Welcome Remarks: Conference on "Privacy and the Press: Scoops, Secrets, and Ethics in the New Media Landscape"

Friday, December 03, 2010

Summary by Jane Thompson: This is David Getches' introduction to the December 2010 Silicon Flatirons Center conference on Privacy and the Press: Snoops, Secrets, and Ethics in the New Media Landscape, which was organized by Paul Ohm. The "coup" of this conference was that it just happened to occur directly on the heels of the major Wikileaks disclosure of State Department communications, and David references that event, along with the law school's experience with "flatly erroneous employment statistics posted on a blog which did its harm when it was in turn picked up by traditional media, and corrections were ineffectual." He also poses a lot of questions about whether publicizing personal information crosses lines of legality, ethics, or just plain decency. This is one of his longer conference introductions, and it has a great ending: "And remember: all you say here is being streamed and recorded. Of course."

David Getches' introduction and various presentations of the conference are also available online. Transcript reproduced with permission of the University of Colorado Law School and the David H. Getches family.

http://hdl.handle.net/10974/getches:152