Jason Young
LL.M. (Law and Technology) Candidate, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

Jason Young is a Gowling Lafleur Henderson Fellow at the University of Ottawa, where he is completing his Masters in Law with a concentration in technology and law. While studying for his law degree at Queen's University, he worked on policy and advocacy for privacy technology developer Zero-Knowledge Systems; was a legal intern with the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, where he conducted research on workplace privacy; and, was a 2002 Samuelson-Glushko Fellow with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C. Prior to coming to law school, Jason was a technology policy analyst with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia.

Jason has written on the privacy implications of video surveillance and online sex offender registries and lobbied both the Canadian and U.S. governments on digital copyright reform and cybercrime issues. He has researched and written on privacy and freedom of expression in China, Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines and Jordan for EPIC's 1997, 2002 and 2003 Privacy and Human Rights surveys, and recently completed the first -ever comprehensive report on Internet censorship in Canada for Privacy International. In 2002, the SOCAN Foundation awarded him the Gordon F. Henderson National Copyright Award for his critique of the WIPO Internet Treaties and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In 2003, Queen's University awarded him the Chief Justice McRuer Prize in Constitutional Law for his essay on the unintended consequences of proposed Canadian cybercrime legislation.

Jason sat on the program committee for the 2nd Annual Privacy and Security Workshop and was chair of the "Personal Privacy, Public Security" forum at Queen's University in 2001.

Jason currently sits on the board of directors of Privaterra, a project of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), and the internal advisory committee of the Canadian Internet Public Interest Law Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa.

Research

Technoneutrality and Policy-making for Privacy

From public-key encryption to the Great Cyberporn Panic, from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to lawful access, our perceptions and fears of technology are driving legislative responses affecting the most sacred of our legal rights.

The pace and the complexity of new development spawns ignorance of the values and valences represented by new technology. It has also collapsed the policymaking cycle, leading to inappropriately visceral responses, over-prescriptive regulation and the adoption of policymaking that sees technology as divorced from the market, law and policy, and technological artifacts as simple tools which can be plugged in to or taken out of legislative tests at a whim.

Beginning with the proposition that effective privacy protection requires both top-down legislation and bottom-up normative and 'code-as-law' efforts, Jason Young's current research builds on earlier writing and advocacy in digital copyright reform and cybercrime. His thesis will focus on themes policymakers should consider when regulating technology that implicates privacy interests. He has written a related paper, "Surfing While Muslim: Privacy, Freedom of Expression and the Unintended Consequences of Cybercrime Legislation" which has been conditionally accepted to the McGill Law Journal.

Research

Works in Progress

Digital Traffic Cops: Recommendations for the Canadian Cybercrime Initiative 

Publications

"Surfing While Muslim: Privacy, Freedom of Speech and the Unintended Consequences of Cybercrime Legislation," Int. J. of Comm. L. & Pol’y, No. 9, December 2004.