Media Mentions

More than 150 academics, scholars and tenured faculty from colleges across the country have signed an open letter that names and shames colleges for using facial recognition technology on campus. They include a renowned cryptographer, prominent gender theorist and the popularizer of intersectionality. There’s just one problem: Some of those colleges told The College Fix they aren’t using the technology. Another college, meanwhile, passed the buck to its students, saying they choose to use it...Cryptographer and author Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, told The Fix in a phone call that there is a difference between “campus security” and “social control.” The first name on the open letter noted that facial recognition technology is used by “authoritarian governments” such as the Chinese Communist Party, and it gives them “awesome” power over their citizens. Schneier also warned that universities are “unprepared” to handle high levels of biometric data, leaving their students’ personal information vulnerable to cyber-penetration by ill-intended actors...Cryptographer Schneier, who also lectures at Harvard, says that the technology has “no place” in an American college campus. He told The Fix that China’s use of facial recognition works in conjunction with video surveillance and artificial intelligence to evaluate citizens in the Communist Party’s “social credit” systems. More often than not, this kind of technology is used “without consent.”

President Donald Trump has said he wants to curtail the strict social distancing guidelines his administration put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic because of the potential impact on the U.S. economy. But Trump is not the only executive to take action in the hope of "flattening the curve," the term medical experts use to describe a slow and steady rise in the number of cases of COVID-19 rather than a sharp spike that could overwhelm the nation's healthcare system. As the president weighs loosening the federal guidance, he does so against a backdrop of governors who have implemented their own statewide – and independent – restrictions, from curfews to lockdowns to sweeping school and business closures...The country's public health law is a patchwork of responsibilities divided up between the federal and state governments, but typically states are in control of "police powers," according to Professor Glenn Cohen, faculty director for the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Some states even delegate those powers to individual localities. But if Trump decides to lift the federal guidance, states like California or New York that have issued stay-at-home orders "may decide to follow suit or not, but typically have significant discretion as to what to do," he said.

An article by Noah Feldman: As more U.S. states roll out stay-at-home orders to combat the spread of coronavirus, it’s now possible to identify an emerging American model of such restrictions. The approach is notably less strict than Covid-19 measures adopted in other affected countries, not only autocratic China, but even democratic Italy. And although the model is sufficiently restrictive that it will have massive effects on the economy, it does not come close to a complete shutdown of economic activity. The emerging American model has several distinctive elements. The first is that, while its contours are being specified in emergency orders issued first by local governments and now by state governments, it isn’t particularly coercive. Indeed, at least in this first iteration, the American model depends mostly on voluntary compliance. To be sure, governors are issuing what they are calling “orders,” not mere recommendations. Some governors, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, have made a point of saying that the orders are meant to be taken seriously, and hinted that police could issue fines to violators. Yet even if police enforcement is mentioned, there is little practical possibility of systematically implementing it. There just aren’t enough law enforcement officers. The legal basis for such enforcements would be shaky given the language of the orders thus far drafted.

An article by Cass Sunstein: Dire as the coronavirus pandemic has become, it’s worth remembering that there are other severe public health threats that can’t be ignored. That’s a reason to applaud the Food and Drug Administration for issuing, even in this period, a tough new tobacco regulation that should save lives: It has required graphic warnings on cigarette packages. Whenever customers buy a pack of cigarettes, or stop to contemplate buying one, they will see one of 11 gruesome images, accompanied by a grim verbal message. The image might be a woman with a large neck tumor, alongside these words: “Smoking causes head and neck cancer.” Or it might be a diseased lung, with these words: “Tobacco smoke causes fatal lung disease in nonsmokers.” Or it might be an obviously diseased body of a patient, with these words: “Smoking can cause heart disease and strokes by clogging arteries.” The images cannot be small: “The new required warnings must appear prominently on cigarette packages and in cigarette advertisements, occupying the top 50 percent of the front and rear panels of cigarette packages and at least 20 percent of the area at the top of advertisements,” the FDA states.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Farzad Mostashari, the former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the Department of Health and Human Services, says we need to collect better data to effectively fight the spread of the virus.

