The Cyber Memo: Mueller probe grinds on, with no end in sightThe Hill. Cf. “Though the mills of God grind slowly, Yet they grind exceeding small.” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Retribution.
Sydney woman defrauded of $700000 in elaborate tax scam
Kafka in Greece: a struggle against tax bureaucracy
Govt uses data matching to sweep prisons for welfare fraud
The Uncertain Future of Bitcoin Futures Bloomberg. Yves: “And Levine likes everything Wall Street does, particularly ‘innovations’.”
VAT fraud crackdown increases liability of website marketplaces
The international tax arena is awash with calls for tax transparency, and a variety of reforms are underway at the national, regional and global level to bring such transparency to fruition. See, e.g., Joshua Blank’s recent article The Timing of Tax Transparency [90 S. Cal. L. Rev. 449 (2017)], reviewed by Omri Marian earlier this year. Of course, with great caches of information comes great potential for security breaches of all types. Michael Hatfield, in his forthcoming article, Cybersecurity and Tax Reform, draws attention to the immensely important cybersecurity risks and challenges of a tax system founded on government collection and use of significant quantities of information. Quoting a former FBI Assistant Director, Hatfield describes IRS taxpayer information as “the gold standard” for being a “treasure trove of information” from the perspective of cyber criminals—large quantities of very valuable data housed in one agency. Is the IRS ready? Maybe not.
Hatfield’s solution to these cyber risks (given the operational demands of running a tax system and the constraints faced by the IRS) is substantive law reform and not merely more security. To be clear, security is a great idea, but at some point, reality must step in and when it does, Hatfield argues that it points to a remedy grounded in tax design and not just cybersecurity. His bold proposal—to have the tax system collect less data—relies on the marriage of substantive law changes and a rethinking of the sources of data security.
CRS Reports & Analysis – Cybersecurity: Cybercrime and National Security Authoritative Reports and Resources. November 14, 2017 (R44408): “As online attacks grow in volume and sophistication, the United States is expanding its cybersecurity efforts. Cybercriminals continue to develop new ways to ensnare victims, whereas nation-state hackers compromise companies, government agencies, and businesses to create espionage networks and steal information. Threats come from both criminals and hostile countries, especially China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Much is written on this topic, and this CRS report directs the reader to authoritative sources that address many of the most prominent issues. The annotated descriptions of these sources are listed in reverse chronological order, with an emphasis on material published in the past several years. This report includes resources and studies from government agencies (federal, state, local, and international), think tanks, academic institutions, news organizations, and other sources…”
Freedom to Tinker – “This is the first post in our “No Boundaries” series, in which we reveal how third-party scripts on websites have been extracting personal information in increasingly intrusive ways. by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan.Update: we’ve released our data — the list of sites with session-replay scripts, and the sites where we’ve confirmed recording by third parties.”
“You may know that most websites have third-party analytics scripts that record which pages you visit and the searches you make. But lately, more and more sites use “session replay” scripts. These scripts record your keystrokes, mouse movements, and scrolling behavior, along with the entire contents of the pages you visit, and send them to third-party servers. Unlike typical analytics services that provide aggregate statistics, these scripts are intended for the recording and playback of individual browsing sessions, as if someone is looking over your shoulder. The stated purpose of this data collection includes gathering insights into how users interact with websites and discovering broken or confusing pages. However the extent of data collected by these services far exceeds user expectations; text typed into forms is collected before the user submits the form, and precise mouse movements are saved, all without any visual indication to the user. This data can’t reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous. In fact, some companies allow publishers to explicitly link recordings to a user’s real identity. For this study we analyzed seven of the top session replay companies (based on their relative popularity in our measurements. The services studied are Yandex, FullStory, Hotjar, UserReplay, Smartlook, Clicktale, and SessionCam. We found these services in use on 482 of the Alexa top 50,000 sites…” [emphasis added]
In the old Dragnet series, Jack Webb’s character was famous for declaring that “all we want are the facts, ma’am.” As if “the facts” are pristine jigsaw pieces that, if you find enough, give you an objective truth. Lawyers know better. Every “fact” comes from a point of view. Even police body cams are viewpoint-dependent, as seen this this nifty experiment. The lawyer’s job is to assemble together facts which, if believed, tell the story from the point of view most favorable to the client’s interest. They promote “a” truth. The fact-finder has to decide on “the” truth.
Most courses in law school are not structured to teach this lesson. We tend to focus our students on appellate opinions where the facts are a given, not a mystery. Still, in both my Civil Procedure course and my Tax course I take what opportunities I can find to show how the finders of fact have huge power in deciding how a case resolves.
In Tax Court, most facts are usually stipulated by the parties. But sometimes the Tax Court judge is called upon to decide the “facts” from witness testimony. A pair of opinions issued last week illustrate the power of fact-finding. One came out well for the taxpayer. The other did not. More below the fold.