important opinions that advance free markets and free people in Riley v. California and ABC v. Aereo. I’ll soon have more to say about the latter case, Aereo, in which my organization filed a amicus brief along with the International Center for Law and Economics. But for now, I’d like to praise the Court for reaching the right result in a duo of cases involving police warrantlessly searching cell phones incident to lawful arrests.
Back in 2011, when I wrote in a feature story in Ars Technica—which I discussed on these pages—police in many jurisdictions were free to search the cell phones of individuals incident to their arrest. If you were arrested for a minor traffic violation, for instance, the unencrypted contents of your cell phone were often fair game for searches by police officers.
Now, however, thanks to the Supreme Court, police may not search an arrestee’s cell phone incident to her or his arrest—without specific evidence giving rise to an exigency that justifies such a search. Given the broad scope of offenses for which police may arrest someone, this holding has important implications for individual liberty, especially in jurisdictions where police often exercise their search powers broadly.
How is it that we humans have again and again figured out how to assimilate new technologies into our lives despite how much those technologies “unsettled” so many well-established personal, social, cultural, and legal norms?
In recent years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking through that question in a variety of blog posts (“Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society”), law review articles (“Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle”), opeds (“Why Do We Always Sell the Next Generation Short?”), and books (See chapter 4 of my new book, “Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom”).
It’s fair to say that this issue — how individuals, institutions, and cultures adjust to technological change — has become a personal obsession of mine and it is increasingly the unifying theme of much of my ongoing research agenda. The economic ramifications of technological change are part of this inquiry, of course, but those economic concerns have already been the subject of countless books and essays both today and throughout history. I find that the social issues associated with technological change — including safety, security, and privacy considerations — typically get somewhat less attention, but are equally interesting. That’s why my recent work and my new book narrow the focus to those issues. Continue reading →
My latest law review article is entitled, “Privacy Law’s Precautionary Principle Problem,” and it appears in Vol. 66, No. 2 of the Maine Law Review. You can download the article on my Mercatus Center page, on the Maine Law Review website, or via SSRN. Here’s the abstract for the article:
Privacy law today faces two interrelated problems. The first is an information control problem. Like so many other fields of modern cyberlaw—intellectual property, online safety, cybersecurity, etc.—privacy law is being challenged by intractable Information Age realities. Specifically, it is easier than ever before for information to circulate freely and harder than ever to bottle it up once it is released.
This has not slowed efforts to fashion new rules aimed at bottling up those information flows. If anything, the pace of privacy-related regulatory proposals has been steadily increasing in recent years even as these information control challenges multiply.
This has led to privacy law’s second major problem: the precautionary principle problem. The precautionary principle generally holds that new innovations should be curbed or even forbidden until they are proven safe. Fashioning privacy rules based on precautionary principle reasoning necessitates prophylactic regulation that makes new forms of digital innovation guilty until proven innocent.
This puts privacy law on a collision course with the general freedom to innovate that has thus far powered the Internet revolution, and privacy law threatens to limit innovations consumers have come to expect or even raise prices for services consumers currently receive free of charge. As a result, even if new regulations are pursued or imposed, there will likely be formidable push-back not just from affected industries but also from their consumers.
In light of both these information control and precautionary principle problems, new approaches to privacy protection are necessary. Continue reading →
I recently did a presentation for Capitol Hill staffers about emerging technology policy issues (driverless cars, the “Internet of Things,” wearable tech, private drones, “biohacking,” etc) and the various policy issues they would give rise to (privacy, safety, security, economic disruptions, etc.). The talk is derived from my new little book on “Permissionless Innovation,” but in coming months I will be releasing big papers on each of the topics discussed here.
Additional Reading:
Last week, the Mercatus Center and the R Street Institute co-hosted a video discussion about copyright law. I participated in the Google Hangout, along with co-liberator Tom Bell of Chapman Law School (and author of the new book Intellectual Privilege), Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Derek Khanna, and Zach Graves of the R Street Institute. We discussed the Aereo litigation, compulsory licensing, statutory damages, the constitutional origins of copyright, and many more hot copyright topics.
You can watch the discussion here:
Congressional debates about STELA reauthorization have resurrected the notion that TV stations “must provide a free service” because they “are using public spectrum.” This notion, which is rooted in 1930s government policy, has long been used to justify the imposition of unique “public interest” regulations on TV stations. But outdated policy decisions don’t dictate future rights in perpetuity, and policymakers abandoned the “public spectrum” rationale long ago. Continue reading →
Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son of SoftBank again criticized U.S. broadband (see this and this) at last week’s Code Conference.
The U.S. created the Internet, but its speeds rank 15th out of 16 major countries, ahead of only the Philippines. Mexico is No. 17, by the way.
It turns out that Son couldn’t have been referring to the broadband service he receives from Comcast, since the survey data he was citing—as he has in the past—appears to be from OpenSignal and was gleaned from a subset of the six million users of the OpenSignal app who had 4G LTE wireless access in the second half of 2013.
Oh, and Son neglected to mention that immediately ahead of the U.S. in the OpenSignal survey is Japan. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.