An article by Shane Fowler '21: The novel coronavirus has shone a spotlight on seemingly incongruous pairings: Healthcare with employment, children’s nutrition with school attendance, and corporate size with access to government assistance. So too should we examine the relationship between internet access and geographic residence. Millions of rural Americans are digitally excluded from an information-rich world. This exclusion is significant for students returning to their rural homes as universities across the country move to online learning. In doing so, the response to coronavirus exposes the nation’s uneven distribution of high-speed internet access and marginalizes students from rural America. “Digital divide” refers to the growing disparity of access to high-speed internet between underprivileged members of society, specifically those living in rural areas, and wealthier, middle-class Americans living in urban or suburban areas. According to the Federal Communication Commission and Microsoft, Kentucky is one of the worst states for access to high-speed internet and cellular data. But the state is not unique in its short-comings, around 27% of people living in rural America do not have access to minimum speed broadband internet.

An article by Mark Roe: As the coronavirus pandemic shuts down the world’s economies, stock markets plummet, and unemployment rises, policymakers will be forced to figure out how to contain the outbreak while preventing financial and economic collapse. Most economic proposals in developed countries focus on cash payments to people, deferred tax payments, and business bailouts. But biomedicine is critical to saving the economy, and of the three major biomedical channels now in play, the least important medically is the one that could impede an economic Armageddon. It’s a test to check whether a person has had, recovered from, and thus become immune to COVID-19. Scientists say that low-symptom and symptomless cases exceed the symptomatic. When these asymptomatic people are over the infection, they could go to work – they will not infect those with whom they come into contact. But we need to know who they are.

An article by Nancy Gertner and John Reinstein: Prisons are Petri dishes for disease in the best of times, but they could become incubators for COVID-19 now. Prisoners sleep, eat, and shower in enclosed quarters with limited ventilation. Social distancing is impossible. Prison populations also have greater rates of serious health problems than the general population. Many are elderly, and have diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and cancer, conditions that, if they become infected with COVID-19, make them more likely to require intensive care and especially vulnerable to dying of the disease. On Saturday, officials announced the first case of COVID-19 at the Massachusetts Treatment Center in Bridgewater. An inmate serving a life sentence and his roommate have been quarantined from each other and the rest of the inmate population. We don’t have to speculate about what will happen as the disease hits the general prison system. We have seen it.

Nearly 70 House Democrats on Monday formally requested that the chamber change its rules to allow lawmakers to vote remotely during national emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic. House members, most of whom are currently in their districts across the nation, are increasingly fearful for their safety if they have to travel back to Washington, D.C., and congregate in large groups to vote on the next economic stimulus package...In a letter led by Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Katie Porter (D-Calif.), a total of 67 Democratic lawmakers asked House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) to temporarily change the lower chamber's rules to enable remote voting...The letter cited Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, pointing to the Constitution stating that "each House may determine the rules of its proceedings" and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe stating that the Constitution "needn’t and shouldn’t be construed to preclude virtual presence any more than it had to be constituted to treat air travel or indeed email as something other than interstate commerce or electronic surveillance as less than a fourth amendment search and seizure.”

Online learning. Can it really replace the learning and community that’s being lost as campuses across the country are closed? Guest: Justin Reich, assistant professor in the comparative media studies and writing department at MIT. Faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Homer Venters, the former Chief Medical Officer for the New York City Jail system, says that we need to stop the spread of coronavirus in prisons, jails, and detention centers to have any hope of flattening the curve.

An article by Noah Feldman: With every passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that the U.S. federal government’s  response to Covid-19 has been appallingly slow and inadequate. A major reason is that the person at the apex of that institution, President Donald Trump, dislikes and distrusts the expert bureaucrats who make the government actually function. The laws that govern emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic give enormous power to the executive branch to direct and coordinate disaster response. These laws are not designed to empower the president personally. To the contrary, the whole point of the emergency laws is to empower government experts who know what must be done in a crisis — that is, career technocrats who work at agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the federal emergency management agency (FEMA). Congress doesn’t trust the president in an emergency. It trusts the experts.

