New York, April 29, 2013—Technology and the vast amount of data collection it enables are fundamentally changing our lives, Columbia Law School Professor Eben Moglen said recently, telling students it would be up to them as future lawyers
New York, April 29, 2013—Technology and the vast amount of data collection it enables are fundamentally changing our lives, Columbia Law School Professor Eben Moglen said recently, telling students it would be up to them as future lawyers to ensure people can maintain a sense of privacy in a world in which nearly everyone carries a GPS-enabled smartphone.
“We are changing the nature of the human race, and we’re not quite understanding how,” said Moglen, who currently teaches Computers, Privacy and the Law, a course that addresses issues defining the relationship between constitutional order and today’s technological revolution. “At the end of your lifetimes, we’re either going to have found a way to use this technology for good and save human autonomy, or we won’t. I suppose you could decide that will be work done by other lawyers. But if I were you, I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion.”
Moglen was joined by Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, as part of “Brave New World: Frontiers in Internet Privacy,” an April 22 presentation sponsored by the Columbia Law School ACLU chapter. As data storage costs decrease, Wizner said, private companies and the government no longer need to make decisions about how much information they can afford to keep.
“In the past, our pr