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Danielle Citron, Hate 3.0

By privacylaw | Posted on

Danielle Citron, Hate 3.0

Comment by: Rebecca Green

PLSC 2012

Workshop draft abstract:

Cyber harassment is an endemic and devastating form of invidious discrimination.  As my book Hate 3.0 (forthcoming Harvard University Press 2013) explores, the identity of the victims and the nature of the attacks explain why.  Statistically speaking, women and/or sexual minorities bear the brunt of the abuse, and the harassment tends to exploit victims’ gender and sexuality to threaten, demean, and economically disadvantage them.

To set the stage for the rest of the book, chapter one presents detailed case studies of four individuals with different life experiences whose harassment experiences are strikingly similar.  It situates the experiences of straight white men in this phenomenon: cyber harassers often accuse them of being secretly gay or women.  Chapter two takes up the harassers and the harm that they do.  Chapter three considers why explicit hate appears in networked spaces when it seems less prevalent in real space.  Any one of the Internet’s key features—anonymity, group dynamics, information spreading, and virtual environments—can be a force multiplier for bigotry and incivility.

Nonetheless, as chapter four considers, cyber harassment remains in the shadows where it is often ignored or legitimated, leaving victims to fend for themselves.  This requires a sustained campaign to re-conceptualize abuse online, in much the way that the women’s movement struggled to change the social meaning of workplace sexual harassment and domestic violence.  Chapter five provides a conceptual apparatus to help us do so.

Part II points the way forward.  Chapter six asks what can be done now, looking to intermediaries, schools, and parents as crucial private avenues for social action.  Internet intermediaries, notably entities that host online communities and mediate expressive conduct, have great freedom and power to influence online discourse.  As chapter seven explores, achieving equality online will require legal solutions.  Although current law addresses some online abuse, its shortcomings require fresh thinking and legislative action.  Yet, in doing so, we need to tread carefully given our commitment to free speech.

Chapter eight argues that civil rights protections can, however, be reconciled with civil liberty guarantees, both doctrinally and theoretically.

David Gray & Danielle Citron, A Technology-Centered Approach to Quantitative Privacy

By privacylaw | Posted on

David Gray & Danielle Citron, A Technology-Centered Approach to Quantitative Privacy

Comment by: Harry Surden

PLSC 2013

Published version available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2129439

Abstract:

We are at the cusp of a historic shift in our conceptions of the Fourth Amendment driven by dramatic advances in technologies that continuously track and aggregate information about our daily activities.  The Fourth Amendment tipping point was marked this term by United States v. Jones.  There, law enforcement officers used a GPS device attached to Jones’s car to follow his movements for four weeks.  Although Jones was resolved on narrow grounds, five justices signed concurring opinions defending a revolutionary proposition: that citizens have Fourth Amendment interests in substantial quantities of information about their public or shared activities, even if they lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in each of the constitutive particulars. This quantitative approach to the Fourth Amendment has since been the focus of considerable debate.  Among the most compelling challenges are identifying its Fourth Amendment pedigree, describing a workable test for deciding how much information is enough to trigger Fourth Amendment interests, and explaining the doctrinal consequences.  This Article takes up these challenges.

Our analysis and proposal draw upon insights from information privacy law.  Although information privacy law and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence share a fundamental interest in protecting privacy interests, these conversations have been treated as theoretically and practically discrete.  This Article ends that isolation and the mutual exceptionalism that it implies.  As information privacy scholarship suggests, technology can permit government to know us in unprecedented and totalizing ways at great cost to personal development and democratic institutions.  We argue that these concerns about panoptic surveillance lie at the heart of the Fourth Amendment as well.  We therefore propose a technology-centered approach to measuring and protecting Fourth Amendment interests in quantitative privacy.  As opposed to proposals for case-by-case assessments of information “mosaics,” which have so far dominated the debate, we argue that government access to technologies capable of facilitating broad programs of continuous and indiscriminate monitoring should be subject to the same Fourth Amendment limitations applied to physical searches.

Danielle Keats Citron & David Super, Cyber Civil Rights

By privacylaw | Posted on

Danielle Keats Citron & David Super, Cyber Civil Rights

PLSC 2008

Published version available here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1271900

Workshop draft abstract:

Social networking sites and blogs have increasingly become breeding grounds for anonymous online groups that attack members of traditionally disadvantaged groups, especially women and people of color.  These destructive groups target individuals with lies, threats of violence, and denial of service attacks that silence victims and concomitantly destroy privacy and reputations.  Victims go offline or assume pseudonyms to prevent future attacks, thereby losing economic opportunities associated with a vibrant online presence and impoverishing online dialogue.  Search engines also reproduce the lies and threats for employers and clients to see, creating digital “scarlet letters” that ruin reputations.

Today’s destructive cyber groups update a history of anonymous mobs such as the Ku Klux Klan coming together to victimize and subjugate vulnerable people.  The social science literature identifies conditions that accelerate dangerous group behavior and those that tend to defuse it.  Unfortunately, Web 2.0 technologies provide all of the accelerants of mob behavior but very few of its inhibitors.  With little reason to expect self-correction of this intimidation of vulnerable individuals, the law must respond.

This article argues that the harm inflicted by such destructive crowds ought to be understood and addressed as civil rights violations.  Federal criminal and civil rights laws must be read to provide effective means to challenge the intimidation and harassment perpetrated by today’s anonymous crowds as they have been to combat other masked mobs that menaced vulnerable groups and outspoken champions in the past.

Ann Bartow, Virtual Women

By privacylaw | Posted on

Ann Bartow, Virtual Women

Comment by: Danielle Citron

PLSC 2009

Workshop draft abstract:

In most contexts, women are less visible and less present than men in the performing arts, and in any commercial enterprise that exploits creative copyrightable endeavors.  Female creative output commands less attention and less money than the creative works of men, and women are less visible, and receive less compensation than male counterparts when they collaborate in the production of creative works with men. Male writers, male singers, male visual artists, male actors, male directors and producers, male composers, male architects, and other male authors of almost any form of copyrightable work dominate the cultural terrain, and acquire and control a substantial majority of the financial resources that creative works accrue.   This gendered phenomenon is observable in real space, and mirrored in cyberspace. The only exceptions are contexts in which women function as commodities for consumption. This paper will focus on one of them: Online periodicals that chronicle on the lives of celebrities. It will then chart the consequences that the norms created by these periodicals have for all women.