An interesting list of international legal threats to privacy and
other rights of computer users appears at:
http://www.io.org/~sherlock/doom/threat.html
The main site, http://www.io.org/~sherlock/doom/doom.html, is run by a
Canadian organization called The Legal Group for the Internet in
Canada.
Jamie Love has posted a letter from the JRI Health Law Institute
expressing objections to the medical privacy bill, S. 1360. They
claim that patients will not know who is using their information, or
what for, among other criticisms. They also suggest that people
requesting the information be required to provide courts with better
evidence of the need for the information. The letter is rather long,
so I've put it on our FTP site. It is the last item in the file
Medical-Records in the Re-Legislation directory. I can also send it
to anyone who asks.
The following comes from Madanmohan Rao's column, "International
Internet NewsClips," at the Internet World site
http://netday.iworld.com/business/NATW.html.
Andy
Universities Are A Testing Ground For Free Speech On The Internet
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Even before the four freshmen at Cornell University in New York
triggered complaints around the globe about their off-colour e-
mail joke about women a few months ago, some observers have been
regarding the universities as a testing ground for free speech
issues on the Internet. One of the questions at the centre of the
controversy is how much responsibility universities themselves
bear for what students say online. The fact that offensive
statements are often made on a university's own networks,
sometimes on university-owned computers, complicates matters. The
university cases may have implications for the degree of
responsibility ordinary companies and online carriers may be held
to bear for communications over their networks. "A lot of people
in the private sector are watching to see how these cases end
up," according to Jeffrey Swope, a lawyer. Free speech advocates
take the university cases seriously, and have organised a
campaign to prevent censorship on campus. They are battling for
cyberspace "speech" codes, which are being considered at a number
of universities.
(Financial Times, Britain; April 15, 1996)
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Posted by Andrew Oram - •••@••.••• - Moderator: CYBER-RIGHTS (CPSR)
Cyber-Rights: http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/
ftp://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/cyber-rights/Library/
CyberJournal: (WWW or FTP) --> ftp://ftp.iol.ie/users/rkmoore
Materials may be reposted in their _entirety_ for non-commercial use.
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