Cyberlaw

Dispatch from Amelia Island: IT and Law Are an Odd, Ornery Couple

By

Can't we all just get along?

As everyone knows, IT professionals and lawyers often want to stab each other’s faces with butter knives have a little trouble seeing eye-to-eye. Practitioners of both the law and computer sorcery tend to be headstrong and preternaturally assured that they are correct 100 percent of the time.

It only makes sense then, that several of Wednesday’s panels at the Legal Technology Leadership Summit dealt with the crucial and interdependent relationship between law dogs and mysterious IT folks. Throughout the day, discussion leaders from both sides of the aisle discussed ways to avoid (or at least mitigate) data breaches and to use technological tools to ease billing nightmares. One session was dedicated to lamenting the top ways IT staff and attorneys drive each other nuts.

For reasons why your boss isn’t thrilled about your sweet new 128 gigabyte flash drive and some classic ha-ha-lawyers-don’t-understand-technology anecdotes, keep on reading….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “Dispatch from Amelia Island: IT and Law Are an Odd, Ornery Couple”

8 Comments

San Francisco Subway Shuts Off Cell Service, Hackers Get Angry

By

I rode BART into San Francisco on Monday for dinner. As our train approached the Embarcadero station, the driver came on the intercom.

“We aren’t stopping at this station. Don’t want to drop you in the middle of a protest.”

So my roommate and I got off a block later and backtracked. We encountered a few clumps of would-be protestors wearing Guy Fawkes masks and bandanas. They might have been more intimidating, but many had hipster neck-beards curling out from underneath the masks. Mostly, though, there were a lot of riot police. A lot. Who were mainly just standing around.

The protest was in response to Bay Area Rapid Transit’s recent decision to temporarily turn off cell phone reception in four San Francisco stations, which was in anticipation of another protest, which was in turn a response to a recent police shooting in a San Francisco BART station.

Only in California do we have protests about protests. It’s all very dramatic, but where do law and technology fit in? As is the trend these days, pesky hackers broke into the BART Police Officers Association’s website on Wednesday and released personal information about the men and women who patrol the local subway system.

Read more about the allegedly horrible, no good, very bad policy decision that led to the hack after the jump….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “San Francisco Subway Shuts Off Cell Service, Hackers Get Angry”

29 Comments

Two British P2P Lawyers Suspended for Being Bloody Wankers

By

It doesn’t take much to get people riled up about peer-to-peer file sharing and everything that goes along with it. Who is the RIAA is suing or not suing? Which Oscar-winning director thinks illegal downloading is maybe kind of OK after all? The list goes on and on.

Often file-sharing doesn’t much concern us here at Above the Law, but sometimes the P2P attorneys themselves become important and/or easily despicable characters within the always-hot topic. A few months ago, I wrote about an attorney named John Steele. A court found his methods of going after P2P porn downloaders to be unsound.

Last week, two more British attorneys were fined almost £200,000 and suspended from practicing law for their unacceptable Internet pirate-baiting schemes.

Let’s see who these guys are and what they did….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “Two British P2P Lawyers Suspended for Being Bloody Wankers”

14 Comments

Don’t Mess With Your Friend’s Facebook; It Might Be a Felony

By

When I was in college, it was not altogether uncommon for people to leave their laptops unattended with their Facebook accounts still logged in. It was not altogether uncommon for an enterprising prankster to creatively twiddle with said account. A little switch of sexual preference here, a mildly offensive profile picture there, and maybe a nonsensical new profile quote.

It was annoying, and at worst required minor social media damage control, but nobody seemed to care much.

Nowadays, people definitely care. The California Court of Appeals ruled on July 21 that the same sort of online mischief can lead to felony identity theft conviction.

Let’s learn more about Rolando S., a teenager who messed with the wrong Facebook account….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “Don’t Mess With Your Friend’s Facebook; It Might Be a Felony”

7 Comments

FBI Rolls Out the Hacker Paddywagon in Nationwide Raid

By

It’s been an unusually exciting month in the legal tech world. Several lawyers have been charged with (and cleared of) upsetting electronic crimes. An Am Law 100 firm got sued for allegedly screwing up e-discovery. I haven’t even had the time or need to write the same vague jibber-jabber about Google+ that everyone else on the Internet has already written.

