CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Author: Paul Ohm

  • Did the Sanford E-Mail Tipster or the Newspaper Break the Law?

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    Part of me doesn’t want to comment on the Mark Sanford news, because it’s all so tawdry and inconsistent with the respectable, family-friendly tone of Freedom to Tinker. But since everybody from the Gray Lady on down is plastering the web with stories, and because all of this reporting is leaving unanalyzed some Internet law…

  • FBI's Spyware Program

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    Note: I worked for the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) from 2001 to 2005. The documents discussed below mention a memo written by somebody at CCIPS during the time I worked there, but absolutely everything I say below reflects only my personal thoughts and impressions about the documents released to…

  • Fascinating New Blog: ComputationalLegalStudies.com

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    I was inspired to post the essay I discussed in the prior post by the debut of the best new law blog I have seen in a long time, Computational Legal Studies, featuring the work of Daniel Katz and Michael Bommarito, both graduate students in the University of Michigan’s political science department. Every single blog…

  • Computer Programming and the Law: A New Research Agenda

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    By my best estimate, at least twenty different law professors on the tenure track at American law schools once held a job as a professional computer programmer. I am proud to say that two of us work at my law school. Most of these hyphenate lawprof-coders rarely write any code today, and this is a…

  • Being Acquitted Versus Being Searched (YANAL)

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    With this post, I’m launching a new, (very) occasional series I’m calling YANAL, for “You Are Not A Lawyer.” In this series, I will try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system). I start with something from criminal law. As you…

  • Abandoning the Envelope Analogy (What Your Mailman Knows Part 2)

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    Last time, I commented on NPR’s story about a mail carrier named Andrea in Seattle who can tell us something about the economic downturn by revealing private facts about the people she serves on her mail route. By critiquing the decision to run the story, I drew a few lessons about the way people value…

  • What Your Mailman Knows (Part 1 of 2)

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    A few days ago, National Public Radio (NPR) tried to offer some lighter fare to break up the death march of gloomier stories about economic calamity. You can listen to the story online. The story’s reporter, Chana Joffe-Walt, followed a mail carrier named Andrea on her route around the streets of Seattle. The premise of…

  • Opting In (or Out) is Hard to Do

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    Thanks to Ed and his fellow bloggers for welcoming me to the blog. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity, because as a law professor who writes about software as a regulator of behavior (most often through the substantive lenses of information privacy, computer crime, and criminal procedure), I often need to vet my theories and…