Cybersecurity News and Insights

This explainer is an evolving project to provide everyone with the types of answers that legal experts might informally provide to each other. Each question includes a short response to help you understand the most likely answer in the most likely cases. That answer is then given a confidence score on a scale of 1-5, […]

Many of the social questions raised by artificial intelligence are mediated through the legal system. Policymakers explore new rules to govern the technology, courts work to apply existing legal framework to new situations, and advocates propose entirely new approaches to deal with novel problems (or old problems with new prominence).

Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy Catherine Sharkey examined those questions in a report she prepared in May for the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent executive branch agency charged with issuing nonbinding recommendations to improve administrative and regulatory processes. Drawing on Sharkey’s report, on July 3, the ACUS published a recommendation […]

The Biden administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy, released earlier this year, calls for shifting liability for insecure software, via legislation and agency action, onto software producers that fail to take “reasonable precautions.” It would impose the cost of security flaws onto the party best-positioned to avoid them while rejecting industry’s attempt to shift liability downstream. While not without critics, […]

Generative AI has great commercial promise but also poses immediate dangers. A new report from the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights argues that the best way to prepare for potential existential risks in the future is to begin now to regulate the AI harms right in front of us.

MSCRS Professor Ed Amoroso outlines a simple framework (suitable for we-humans to sketch on a napkin) that is based on an acronym called PILOT. The framework suggests how the US should begin to regulate artificial intelligence using an oversight board within NIST.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland testified on March 1 for the first time before the new Congress at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Oversight of the Department of Justice.” Buried in wide-ranging testimony was an exchange about the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Just Security recently ran a series featuring pieces by Elizabeth […]

This year’s reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — a law that authorizes broad surveillance of foreigners outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information— will be unlike any previous one. In the past, reauthorization was a foregone conclusion, and civil liberties advocates struggled to secure even minor procedural […]

Across the technology industry, artificial intelligence (AI) has boomed over the last year. Lensa went viral creating artistic avatar artwork generated from real-life photos. The OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT garnered praise as a revolutionary leap in generative AI with the ability to provide answers to complex questions in natural language text. Such innovations have ignited an outpouring of investments even as the […]

The first meeting of the United Nations Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) held outside of U.N. headquarters in New York since 2015 marked important advances in engaging with civil society and experts who have questioned the embrace of counterterrorism approaches that too often backfire or result in human rights violations[…]