Legaltech News: Nervous System

With the aggressive pace of technological change and the seeming onslaught of news regarding data breaches, cyberattacks, and technological threats to privacy and security, it is easy to mistakenly assume these are fundamentally new threats. In fact, the pace of technological change is perhaps slower than it feels, and many of these seemingly new categories of threats have been with us longer than we remember.

In “Nervous System,” David Kalat approaches issues of data privacy and cybersecurity from the context of history—to look to the past for clues about how to interpret the present and prepare for the future.

Read his full series of articles:

2024

• The ELIZA Effect (June)
• Cybersecurity 1800s Style (May)
• A Night to Remember (April)
• The Osborne Effect (March)
• 32-Bit Computers Dancing Backwards in High Heels (February)
• Paying with Your Finger (January)

2023

• Y2K Revisited (December)
• The Context of Keywords (November)
• The First Video Call (October)
• The Tale of the Tape (August)
• How to Stuff Cellular Phone Calls in Digital Bubble Wrap (July)
• When Mobile Telephones Had Steering Wheels (June)
• How Computers Saved Wall Street (May)
• The April Fools’ Prank That Changed the World (April)
• The Laws of Thought (March)
• Formulae for Success (February)
• The Great Emoji War (January)

2022

• From Gibberish to Unicode (December)
• The Strange Case of the Forged Email, the Carphone, and the Woman Who Lost Her Job (November)
• The Bakery Computer (October)
• How Trolls Built Big Tech (September)
• How to Have a Secure Conversation with a Stranger (August)
• Putting Data on a Diet: How Lossless Compression Makes Information Skinnier (July)
• Cybernetics and the Birth of Computer Ethics (June)
• From a Cry in the Dark to the Forensic Voiceprint (May)
• The Entropy of Wordle (April)
• iPhone Witness Testimony (March)
• Knowing Your Place in the World (February)
• The Computer Crime of the Century (January)

2021

• The Computer Virus That Wasn’t (December)
• Rethinking Voice Recognition at the Canada Border (November)
• Engineering the Next Generation of Computer Users with the Alto (October)
• Dumpster Diving for Fraud and Profit (September)
• Florida Man, Joe Biden, and the Federal Computer Crimes Act (August)
• SafeBack in the Day (July)
• The CPU ARM Race (June)
• Audrey and the Dragon: The History of Voice Recognition Technology (May)
• Oliver North and the Origin Story of Legal Technology (April)
• Computer Crime and Punishment (March)
• How ‘The 414s’ Hacking for Video Game High Scores Led to Federal Cyber Law (February)
• Dialing for Dollars (January)

2020

• The First Major Data Breach: 1984 (December)
• Before the Battle Over 5G, There Was the Battle Over 3G (November)
• The Sleepy History of the Buffer Overflow Attack (October)
• The Inventor, the Barbershop Quartet, and the Origin of the Email Attachment (September)
• The Police Beat Algorithm and Automated Criminal Justice Information Systems (August)
• The Unexpected History of VoIP (July)
• Teaching Machines to See Faces (June)
• The Triumphs of a Lazy Programmer (May)
• How Punch Cards Brought Us to Our Census (April)
• UNIVAC Predicts the Next President (March)
• Alan Turing’s Gin Memory (February)
• The Countess of Lovelace, the First Computer Programmer (January)

2019

• Claude Shannon’s Magic Mouse (December)
• Passwords Become More Secure by Adding a Pinch of Salt (November)
• How Legal Tech Helped Catch the BTK Killer (October)
• Clipping the Wings of the Clipper Chip (September)
• The First Modern Presidential Campaign (August)
• The Day the NSA Took Down the Military (July)
• The Great Fixer of Information Coding Errors (June)
• Think Cryptocurrency Is New? You’ve Forgotten the ’80s (May)
• The First Social Network (April)
• Big Brother, the Ghost in LBJ’s Computer (March)
• Remembering the Dawn of Spam (February)
• The Day Grace Hopper Literally Debugged a Program (January)

2018

• The Computer That Taught HAL to Sing (December)
• Taking Biometrics at Face Value (November)
• What Hollywood Has Taught the US Government about Cybersecurity (October)
• The Tech Revolution Is Earlier than You Think (September)
• The Glamour Girl’s Secret Privacy Weapon (August)
• The Small Start of Big Data (June)
• Just the Fax, Ma’am (May)
• The Boy Who Could Talk to Computers (April)
• Evaluating TCPA Liability in the Actual Wild West (March)
• The Story of the First White Hat Hacker (February)