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tv   The Communicators  CSPAN  November 16, 2013 6:30pm-7:01pm EST

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various friends. mrs. johnson gave the tour of the house in 1968 where she featured the china you see here purchased in mexico, very colorful. she spent a lot of time here at the ranch and it was very important because it provided such a respite from all of the turmoil at washington, particularly later in the presidency. did -- the johnsons could come home and recharge the batteries and make it back to the place they valued so much. >> first lady, lady bird johnson, live at 9:00 eastern on c-span. span, created by america's cable countries -- companies in 1979, brought to you as a public service by your television provider. sawnow who you are and i what you did" is the name of the book. the author is a professor of law at the college of law in
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chicago. professor andrews, what is behind that title? >> it is amazing how much outside entities, third arty institutions, no about us based on our web presence. in of human resources people companies check your online profile before they interview you for a job. one in four college admissions officers are looking at the students before deciding on them. your internet self may be more important than your physical self. a lot of these institutions think they know who you are and impression andse discriminated against you as a result. >> are we more willing to put ourselves out there online than we are in person? >> yes. there are studies that say women are more willing to reveal things in person but men, who are notoriously closed mouth in
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person, are more revealing of themselves on the web. if you think about it, think of the information facebook has on over a billion people. and know your political sexual preference, who your friends are and what you like, what your dogs name is. all these sorts of things. said, ifity analyst the government had asked you directly for that sort of information, it would have taken money, lawyers, and even guns, to get you to cough up the information. but we routinely do so on social networks. we also do not think about the fact that our google searches are tracked. books, so mymr. google searches, if the fbi chose to look at them, would be very incriminating. i am looking at different date rape drugs and things like that for my mistress. people sitting there with her computer may think they are engaged in some secret activity,
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not knowing it is as if there were a big eyeball on the other end, keeping track of the things you do. i have been shocked even since my book came out about some of the new uses about the information against you. life insurance companies are now being advised by consulting aways that they should do with the expensive blood and urine tests to decide whether someone merits life insurance, and instead look at their social network profile. you are an avid reader, if you eat fast food, if you commute to work, all those things could be used against you in life insurance. ofm hoping there are a lot avid readers out there because i write books. but the assumption is, now that that you areg somehow sedentary. a judgment is being made against you that you do not even know about.
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>> what is web lining that you talk about in your book? a judgmentlining is made about you because you are part of a group. in the 1960's, there was a phenomenon called redlining where banks would actually put a red line around a part of the city where they did not want to invest, where low income people were. with web lining now, it could be any of us. one young man who had his own business, had a condo, paid off his credit card every month, had his american express card limit lowered from $10,000 to $3000 , not of anything he did, but because he shopped at a place where other people were more likely not to pay off their credit cards. groupputting you into a and limiting your opportunities as a result of it. expensive a less
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website, target.com, and then i go to a credit card site, i may be offered a less good credit , youbecause the notion is know, i am not worthy of it. web lining might even be things like, if a bank or an airline knows my gender, that i am a woman, and they think, women are , andlikely to be patient hold online, when they call in for something, i might actually be web lined and put on hold for a longer time. think about that. i am a lawyer. if i were waiting in a bank and out of order, all the men were taken ahead of me, i would get very upset and probably make a big fuss. but i do not even know that is occurring when it is based on something i have done on the web. >> who is doing that web lining? aboutfirst have to think
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data aggregators, which most people do not think of. there are companies wake axiom, which says it has 1600 bits of information about 96% of americans. google collects information by scanning your gmail, by looking at what you look up, by looking videos youtube watch. they have 60 different services and combine data and they make over 90% of their income, which is huge, over 50 billion dollars a year, providing that information to advertisers. so, websites for credit card .ompanies are doing web lining the people who give out home loans are web lining. it might even be as simple as, a your family has entered poorer zip code anyplace on a website, your child may be getting ads for trade schools appropriate