A Ted Talk by Zeynep Tufekci: With so much data collected on our online behavior, it's bound to be misused. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci says to rebuild trust in the internet, we need to entirely restructure how it operates.

Courts are likely to continue examining a requirement that IRS employees get their boss to OK penalty decisions before they are presented to taxpayers, even after the U.S. Tax Court issued a recent string of opinions addressing the issue. The Tax Court’s 2017 ruling in Graev v. Commissioner interpreted tax code Section 6751(b) as requiring the IRS to obtain supervisory approval in a tax deficiency case by the time it imposes related tax penalties. Since January, the Tax Court has grappled with multiple aspects of the requirement, trying to establish the exact point in the process when the requirement must be met and which penalties need approval...The fact that all the judges weighed in on the Belair decision increases the chances that it will get reversed, according to T. Keith Fogg, director of the Federal Tax Clinic at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School. “When you look at fully reviewed opinions that get appealed, they get reversed more than other Tax Court opinions that have also been appealed because they’re controversial—they’re close questions,” Fogg told Bloomberg Tax... “I expect appeals in every case the taxpayers have lost involving 6751(b) where the taxpayers are represented by counsel,” said Carlton M. Smith, who formerly directed the Carodozo School of Law’s tax clinic and now is a retired volunteer at Harvard Law School’s Federal Tax Clinic.

Monday marks the tenth anniversary of the signing of President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, and the 10-year anniversary of the first lawsuits seeking to strike it down. Back then, U.S. Representatives Mike Pence, Mick Mulvaney and 120 other Republican lawmakers criticized the Obama Justice Department for its willingness to defend the controversial Obamacare, while choosing to abandon the Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by another Democrat, Bill Clinton. The “Department of Justice is vigorously defending in numerous federal courts across the country President Obama’s signature health care reform law” even though it “barely passed both chambers of Congress on party line votes,” they said in a House Resolution, after two federal trial courts ruled parts of the ACA were unconstitutional...In deciding not to defend Obamacare, the administration is stretching its power, said Harvard Law School Professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general from 1985 to 1989 under President Ronald Reagan. Fortunately, Fried said, other parties often step in, as they did here, to defend the laws the government chooses not to, but “the Justice Department kind of loses some of its credibility.” “When it says we’re not going to defend it, it no longer means because it’s indefensible or no reasonable person could defend it,” he said. “It just means we don’t like it. The Justice Department is supposed to have weightier reasons than that.”

As millions of Americans shut their doors to the threat of coronavirus, those who venture out — whether to seek necessities or in ignorance of new guidelines — face a rapidly changing world. Businesses have shuttered or limited their hours. Health care facilities have changed their intake procedures. And places that do remain open have refused service to customers for reasons that just weeks ago would have seemed unreasonable: because they wore scrubs, talked about recent travel abroad or had a coughing fit. Scores of affected Americans have taken to social media to complain, with some even asking whether it’s legal for businesses to boot coughing customers. The short answer to that question is, yes...Under the Civil Rights Act, a business can’t deny goods or services based on race, color, religion, or national origin. Under current circumstances, that means a business can’t deny service to a customer from a specific country, even if it’s seen an uptick in coronavirus cases. The same goes for people with impairments, who are guaranteed accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the law does not require businesses to serve those who pose “a direct threat to the health and safety of others,” said Joseph Singer, a law professor at Harvard Law School. Nor does a coronavirus diagnosis qualify as a disability under the law, added Stacey Lee, a business law expert at Johns Hopkins University.

Momentum appears to be building for a national shutdown to confront the coronavirus crisis, raising the prospect that President Trump could issue an order requiring people to stay at home. Such an order would be unprecedented in American history, but some of Trump's top advisers have said publicly they would be open to it. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday he had raised the prospect of such a dramatic step with the administration...What such an order at the federal level might look like — and even whether Trump has the authority to issue an order — is unclear, because no president had ever tried it before. “I don’t think Congress has ever authorized the president to issue a curfew or a shelter-in-place order,” said Michael Klarman, a constitutional law expert at Harvard Law School. “I’m sure the Trump people will think Trump can do whatever he thinks is necessary to protect the nation’s health. I have a hard time imagining this Supreme Court ruling otherwise. And I have little doubt Trump would violate a court order anyway if he thought he could get away with it.”

