European Data Protection Law

European Data Protection Law, Corporate Compliance and Regulation,Second Edition by Christopher Kuner (Oxford Press, 2007)

Text Source: Epic Bulletin

In the updated edition of his text, Kuner sets out the difficulty ofexpansion into EU markets for US businesses that have not taken themessage of data privacy protection seriously. US businesses intent onexploiting the information age through new EU markets or creating moreefficiency in existing European markets must effectively convert theirbusiness models to comply with EU data protection laws. The various EUdata directives create minimum standards that each member state mustthen adopt though the passage of new laws. However, this model doesallow member states to adopt stronger measures for data protection.There is a process for industries to establish self-regulatory codesunder Article 27(1) of the General Directive, but according to theauthor the process is so cumbersome that few industries have createdthem. He sees the process as taking too long to complete, and the"uncertain legal status" of the measures once adopted.

Cybercrime: Digital Cops In A Networked Environment

Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment, by J. M. Balkin (New York University Press, 2007).

Contributors: Jack M. Balkin, Susan W. Brenner, Daniel E. Geer, Jr., James Grimmelmann, Emily Hancock, Beryl A. Howell, Curtis E.A. Karnow, Eddan Katz, Orin S. Kerr, Nimrod Kozlovski, Helen Nissenbaum, Kim A.
Taipale, Lee Tien, Shlomit Wagman, and Tal Zarsky


"The Internet has dramatically altered the landscape of crime and national security, creating new threats, such as identity theft, computer viruses, and cyberattacks. Moreover, because cybercrimes are often not limited to a single site or nation, crime scenes themselves have changed. Consequently, law enforcement must confront these new dangers and embrace novel methods of prevention, as well as produce new tools for digital surveillance - which can jeopardize privacy and civil liberties. Cybercrime brings together leading experts in law, criminal justice, and security studies to describe crime prevention and security protection in the electronic age. Ranging from new government requirements that facilitate spying to new methods of digital proof, the book is essential to understand how criminal law-and even crime itself-have been transformed in our networked world."

Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World

Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea: that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils ofanarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance.