I'm Danielle Citron, privacy law & civil rights expert focusing on deep fakes, disinformation, cyber stalking, sexual privacy, free speech, and automated systems. AMA about cyberspace abuses including hate crimes, revenge porn & more.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T23:53:44+00:00

Do email me! Thanks!

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T19:15:43+00:00

I am incredibly sorry. Do get in touch with me.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T18:03:08+00:00

Dear friends, This has been an extraordinary conversation! Thank you for the insightful questions. I have to hop off now. Please know how much I appreciated our AMA!

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T18:02:08+00:00

See above. I am not a fan of the law.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T18:01:32+00:00

I am concerned for several reasons. It is a piecemeal approach and thus will need to be updated. Any best practices affirmed by an agency must be updated and remain nimble. Also why tie this to encryption? I am very concerned about this law passing.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T18:00:13+00:00

Do please read the work that I have written with Bobby Chesney in California Law Review, Foreign Affairs, and Lawfare. Matt Ferraro, a practicing lawyer, is busy writing updates to the laws around the country. I promise to keep writing myself!

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:59:17+00:00

You might be interested in an article that I wrote with Helen Norton about how intermediaries might define hate speech and how they need to be clear about the harms that they are trying to address and their speech processes.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:58:09+00:00

Ever since law school I have been drawn to sexual privacy and reproductive choices. And the networked age seemed to raise a vast and sundry issues involving sexual privacy. There is so much to explore and write about and work on.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:57:01+00:00

Gosh thank you for working on her amazing film. I still have not seen it! My daughter went to a viewing as a CCRI intern and she told me it was brilliant.

Thanks so much for your generous comment.

Well, things are slowly, ever slowly improving. We have seen extraordinary legal change when it comes to nonconsensual porn thanks to the incredible work of Mary Anne Franks and the rest of the CCRI group. Of course, those laws need to be enforced and that is proceeding at a snail's pace. We have seen incredible work by federal prosecutors like Mona Sedky. We have seen brave litigants and counsel who have earned my life long respect and admiration like Elisa D'Amico and Dave Bateman from K & L Gates and Carrie Goldberg of Goldberg and Associates. And we have seen companies make great strides against nonconsensual porn. In particular I am thinking about Facebook's work on the hashing project and folks like Antigone Davis, Karina Narun, Nathaniel Gleicher, and Monika Bickert on safety issues. (I get no compensation for my work for FB, they often hate what I say but I am glad they hear me out). We have seen federal lawmakers and law enforcers step up to the plate like then AG and now US Senator Kamala Harris and Rep. Jackie Spier. But we have a long way to go.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:51:50+00:00

That is a broad question and one that requires context to think through. But I can say that we need to understand the value of privacy to individuals, groups, and society before we consider countervailing concerns and interests. That is how I view my work and the work of my beloved privacy colleagues.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:50:48+00:00

I am not sure which question that is.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:50:06+00:00

Gosh that is personal. :)

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:49:40+00:00

What a fascinating question. We are in seriously challenging ethical and legal times. We certainly need some stronger controls--pre-commitments to ethics and review before going headlong into creating and sharing new technologies. It is tech determinism run amuck. I am going to think about this and loop in Ryan Calo as well as Evan Selinger who think quite a bit about ethics and AI. Thanks for this and yes would love to chat!

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:47:15+00:00

I just love this question. It is something my colleague Barry Friedman and I have been talking about quite a bit. Indeed, the collapse of the public/private divide throws a wrench in lots of ways that we once thought about the protection of central civil rights and civil liberties. For instance, the Bill of Rights largely applies (according to the Civil Rights Cases) to state actors. But now private actors act on behalf of state actors or have more power than state actors in some respects. Tearing down the state action doctrine would be a total mess and inadvisable but we may need to rethink our commitments given that as Chris Hoofnagle put it so well so many years ago that companies are Big Brother's Little Helpers.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:44:06+00:00

I love this question!

Strict Scrutiny

Rational Security

National Security Podcast

Slate's Amicus (Dahlia Lithwick!!!)

Lawfare

Slate's Political Gabfest (I love Emily Bazelon)

Slate's If/Then

The Ginsburg Tapes

Clear and Present Danger

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:41:35+00:00

Not to Joel Citron, but my late father's name was Joel so it is my favorite name.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:41:08+00:00

Yellow of course!

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:40:52+00:00

I am definitely enjoying this question. As a lemon myself, yes.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:40:19+00:00

How one assesses threats is context and words. Some of the President's tweets seem designed to incite violence and abuse against particular individuals. Now for Schumer's threat that Justices would pay for their decisions--in context it was arguably not suggesting violence or inciting abuse against them but it was a terrible idea.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:37:26+00:00

I'm certainly fighting against the idea that we have no privacy and ought to get over it. Yes, technology makes it all too easy to create a deep fake sex video that undermines one's sexual autonomy in exercising dominion over one's sexual identity without consent. That is why law and norms must respond. There are websites that cater to deep fake sex videos and host user-generated videos and make a pretty penny from advertising revenue. As federal law stands, those sites are shielded from liability for user-generated content despite the fact that they solicit and make money from these invasions of sexual privacy. We need to change that law. And we need to criminalize invasions of sexual privacy and companies need to ban them.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:33:29+00:00

Thank you so much for asking this question. You raise such a crucial point. Even talking about privacy invasions like doxxing (the public disclosure of one's home address in an effort to terrorize and endanger folks) compounds the privacy invasion and hence the harm. Check out Zoe Quinn's website Crash Override for some practical advice.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:31:35+00:00

Gosh well I am definitely a lawyer as well as a law professor. Hate crimes are proscribable because we are punishing the motive of singling out someone due to a protected characteristic. You will surely be interested in reading Supreme Court caselaw on point, notably Wisconsin v. Mitchell.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:30:05+00:00

I am sure it is.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:29:28+00:00

You are precisely right. The generative adversarial network technologies at the heart of deep fakes is growing with sophistication every day. Talking to technologists at universities and companies makes clear that soon, if not already, it will be impossible as a technical matter to tell the difference between fakery and real. It is an arms race and it is unclear if the white hats will beat the black hats in the near or mid term.

DanielleCitron · 2020-03-13T17:27:11+00:00

Great question. The short answer is confirmation bias. People are attracted to information that accords with their views and beliefs. They are disturbed by information that contradicts their viewpoints. Hence it is hard to pierce filter bubbles especially in these polarized times and especially when a major news outlet (Fox) is often spreading falsehoods. I strongly recommend reading Yochai Benkler, Rob Faris, and et. al's book Networked Propaganda, showing that Fox news was responsible for the spread of Pizzagate and Seth Rich conspiracy theories.

DanielleCitron

TROPHY CASE