The Clinic is excited to announce the release of an update of A Researcher’s Guide to Some Legal Risks of Security Research (pdf), a guide authored by Sunoo Park and Kendra Albert, and co-published by the Cyberlaw Clinic, the Technology Law and Policy Clinic at NYU School of Law, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
This update, which builds on the 2020 version, incorporates the Supreme Court’s Van Buren decision and subsequent case law, updates to the security research exemptions to § 1201, as well as adding sections on defamation and publishing code that may be misused.
The guide gives the most comprehensive presentation to date of this landscape of legal risks, with an eye to both legal and technical nuance. Aimed at researchers, the public, and technology lawyers alike, its aims both to provide pragmatic guidance to those navigating today’s uncertain legal landscape, and to provoke public debate towards future reform.
Sunoo Park (HLS JD ’21, MIT PhD ’18) is an assistant professor in computer science at New York University, who also teaches at the Technology Law and Policy Clinic at the NYU School of Law. Kendra Albert was a Senior Clinical Instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic during the writing of this guide, and is an incoming partner at Albert Sellars, a public interest technology law firm.