American Civil Liberties Union

The South by SouthWest Panel Picker has launched for the 2013 festival, and we need your help!

The ACLU has submitted two panel pitches (one and two) for SXSW Interactive, which will take place March 8-12, 2013 in Austin, Texas. (Wondering why the ACLU is going to SXSW? We work with policymakers, business and community members every day on issues related to privacy, free speech and emerging technology. And as we’ve done for the past several years, we’ll be at SXSW this year to make sure that privacy is on the agenda!)

Approximately 3,000 protesters from across the country amassed in New York City’s financial district to celebrate Occupy Wall Street’s one year anniversary.  Refusing to be deterred by the barricades and checkpoints that precluded them from entering the area by the New York Stock Exchange, protesters broke into numerous roving marches, chanting, singing and throwing confetti.  The NYPD’s response to many of these marches was more tempered than previously observed in other Occupy protests, and a fair number of arrests were the result of civil disobedience. 

A few links that have caught our eye this past week:

Paul Rosenzweig has posted a nice piece on Lawfare on the reasons to be skeptical of the need for cybersecurity regulation. He breaks cybersecurity down into its constituent parts (as we have urged) of cybercrime, cyber espionage, and truly catastrophic “digital Pearl Harbor” attacks. He suggests that the first two do not justify regulation, and (like us) is skeptical about the degree of risk of the third. In explaining that skepticism, he provides an elegant analysis of the electric grid, the taking down of which is a frequent cyber-attack scenario, and makes the point that the pro-regulation viewpoint “mistakes vulnerability for risk”—in other words, there can be a vulnerability in a system, but still a low risk that anyone will actually be able to or try to exploit it.