In a new post on the Covington Energy & Environment Blog, our colleagues discuss the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Notice of Inquiry on updating reliability standards related to cybersecurity, especially given the threat of a coordinated cyberattack targeting geographically distributed generation resources.  The Commission also issued a staff paper that suggests a framework for providing incentives in transmission rates for cybersecurity investments.  To read the post, please click here.…

Continuing the flood of recent proposals to amend the scope of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, a bipartisan group of Senators unveiled the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency Act (“PACT Act”) last week.  Proposed by Senators Brian Schatz (D-HI) and John Thune (R-SD), the PACT Act comes on the heels of legislative proposals from Senate Republicans, a Department of Justice report with proposed amendments to the law—both of which we analyzed here…

On June 24, 2020, the European Commission (“Commission”) published its much-anticipated assessment of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) two years after it went into effect.  The assessment takes into account contributions from the European Council, the European Parliament, the European Data Protection Board (“EDPB”), individual supervisory authorities, the Multi-Stakeholder Expert Group and other stakeholders.  The assessment considers a wider scope of issues surrounding GDPR implementation beyond international transfers and the cooperation and consistency…

On June 16, 2020, the First Circuit released its opinion in United States v. Moore-Bush.  The issue presented was whether the Government’s warrantless use of a pole camera to continuously record for eight months the front of Defendants’ home, as well as their and their visitors’ comings and goings, infringed on the Defendants’ reasonable expectation of privacy in and around their home and thereby violated the Fourth Amendment.  The appeal followed the district court’s decision…

On June 19, 2020, the French Council of State (Conseil d’État) decided that the French Supervisory Authority (“CNIL”) had gone too far in its guidance on cookies and similar technologies when it stated that conditioning a user’s access to a website upon his or her acceptance of certain cookies (commonly known as “cookie walls”) is never compliant with the consent requirements in the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). According to the Council of State,…

On Wednesday, two proposals were unveiled that would reform the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.  Section 230 immunizes online platforms from civil liability based on third-party content, and provides immunity for acting in “good faith” to restrict or remove content that is “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”…