An article by Noah Feldman: California Governor Gavin Newsom’s stay-at-home order may well be necessary as a matter of public health in the face of the new coronavirus — I will leave that to epidemiologists to determine. But viewed as a legal declaration, it’s a total mess. Most worrisome, the order fails to create an exception to the stay-at-home requirement for the free press to function — an exemption that is certainly mandated by the First Amendment. Instead, the order creates exceptions by referring to a federal list of 16 “critical infrastructure sectors” — a list that itself fails to say that a free press is a constitutionally specified form of critical infrastructure, without which we cannot hope to cope with a pandemic like Covid-19. The order is also drafted so badly that it creates contradictions with the state’s own website explaining it; with the governor’s own speech rolling it out; and with common sense. As written, the order does not say clearly that Californians can leave their homes to buy food or medicine or other necessities. It doesn’t say whether they can go out to help family members or friends who are themselves vulnerable or otherwise in need. It is silent on going out for exercise. Although context suggests all these may be permitted, the formal legal implication of the text would be that all are prohibited.

In 2011, Nancy Schwartzman started developing a mobile application to move the psychology of bystander intervention into an increasingly online world. Technology aimed at preventing rape had long put the onus on the individual, but what if an entire community could take responsibility for preventing sexual assault? By 2012, she had created Circle of 6, an app in which users enter six of their most trusted contacts. Should a risky situation arise, users can tap an icon to send a text saying, “Call and pretend you need me. I need an interruption.” ...Callisto, a nonprofit that has expanded rapidly in the past few years to help college students document assault, is set to double the number of campuses where it operates by fall 2020. The program allows students to create a report of their assault, with the app connecting survivors of the same assailant through their Title IX office—even if the assaults occur years apart... “#MeToo has shown, in a disturbing way, that women are frequently not believed unless two or 10 or 60 of them come forward together,” says Sejal Singh '20, a Harvard Law student and former policy coordinator for Know Your IX, a national campaign to end gender-based violence in schools. Singh has advocated for Callisto in her work with universities, saying, “Callisto enables people to come forward together and to have each other’s back.”

An article by Noah Feldman: One of the weirdest things in this weird historical moment is the hodgepodge nature of the coronavirus responses from different state, county, and local governments throughout the United States. In essentially every other country on earth, central government authorities are directing and running the response to Covid-19. If Italy shuts down, it’s the Italian government that decides to do it. If Germany chooses to end hotel stays, it’s Chancellor Angela Merkel who makes the call. But in the U.S., separate Bay Area counties can go one way, the mayor of New York another, and the governor of Massachusetts yet a third. There’s little if any national coordination. It hardly seems like an optimal arrangement during a global pandemic. The explanation for this bizarre diversity of uncoordinated responses can’t be laid solely at the feet of President Donald Trump, despite his alarming lack of leadership. The deeper explanation is the distinctive, peculiar system of U.S. federalism.

The White House’s nascent effort to bail out oil and gas producers struggling with plunging oil prices could become a political boondoggle, legal and industry experts say, given the difficulty of finding congressional support for offering federal dollars to an industry plagued by reckless financing and devastating effects on the climate. The price war that broke out between Saudi Arabia and Russia on Sunday pushed the price of crude into its steepest single-day nosedive since 1991. Both producers vowed to continue oversupplying the market even as the panic over the coronavirus pandemic grounded planes and shuttered factories, significantly reducing demand... "The industry has gotten quite a few things off its wish list from this administration. Yet the administration is still willing to do more. It’s just, like, when will it ever end?" Caitlin McCoy, environmental and energy fellow at Harvard Law School. The industry carries important symbolism for the Trump administration, which cast its efforts to deregulate and expand the industry as vital to its nationalist agenda.