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scholarship material for the ivy league. it is any of the services that make judgments about who to go after in terms of giving benefits, or taking away benefits online. >> professor andrews, you also talk about web weakens and web scrapers. hat are they? >> there are a variety of mechanisms to find out where you go on the web. a simple one is cookies. they start out benignly. , you agree to do cookies so you would not have to enter information about your shipping address every time. they could send you recommendations. then it got out of hand. there were other types of tracking mechanisms, like those you mentioned, that came up every time you would download, like adobe flash player, things like that, to
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keep track. i was astonished when i learned both presidential campaigns, the last time around, romney and obama's groups, put cookies in it -- and other tracking mechanisms, web beacons, on your computer, to see where you went on the web. did you go to a religious site? a site? -- a pron site? so-- porn site? could target these mechanisms. i love dictionary.com. i had no idea when i look up by word on it, it put 233 cookies on my computer to track where i went. withnk it is out of line other rights that we have. think about it erie it i have privacy rights off-line. i have the right to express myself. but if data is collected and used against me, i'm losing the rights in the digital world. when you think about it and think about the recent orderedons the nsa has
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verizon, for example, to turn over data about our calls, who we call from where. now, the government has said, that is not that much of a problem because we do not actually look at the substance of the calls. but that does not comport with first amendment and fourth amendment rights. i have a first amendment right to express myself. theyoking at who i call, could tell whether i am calling octopi wall street people, the tea party, an abortion clinic, an aids clinic, the same thing by looking at my location data. in a supreme court case last year, the supreme court decided your location is private information and police need to get a warrant before they put a gps tracking device on your car, for example. out, that that
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sort of location data, which nsa is collecting from our cell personal,n reveal sexual, professional, and other connections we have. it can tell whether we are aeting with our lover or competitor or employee or. it is all very sensitive in it -- information and should be protected. >> professor lori andrews, i know who you are in a solid he did is the name of the book area you tell the story about a kodak seemed in your book. what is that? >> so, this privacy issue is nothing new. say, privacye who is dead now that there are social networks. i found every technology back 125 years, people said the same thing. waskodak theme, in 1888, the first portable camera. before you had control of your image, you had to go into a studio and pose if you wanted to
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have your picture taken. now, when the portable camera came out in 1888, there were beds all around the country saying, watch out for the kodak fiend. it can't catch you in an uncouth position in line in the post office. think about it. it is just like tagging and facebook. your friends may put up an unflattering photo of you. at the time, people said privacy was dead but the law caught up and said, no, you have a right to not have your privacy invaded by someone coming on your property and taking photos of you. doing ads with your photo in it. similarly, when other technologies came along, wiretapping, initially, the cops used it, without thinking they warrant orave any anything, that it did not invade privacy rights. ultimately, the supreme court
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said, privacy is important and we should protected. ultimately, i think we will see more privacy protection, even in the social network world, perhaps even something like they have in europe, where you have to be told if data is being collected against you. you have a right to know if discriminatory decisions are made based on your online data. correct it.ight to one law student, actually, in europe, was able to ask facebook what information it had on him under that law. of informations which showed facebook was collecting everything posted about him by friends, everything he had ever it deleted. you can see the incredible image people get about you that might then come back to haunt you when you try to get a job. it is not just, you know, trenton photos that can be used
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to your disadvantage. one woman who sued her employer after she had a workplace to need that caused her several spinal surgeries, pins put in her neck, was denied a right to sue by a judge who said, you are smiling in your photo on your social network. you could not have been that badly hurt. if a womanrce cases, puts up a sexy photo of herself, hasjudge, in some cases, taken away custody of the child without asking, has the mom -- how is the mom really treating a child. in one case, the judge was trying to decide whether he should take custody from a husband who said he liked a violent video in which ronald mcdonald shot hurricane in the face. millions of people had liked that video. everything you say and do on the web can be used against you.
