5 Legal Updates to Read this Weekend
Spear phishing, road warriors, immigration nightmares, eminent domain, and social media blunders: the week that was, in law news.
I spend my week reading analysis and commentary on JD Supra by some of the smartest lawyers at work today. Here are five items that stood out in the mix, for a variety of reasons. For your weekend reading:
The weakest link is human behavior: Cybersecurity is a growing concern, as Senator Jay Rockefeller’s letter to the CEOs of the country’s largest corporations will attest. But ironclad network security and impenetrable firewalls are useless when employees let “spear phishing” attacks in through the front door: “seemingly innocuous email messages that [appear] to originate from trusted contacts [but are,] in fact, cyberweapons that [are] part of a sophisticated and large-scale social engineering attack intended to trick the recipient into circumventing the organization’s security controls.” Are you ready for the latest threat? (Mintz Levin)
Road warriors take note: Export control laws are relatively obscure, but the U.S. government takes them seriously. Just ask Sixing Liu. Liu, a US resident with Chinese nationality, took his laptop containing controlled data to China without obtaining the requisite export control license. Notably, the indictment did not allege Liu that disclosed the data, only that he broke the law by taking it out of the country (and that he knew full well that doing so was a crime). (Miller Canfield) [Update: Liu was found guilty on nine counts.]
Dream act or nightmare? The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides certain illegal immigrants temporary relief from deportation and authorization to work legally in the country, may turn out to be a nightmare for employers if current employees admit to having used false papers when they were hired. So far, no federal agency has provided any guidance on how to respond if existing employees present new work permits or other documentation. (Polsinelli Shughart)
What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine too: One of the more radical plans for solving the mortgage crisis in California would have municipalities, working with private investors, seize title to underwater mortgages by eminent domain, then issue new mortgages to homeowners for an amount that corresponds to the value of the property. Everybody wins, right? Except for the original lenders, who not surprisingly are outraged by the proposal. (Dechert)
Why your company needs a social media policy: The first debates in this year’s presidential contest were held this week. (Dodd-Frank was covered by both candidates.) The biggest blunder didn’t happen on camera, however, and it didn’t come from Messrs. Obama or Romney. Instead, it was a tweet from KitchenAid’s corporate account:
“Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’. #nbcpolitics”
Let KitchenAid’s mistake be a lesson to you. (Pullman & Comley)
