Kendra Albert

Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ruled that President Donald Trump couldn’t block his critics on Twitter. More specifically, the court determined that Trump’s Twitter account is a “public forum” where citizens have a right to engage with his comments, the same way they’d be able to attend a town hall. This ruling could shape how all government officials use social media — from the US president to local garbage collectors...Kendra Albert, an instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, believes the Second Circuit’s decision is unnecessarily ambiguous. The Trump administration has argued that its account is government speech, or speech that the government is performing on its own behalf, which isn’t regulated by the First Amendment. Albert argues that the original ruling clearly separated the account’s “government speech” content from the interactive forum in the replies. “The lower court decision actually does a really good job of explaining why it matters that people are blocked, even if they can just log out of Twitter and see the president’s tweets otherwise,” Albert said, “and it’s because there’s sort of this discursive space going on underneath the tweet.”

A bill before the Texas Senate seeks to prevent social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter from censoring users based on their viewpoints. Supporters say it would protect the free exchange of ideas, but critics say the bill contradicts a federal law that allows social media platforms to regulate their own content. ...Opponents to the bill raised concerns about the conflict with a federal law that protects social media platforms. In the federal law, social media platforms are protected under a “good Samaritan” policy that allows them to moderate content on the platform however they want, or on a subjective basis. Kendra Albert, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said the federal law would likely preempt SB 2373 because the bill is more restrictive. “The federal law contains what we would call a ‘subjective standard,’” said Albert, who specializes in technology law. “It's based on whether the provider thinks that this causes problems, whereas the Texas bill attempts to move it to an objective standard.”

A bill before the Texas Senate seeks to prevent social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter from censoring users based on their viewpoints. Supporters say it would protect the free exchange of ideas but critics say the bill contradicts a federal law that allows social media platforms to regulate their own content. ... Kendra Albert, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said the federal law would likely preempt SB 2373 because the bill is more restrictive. “The federal law contains what we would call a ‘subjective standard,’” said Albert, who specializes in technology law. “It's based on whether the provider thinks that this causes problems, whereas the Texas bill attempts to move it to an objective standard.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested in London on Thursday, after hiding out in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012. U.S. authorities now want to charge the man whose website had published hundreds of thousands of classified and sensitive U.S. government documents. U.S. lawmakers have long regarded the large-scale leaks published by WikiLeaks as a threat to national security, but it was not entirely clear what crime they would be able to charge him with—Assange himself, so far as anyone knew, had not stolen any information but instead merely published it. ... That was the extent of Assange’s involvement in anything technical—a single failed attempt to help Manning figure out a password. That could make it difficult to pin a CFAA charge on Assange since there’s no evidence that he ever used a stolen password or cracked it (or even really tried to crack it!) to access a computer without authorization. But a person can be found guilty of conspiring to commit a crime even if they do not actually commit that crime, Harvard Law School lecturer Kendra Albert explained. “A successful conspiracy charge does not require you to actually violate the underlying statue,” Albert told me. “The government doesn’t need to prove that the CFAA was actually violated.”

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) faces an uphill battle in his $250 million lawsuit against Twitter and three of its users, legal experts say. ... The tweets from @DevinNunesMom, @DevinCow and Mair cited in the lawsuit could likely be interpreted as opinions or parody, both of which are protected forms of speech, Kendra Albert, a clinical instructional fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, told The Hill.

Every day, it seems like people are quitting social media for one reason or another — including fatigue and privacy concerns. Recently, one of my coworkers even told me he had stopped using Instagram because he believed it was listening in on his conversations. ... If tech companies were actually listening in on us without our consent, they'd be in for some serious legal pain. "There is also a federal statute called the Wiretap Act, which prevents people from eavesdropping on oral communications, and that could be a cause of action for a potential plaintiff against the company that was eavesdropping on them," said Kendra Albert, clinical instructional fellow at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School.

A new ruling from the Librarian of Congress is good news for video game preservation. In an 85-page ruling that covered everything from electronic aircraft controls to farm equipment diagnostic software, the Librarian of Congress carved out fair use exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for video games and software in general..."These rules are a big win," Kendra Albert, a Clinical Instructional Fellow at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, told Motherboard. Albert represented the Software Preservation Network, which was one of the parties arguing for the change at the Copyright Office. "The 2015 rules cracked the door open for many things, but the exemptions that were granted here are potentially much, much broader."

Local politics blogger Kevin Vericker is better known for putting an occasional toe — OK, foot — over the line than for pulling punches. Wielding hyperbole in the rabid manner endemic to the blogosphere, the retired software analyst relentlessly details the palace intrigue of tiny North Bay Village for his 1,000 local readers...The suit is part of a growing trend of public officials taking bloggers to court for posts they see as harmful to their personal or professional image, according to Kendra Albert of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. Melania Trump filed a high-profile libel suit against a Maryland blogger that settled last year in her favor, with a full retraction and significant reparations. While some cases are legitimate, Albert said, the increase in lawsuits against journalists (think Hulk Hogan vs. Gawker) has publications thinking twice before publishing. These days, even facts can be expensive to defend.