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unlike vegas, what happens on face but does not stay on facebook. >> you write, courts are advocating their responsibility to protect individuals when they reason that you cannot expect privacy on the internet since nothing on the web is safe from someone with hacking skills or data aggregation. so, courts have forgotten the basic premises about why privacy is important. it is important because we develop relationships with people by parceling out information. when we are close to someone, they know more information. we are able to have our freedom of association by not potentially letting everybody know what church or mosque or synagogue we attend. seem to courts mistakenly think just because a hacker could potentially find out what we're doing online,
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privacy cannot be protected. that is wrong. someone could steal my mail out of my mailbox but yet we protect the privacy and letters. just because i walked through a part of the city where rape is more common, we do not say, oh, she is not protected against rape. just because someone could do something dangerous, does not itn it is worth giving up, does not mean we should give up our privacy rights. another way courts are advocating their responsibilities is by accepting at face value what they find on facebook or myspace pages. say --, courts have to determine whether something is relevant to the case, determine whether it is authentic. now, we have a crazy thing where , in anticipation of divorce, making up facebook pages for the other spouse and putting horrible things on it so it will be more likely they will
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get custody. judges are not looking closely posth about whether the was authentically made by the ex husband or a ruse of the ex- wife. not looking at things, whether a certain photo means someone will be a bad parent or not. employers are not saying, what are the skills of the person? 30% of employers say they will turn down someone who has a drink in their hand on a facebook page. even an innocent drink at a wedding reception. failure tong a figure out that there is more to people than what they post. >> how does your book tie into your work as a law professor? >> i teach a course on the law of social networks. also, i am involved in pro bono cases and advising government and various groups, about their rights. and working with the legislature's.
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great band of research assistants who are students who have put their online reputations on the line by doing a lot of work in this area. you know, actually contacting data aggregate to see what information they have about them, doing things like using the homeland security forbidden words and seeing what happens. now ina lot of expense the hundreds of billions of dollars on the part of government to track us. some of it is ludicrous. 300 50d security has words they look at in e-mails. , the name of a drug will -- drug lord. anybody else. in one term they look for is organized crime. how useful is that? is it truly likely a mob leader , "loveign an e-mail
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tony, organized crime. " they do not even make sense. >> who knows more about us, the federal government or private corporations such as facebook? >> private corporations. google knows more about us. aggregators know more about us. there is no constraint on them. seeing someare pushback to government agencies. they have to comply with the fourth amendment, which says, if i have a reasonable expectation my social, i can keep network posts private, unless the government gets a warrant. that is not true with data aggregators. in very specific cases. the fbi actually went to a judge
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and said, i want a warrant to suspect's camera on his laptop to take pictures of him. the judge said no. but, private companies put the tracking mechanism on lap -- laptops all the time. in pennsylvania, a school gave laptops to all of its students. they did not tell the students or the parents that the camera could be turned on from the school. it was only supposed to be turned on if the laptop was stolen to get a picture of the thief. but the i.t. department at the high school took 30,000 photos of students, 50,000 screenshots. where do high school students have their laptops open? their bedroom, coming from the shower, in bed, and so forth. called in to investigate. they said, there is no criminal law against that. we are all
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to what institutions other than the government can do, facebook, google, and so forth. you're up, there are more pretensions about it. not so here. although, we have some people in , congressman joe barton, who are concerned about these issues. the federal trade commission is considering something like a do not track the law. we already have a do not call list. why not a do not track law that prevents people from tracking us and companies and marketers and google, and so forth, without our advanced permission? i think it is a good idea. of what the great american humorist said, is that, the do not call list was the
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greatest government invention, second only to -- >> lori andrews, you tell this story in your book of a law student of yours who tried to disable all the cookies that track him throughout his day. it took him forever. >> it does take you forever. i think the default should be opt in rather than opt out. cookies right now are put on your computer and you have to figure out which company put it on, which you can often not find out. go to the company and say, can you take me off? then there is a perverse thing. some companies that do have a do not track approach actually achieve that. by means of putting a cookie on your computer to say, lori andrews is the one who does not want to be tracked. if you disable your cookies, it puts you back into tracking. right now, the situation being opt out is sort of like, i come home from a hard days work and there are 30 strangers in my home.
