Digital privacy blogs keep lawyers at forefront of their industry

In recent weeks, blogs and newspapers around the country have renewed the focus on Internet privacy issues, as many Americans are realizing their web searches and Google-centered lives are not as anonymous as they’d hoped. Almost overnight, “digital privacy” entered our daily lexicon. And everyone, from private citizens to business owners, wants to ensure they are protected.

Some consider the threats of technology a cause for alarm, while others shrug it off as a small price to pay for the freedoms of the Internet. But there is one thing most people agree on: privacy, and the laws surrounding it, has changed.  

“Over the past five years, laws governing the protection of personal information of consumers and employees have started to respond to radical changes in technology,” says Tanya Forsheit, a lawyer with Proskauer Rose LLP and one of eight bloggers writing for the firm’s Privacy Law Blog. “The blog is important, in part, because privacy and data security laws continue to evolve.”

Since the Privacy Law Blog launched earlier this year, the firm’s expectation – that the blog would allow continuous, up-to-the-minute news updates – has continued to be met. No small challenge, considering the constant advancements taking place within the industry.

In fact, such advancements posed what Forsheit considers her biggest obstacle yet.

“The rapidly changing landscape requires that we constantly monitor and stay on top of weekly, if not daily, developments – this in addition to our full-time counseling and litigation practices,” she says. “We invest the additional time to understand and keep our clients and friends informed of those changes, and the blog facilitates that process.”

The blog also serves to complement “Proskauer on Privacy: A Guide to Privacy and Date Security Law in the Information Age,” a treatise detailing global privacy/data security laws. With the Privacy Law Blog, the firm can detail developments on privacy law immediately when they happen, as opposed to waiting for an updated treatise to be released.

Not surprisingly, Proskauer Rose isn’t the only firm involved in blogging the digital privacy world. Davis Wright Tremaine LLP – whose position in the blogosphere was highlighted in a recent LexBlog article on practice-specific law blogs – maintains one of their own, called the Privacy & Security Law Blog.

Randy Gainer is a partner at DWT’s Seattle office who writes some of the content for the Privacy & Security Law Blog. For him, the challenges of practicing law in a changing technological landscape are similar to those impacting Forsheit. How, he wonders, can legal principles developed before the digital boom be appropriately applied to new technology?

To solve this problem, Gainer has taken a few steps. He works towards understanding why certain legal developments come about. He reads scholarly journals on the Internet that have been written by those analyzing similar issues. And he asks his colleagues for their input on his conclusions.

But perhaps most importantly, Randy Gainer understands the technology he is dealing with.

“I try to develop a technical understanding of whatever technology is involved in a case or transaction, whether it’s a commercial software program, open source software, the Internet, P2P networks, encryption, tools used to defeat DRM, methods used to penetrate network security, etc,” he says.

Gainer – whose experience includes working with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to challenge the federal government’s domestic eavesdropping program – doesn’t believe that the rapid changes in technology should undermine the freedoms guaranteed to Americans. While the government may use technology to catch criminals, he says, the detective work must be done legally and in compliance with the Constitution.

And though the game has changed, Gainer doesn’t buy into the claim that privacy as Americans have traditionally known it is a thing of the past.

“The founders of this country fought the revolution in part to prevent colonial officials from conducting general searches of their homes and businesses whenever and for whatever reason the officials chose,” he says. “Today’s supposed experts who say we should sit by passively as our privacy rights are destroyed are wrong. Those rights are worth fighting for, and the fight can be won.”