Category Archives: Writings

Lessons from the Identity Trail Published Today

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

ID-trail-med.pngLessons from the Identity Trail (Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves & Carole Lucock, eds.), a whale of a book, is being published today.

During the past decade, rapid developments in information and communications technology have transformed key social, commercial, and political realities. Within that same time period, working at something less than Internet speed, much of the academic and policy debate arising from these new and emerging technologies has been fragmented. There have been few examples of interdisciplinary dialogue about the importance and impact of anonymity and privacy in a networked society. Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society fills that gap, and examines key questions about anonymity, privacy, and identity in an environment that increasingly automates the collection of personal information and relies upon surveillance to promote private and public sector goals.

This book has been informed by the results of a multi-million dollar research project that has brought together a distinguished array of philosophers, ethicists, feminists, cognitive scientists, lawyers, cryptographers, engineers, policy analysts, government policy makers, and privacy experts. Working collaboratively over a four-year period and participating in an iterative process designed to maximize the potential for interdisciplinary discussion and feedback through a series of workshops and peer review, the authors have integrated crucial public policy themes with the most recent research outcomes.

The book is available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Canada License by chapter. Hard copies are available for purchase at Amazon & at Oxford University Press.

I've got two chapters in it, Identity Cards and Identity Romanticism and Anonymity and the Law in the United States. And I'm very pleased to be in such wonderful company — it was a valuable conference full of interesting people and the materials collected here are going to be of interest to people in many of the cross-cutting fields around the world. And the chapters are (painfully) short.

The full Table of Contents, with links to the online versions of the chapters is below. Some chapters won't be released for a few weeks, so keep an eye on the main site for updates.

Continue reading →

Posted in ID Cards and Identification, Law: Constitutional Law, Law: International Law, Writings | 14 Comments

Building the Bottom Up From the Top Down

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Michael Froomkin

A. Michael Froomkin, Building the Bottom Up From the Top Down, 5 I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society __ (forthcoming, 2009), draft available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1338790.

Abstract:

“Bottom up” governance. “Self-organization”. These are among the most talismanic virtue-words of modern political discourse. Yet the reality is that in politics, “self-organization” is rare, being hard to initiate and even harder to sustain. As Oscar Wilde once complained about socialism, it “requires too many evenings”. Governance as we tend to know it depends primarily on hierarchical institutions, or on close coordination within small groups. True partnerships, conversations among engaged equals, do not seem to scale. Indeed, whether one believes the fundamental problem to be something about the economics of group formation, the iron law of oligarchy, or something in between, experience demonstrates repeatedly that the problem of group self-organization, not to mention self-governance, is all too real both in politics and other walks of life. Enthusiasts of modern communications have not been slow to point out the ways in which the Internet (and the cell phone) change the ways in which all types of groups form and communicate. For example, Internet-based 'social software' drastically lowers the cost of group formation and offers at least the potential of tools that may make group self-governance more practicable.

While this optimism is valuable and may some day be realized, the current reality falls far short of the ideal and seems likely to do so for the foreseeable future. This paper suggests that existing institutions could be harnessed to grow the tools and nurture the conditions that promote self-organization of groups and democratic decentralized self-governance. I identify eight specific governmental policies that could usefully be adopted in any relatively wealthy liberal democracy to promote the formation of groups and assist them once they are formed:

  1. Democratizing access to communication by ensuring that the communications infrastructure is widely deployed, inexpensive, and of suitable quality.
  2. Enact legal reform (if not already in place) to prevent cyber-SLAPP lawsuits.
  3. Apply competition law aggressively to markets for communications technologies in order to ensure that no software or hardware maker can exert control over citizens' means of communication.
  4. Provide reliable data, and act as honest archivist.
  5. Assist those who desire aid (but only them) to fight spam and other forms of discursive sabotage.
  6. Ensure that Meetup-like services are available at low (or no) cost (if demand for these key services proves to be elastic as to price) and subsidize facilitative technologies, such as group decision-making software.
  7. Enact a digital workers rights policy including a component that encourages digital or even physical meetings.
  8. Provide a corps of subsidized online neutrals to settle non-commercial disputes among members of virtual communities.