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i individually have to ask each one of them to leave. i think the situation should be, opt in, nobody puts cookies on my computer unless i specifically invite them. what we are seeing with respect lawhildren in a new federal and regulations is that for children under age 13, you cannot condition being in the website or the social network on giving up your right to privacy. another thing my law student found is that you could not go on certain websites unless you agreed to cookies. we need to change that. we have changed it for under 13- year-olds and should change it for adults as well. >> if you had to foresee a supreme court case around some of these issues, what do you foresee? >> there are a couple of things. the justice seemed to hint she would like to take a look at the fact that now, third-party
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surveillance, so if someone else remotely turns on my laptop camera, the police can use those pictures. she is thinking, maybe we need to reconsider the third-party doctrine that if the police get it from somebody else'surveillance, they could use it, even though they could not of done in their first place. we may see a case about that. i think we will see cases where people have actually had onancial losses based information collected about them. that may in fact not have an true. because, i shop at a bargain website, does not mean i will be someone who does not pay off her credit card bills. the problem has been those people do not even realize this is occurring. so they have not been able to come forth to say, i was harmed in this way. i lost a mortgage as a result. i lost a job as a result. i think we will ultimately see people who are a little more
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tech savvy finding out the cause and in those cases going to court. book, i know who you are and so you did, you have a social network constitution. what is that? constitution, a bill of rights, off the web, with things like, a right to privacy and freedom of expression. i went -- i want the rights to go online as well. it is a way of trying to build a foundation for judges who are willing to rule in that direction to have a grounds on which to do it. it was also a way to let people know what the slippages. one thing is that come i never anticipated when i started writing the book that i would see social networks get in the way of a right to a fellow -- fair trial. it turns out even though you are only supposed to make judgments based on what evidence comes in in the courtroom, jurors are using google to do searches of
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the crime scene, or find out what the witnesses myspace page said, and making all these judgments based on external information. that has no relevance. if i found -- if i googled a corner where a murder was thought to have occurred, i might think, oh, the witness, of course, was able to see. there was a lot of weight on that corner. the lawyers might not have -- even though the jurors had done that and might not have a chance to correct it by saying, on the night it was raining, the light was knocked out. and so forth. you even have jurors posting the facts of the case on facebook and asking their friends to vote up or down about whether we should fry this guy, whether we should criminalize what he did. make think i am trying to
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judges where the very basic rights, individual rights, a right to a fair trial, freedom of privacy, freedom of association, are being denied to people online and to move the conversation all along, just like it was moved along with the kodak theme, the portable camera, 125 years ago. thene of those in constitution, one of them is the right to connect. no government should bridge the right to connect nor should it monitor exchanges over the internet, or code them as to sources or content. >>that occurring today echo we are seeing more and more governmental backdoors into websites. so, i was astonished how, in the arab spring, president obama that we have a right to use social networks,
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that it is a right, like the freedom of association and freedom of press. he was saying it in response to proteststhat when began in egypt, the egyptian government shutdown the internet and not everybody off twitter and facebook so they could not organize. at that time,a, was indicating we would never do that. more and more, we are seeing that is just not the case, that in fact the government has been keeping track, in some way, and i think that is inconsistent with our democratic principles, and we need a social discussion at the very least. i work in another area of technology, genetic technology, and police just did not start a giant forensic dna databank of byrybody in the universe following them around and see where they spit and doing dna
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coding. we had a social discussion about whose dna should be collected and we determined it was people who had committed crimes and were more likely to commit other crimes, so that we could solve subsequent crimes. we did not put everybody in there, but everybody's going into a database about additional database. i think we see -- we need the same sort of societal discussion and protections we had in that era. class we had been talking with lori andrews, a professor of law at the college of law at the illinois institute of technology . she is also the author of this book. "i know who you are and i saw what you did. you are watching "the communicators" on c-span. >> c-span, created by amerco's cable companies in 1979, brought to you as a public service by your television provider. >> there are some serious scholars in women's studies. their fairents have
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share of ideological non- academics to offer women's psychology, women's literature. ideologically fervent, statistically challenged hard- liners set the tone in most women's studies apartments. if there is a department the defies this, let me know. conservative women, moderate women, libertarian women, traditionally religious women -- left. critiques of late 20th- century feminism have led critics to label her as anti- feminists. sunday, december 1 on "in- depth." shows marktalk oh the first sunday of every month on c-span2.
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>> taking you live now to new hampshire where maryland o'malley,artin thought of as one of the possible 2016 presidential candidates come a is heading the jefferson-jackson dinner. it is a fun grinder -- fundraiser for the democratic party held every year. he also expect to hear from new hampshire and governor maggie hansen as well as senator jeanne shaheen. >> at this time, i would like to recognize the other officers of the new hampshire higher -- new hampshire democratic party. [laughter] [applause] second vice chair, dorothy sullivan. [applause] -- secretary, betty [applause]

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