The Yale Law Journal

VOLUME
125
2015-2016
Collection

Emerging Technologies in Investigations

03 Mar 2016

Novel technologies shift the costs of government investigations. They alter who controls key bottlenecks in the flow of targeted information. And they can undermine existing accountability mechanisms that control for investigator error and abuse. This panel of three essays advocates for greater transparency about the use of emerging technologies in search, surveillance, and forensic investigations. The authors explore different transparency-enhancing mechanisms, from private enforcement through constitutional litigation, to international human rights law, to courts’ evidentiary rules.

Forum

Open Source Evidence on Trial

Keith Hiatt

Introduction Investigating war crimes is a messy business. It is difficult and dangerous. International criminal tribunals charge powerful individuals, including heads of state and leaders of armed forces, whose personal resources may well exceed the annual operating budget of the invest…

Forum

Science and Harm in Human Rights Cases: Preventing the Revictimization of Families of the Disappeared

Eden Medina & Ilan Sandberg Wiener

Introduction International human rights law and the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights obligate states to investigate cases of forced disappearance (also called enforced disappearance) until the victim has been found and identified.1 However, neither specifies th…

Forum

Online Service Providers and Surveillance Law Transparency

Jonathan Manes

On June 5, 2013, the first revelation hit the front pages: documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had for years ordered telephone companies to turn over our domestic telephone calling records en masse.1 The government had created a database of …