This week, we’ve got more high-profile tech arrests, involving the members of an international hacker club who happen to be supporters of everyone’s favorite Australian albino.

For deets on the legal consequences of crashing PayPal’s website, read on….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “FBI Rolls Out the Hacker Paddywagon in Nationwide Raid”

15 Comments

This Lawyer Had the Worst Neighbor Ever

By

We’ve all had obnoxious neighbors. The stoners who play music too loud, the dysfunctional lovers who are always yelling at each other… it’s part of life.

Most of us, though, have not lived next door to our own personal cyber-terrorist. Minnesota attorney Matthew Kostolnik has.

His neighbor “launched a calculated campaign to terrorize his neighbors, doing whatever he could to destroy the careers and professional reputations of Matt and Bethany Kostolnik, to damage the Kostolniks’ marriage, and to generally wreak havoc on their lives.”

On Tuesday, the man who published child pornography and sent a death threat to Joe Biden, all under Kostolnik’s name, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Keep reading to learn more about the worst neighbor since the door-kicking judge….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “This Lawyer Had the Worst Neighbor Ever”

44 Comments

Chinese Hackers Hijack Hundreds of Gmail Accounts

By

This news is more than a little scary.

Google announced yesterday that hackers in China had gotten access to hundreds of Gmail accounts. And it wasn’t just anyone’s email. The attack targeted senior government officials in the United States, Chinese political activists, officials in several Asian countries, military personnel, and journalists.

I have a feeling we will hear a lot more about this over the next few days. For the moment, let’s take a look at the details we know so far….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “Chinese Hackers Hijack Hundreds of Gmail Accounts”

19 Comments

Just Like Us, Europe Isn’t Sure How to Handle Net Neutrality

By

Isn’t it annoying when the YouTube video you’re watching just stops loading right in the middle? Or when your Skype connection suddenly starts sucking in the middle of a video conversation?

Well, it turns out that in Europe, sometimes stuff like that doesn’t happen accidentally. Internet Service Providers intentionally “throttle” certain kinds of web traffic.

The European Union is sick of this. On Tuesday, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda threatened new legislation and public humiliation for companies that don’t allow consumers easy access to a free and open Internet. That’s right, kids; the net neutrality debate is hot in Europe, too….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “Just Like Us, Europe Isn’t Sure How to Handle Net Neutrality”

14 Comments

Hackers Probably Stole Your Email Address Last Weekend

By

Raise your hand if you are a JPMorgan Chase customer. Now raise your hand if you’ve shopped at Best Buy. How about Citibank, Target or Walgreens?

Has everybody in the world raised their hands yet? Congratulations — your email address may have been stolen.

There was a data breach at Epsilon, a Texas-based marketing firm, last weekend, exposing the names and email addresses of potentially millions of their clients’ customers. I first found out about it when Chase emailed me. You might have gotten a similar alert from one of the affected companies.

Read part of the bank’s announcement and more about the breach, after the jump.

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “Hackers Probably Stole Your Email Address Last Weekend”

16 Comments

Suing Hundreds of Anonymous People Will Not Make You Popular

By

It’s not everyday you get porn, file sharing lawsuits, amateur motions to quash subpoenas, and a federal judge quoting Shakespeare’s King John, all wrapped up in a nice legal bundle of joy.

Here we go, from the beginning:

Chicago attorney John Steele, whose firm website is located at www.WeFightPiracy.com, represents CP Productions, the filmmakers behind — wait for it — Cowgirl Creampie. The movie was part of their website, www.chicasplace.com (obviously NSFW; I can’t believe I just looked that up in Starbucks).

On behalf of his client, Steele sued 300 people who allegedly downloaded and shared the movie via BitTorrent. No one actually knew, however, who these supposed downloaders were. The plaintiffs only had IP addresses — not names, phone numbers or mailing addresses.

Steele subpoenaed various Internet service providers to get the personal data. He spent months unsuccessfully trying to contact all of the defendants, who lived conveniently in a single Chicago apartment building all over the damn country….

double red triangle arrows Continue reading “Suing Hundreds of Anonymous People Will Not Make You Popular”

74 Comments
Page 5 of 812345678