Something of a departure for me — while it's not the first time I've gone outside the traditional law review article, or published in a non-legal journal, it's the first time I've attempted to write something scholarly that isn't primarily legal analysis, even if a little sneaks in here and there.

It all started when I tried to think what I should write as a sequel to my Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace paper. There was one critique of that paper which had enough truth to sting a little — the response that while it might sound nice in theory, it was all too much work for real life, “too many meetings.” I started to think about what would be needed to actualize the ideas (and ideals) I was promoting; for better or worse, this is what came out.

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A Tiny Publication

Posted on November 15, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

A long time ago — 18 months? — Professor Paul Caron organized a seminar at Harvard entitled Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship. The papers from that event have finally reached dead trees via the Washington University Law Review.

The Taxprof Blog has a links to all the e-versions of the articles, including my own brief and somewhat skeptical contribution, The Plural of Anecdote Is “Blog”, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1149 (2006).

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What I’ve Been Doing Recently

Posted on May 7, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Since classes ended, I've been writing like mad.

wordcount.jpg

I did too much administration this year, and too little writing. It has been harder than I liked to get back into the swing of it, but now that it's getting fun again I can't understand how I let myself get sucked into doing anything else.

I'm going to have to see about that 139-word sentence. I hope it's that big quote from the court, not something I did….

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Grimmelmann on ‘SSRN Considered Harmful’

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

If you are interested in academic legal scholarship, please reaed James Grimmelmann's SSRN Considered Harmful.

You can get it from … SSRN … which is part of the point, as explained here.

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Scholarly Agenda 2.0

Posted on November 9, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

I recently applied for something which required an up to 500-word statement summarizing past, present and future scholarship. The trouble is, I HATE writing self-assessments. I had to write one for my tenure file years ago and found it excruciating — and it took me over a week. This time it was a little easier — if only because I only had 24 hours to do it before the deadline.

Here’s what I wrote. I think it’s true, although there’s a lot more I would have said if I’d had more words to play with:

I started teaching expecting to be a somewhat traditional scholar of US administrative law. Although I still teach the course with great pleasure, and occasionally write in the core of that subject, my interests soon grew to include the rapidly developing issues created by advances in computer technology and especially the Internet. Today, while still at heart a public lawyer, I find myself to be one with a particular interest in governance problems concerning information, and information systems. These complementary interests underlie the majority of my work to date, and are themes in my current and future projects.

Much of my recent work has concerned governance issues raised by information technology. This includes governance of the Internet by its users, self-governance by means of new technology, governance of online activities (including e-commerce) by the operation of private law, and especially regulatory initiatives by public bodies, both national and trans-national, that seek a role in either Internet regulation (e.g. the domain name system, which is the Internet’s plumbing) or seek to regulate the things that people do online. My background in administrative law has proved surprisingly useful for this, as it gives one a grounding in standards of fairness and regularity against which to measure these new and ever-evolving regulatory processes. It has also made me conscious of the need for equivalent rules and norms (and avenues for individual redress) to constrain and govern new trans-national rulemaking processes, particularly those designed as public/private hybrids.

The regulation of information technology is perhaps just a special case of the regulation of information. I continue to write about privacy, particularly the ways in which new technologies may threaten or enhance both the individual’s and the state’s control of information. Thus, current projects include work on privacy in public places, and a forthcoming project in which I hope to set out an optimal set of rules for as privacy-friendly an ID card system as one could hope for in the United States. Ideally, the next stage in this project would be to broaden it to include a comparative dimension.

The ways in which we use information and information technologies also have implications for the smooth functioning, and perhaps even the nature, of self-government, both on the small-scale of affinity groups, clubs and on the larger scales of individual participation in national and even trans-national lawmaking. NGOs are using the Internet to organize their participation in matters ranging from UN sponsored conferences to trade negotiations. Localities are experimenting with a range of devices that allow citizens more direct participation in what were formerly bureaucratic and administrative decision-making. These are, potentially, tools for a new type of self-governance, and as they mature they may require not just amendments to our ideas of how administrative law works, but to more fundamental concepts about how we organize democracy. I intend to take part in those debates, both as a participant, and as a scholar.

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