Government policymakers have been hoping for twenty years that companies will be driven to good cybersecurity by the threat of tort liability. That hope is understandable. Tort liability would allow government to get the benefit of regulating cybersecurity without taking heat for imposing restrictions directly on the digital economy.

Those who see tort law as

It was a busy week for companies and government agencies struggling to combat the growing threat of cyber-attacks, with some bad news and some good news.  Here’s what you need to know, and how we can help.

What you Need to know

First, the bad news:

  • Lawsuits against Target move forward and lawsuits against Home

Three months ago, I tried hacking Google’s implementation of Europe’s “right to be forgotten.”  For those of you who haven’t followed recent developments in censorship, the right to be forgotten is a European requirement that “irrelevant or outdated” information be excluded from searches about individuals.  The doctrine extends even to true information that remains on

HIPAA is an arguably well-intentioned privacy law that seems to yield nothing but “unintended” consequences.  I put “unintended” in quotes because the consequences are often remarkably convenient, at least for those with power.  I’m not sure you can call something that convenient “unintended.”

The problem has gotten so bad that even National Public Radio and

China seems to have found a reliable legal tool for suppressing dissent.  A prominent Chinese human rights lawyer, Pu Zhiqiang, has been arrested after a meeting in a private home to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the killings at Tiananmen Square.  The charge?  “Illegal access to the personal information of citizens,” a crime punishable by

Here we go again.  A prominent company suffers a data breach.  The company publicly alerts its customers.  The company almost immediately finds itself the subject of inquiries from Congress and the target of investigations by regulators.  Before long, class action lawyers will crank out complaints as if they’re Mad Libs, filling in the name of