Silicon Valley Law Group Blog

Colorado’s Carlino Brothers: A Bootlegging Empire

December 17, 2019 | Silicon Valley Law Group

What if you never knew your grandfather because he allegedly died early in life from natural causes, and one day an elderly gentleman informs you that your grandfather died of “lead poisoning”?

That real-life event prompted author and San Jose’s Sam’s BBQ owner, Sam Carlino to discover his grandfather and great uncle control the flow of prohibition alcohol in Colorado before their gruesome and bloodied separate assassinations in 1931. “Colorado’s Carlino Brothers” provides newspaper accounts, intimate photographs and surprising revelations, including the confirmation that his grandfather Pete Carlino met with crime boss “boss of all bosses” Salvador Maranzano in New York before his murder under the orders of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, and that both men’s September 10, 1931 assassinations may not have been a coincidence.

Congratulations Sam Carlino on the successful launch of your riveting book on Amazon. It was an honor to assist you in this journey.

Shareholder Stephen Wu’s Presidential Showcase Program at the American Bar Association Annual Meeting

August 5, 2019 | Silicon Valley Law Group

Shareholder Stephen Wu will be speaking at the American Bar Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco. On August 9 at 2 pm, he will be presenting in a panel Presidential Showcase continuing legal education program entitled “Law Firm Cybersecurity Requirements You Never Dreamed Of: Emerging Threats, Ethical Obligations, and Survival Tactics.” The sponsor is the ABA Cybersecurity Legal Task Force, and Stephen is a new member of the Task Force. If you are attending the ABA Annual Meeting, please join us. For event details please click on the link below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wgdu-R8FKk6Ri1mYCPc63IvWcmeQs54v/view?usp=sharing

Press Interview with SVLG Shareholder Stephen Wu About HIPAA Fine on Electronic Health Record Vendor

June 10, 2019 | Silicon Valley Law Group

On May 23, 2019, shareholder Stephen Wu spoke with Marianne Kolbasuk McGee of Information Security Media Group about a HIPAA an enforcement case.

The case was brought by the Office for Civil Rights, Department of Health and Human Services. It emphasized the importance of conducting a security program risk assessment in order to prevent security breaches.

To read the article with Stephen’s comments click here.

Podcast on Brexit, GDPR, and the American AI Initiative

February 11, 2019 | Silicon Valley Law Group

Today, shareholder Stephen Wu hosted DMH Stallard partner Anthony Lee and talked about fast-breaking news about personal data exports from the United Kingdom to the United States in light of Brexit and the status of the General Data Protection Regulation in the United Kingdom. Steve Wu spoke about the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative executive order that President Donald Trump was expected to sign today.

To listen to the podcast or download a copy, please click here.

Stephen Wu’s practice includes compliance, transactions, liability, investigation, and governance in advanced information technologies such as artificial intelligence He collaborates with lawyers in other member firms of the International Network of Boutique and Independent Law Firms’ in a global GDPR working group. For assistance on GDPR, GDPR compliance program, or artificial intelligence matters, please contact Stephen Wu by completing the web form here.

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Investigations Webinar

January 31, 2019 | Silicon Valley Law Group

SVLG Shareholder Stephen Wu will host a webinar on February 27, 2019. at 10 am Pacific/1 pm Eastern. The presenter for this webinar is Attorney Paul Starrett. The program is entitled “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Investigations.”

SVLG regularly hosts Meetups of the American Bar Association Section of Science & Technology Law’s Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Committee. The Committee offers Meetup programs as a member benefit.

During the program, Paul Starrett, EnCE, CFE, an attorney and private investigator specializing in high-profile investigations, will discuss applying machine learning to investigations. More specifically, he will focus on the synergy among machine-learning tools found in information retrieval, natural-language processing and graph databases. He will also talk about how that synergy provides an efficient means to reveal vital insights. Without such insights, those insights might be lost.

Connected Car Security Vulnerabilities – Part 1

October 31, 2018 | Stephen S. Wu

The Internet of Things connects machines to other machines in a wide variety of fields and industries. In our digital lives, we are connecting devices to our networks at work and at home. In addition to work and home, however, we spend much of our waking time in transit from one place to another, often in our private automobiles. The Internet of Things is extending our digital lives to our cars, trucks, and other road vehicles. With this new integration comes privacy, security, and other legal issues.

A 2015 episode of the CBS television show “60 Minutes” vividly illustrates what can happen when we connect cars with information technology networks. In the show, reporter Lesley Stahl sat behind the wheel of a nondescript dark gray sedan while driving through a tree-lined suburban parking lot. She appeared on a 60 Minutes segment aired on February 8, 2015. In the driver’s seat next to her was Kathleen Fisher, a veteran of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or “DARPA” for short. As Stahl navigated one end of the cleared parking lot, two men stood at the other end – Karl Koscher, a University of Washington Ph.D. student, and Dan Kaufman, who was then Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office. Koscher used a laptop sitting on black boxes of what appeared to be equipment, while Kaufman provided instructions.

Kaufman told Koscher, “You wanna hit the fluids?” Koscher typed something on the laptop and suddenly the windshield wiper fluid sprayed onto the windshield on Stahl’s car and the wipers started moving back and forth. Stahl said “I did nothing” to turn on the spray. And yet, without Stahl doing anything, Koscher had taken control of the wipers and fluid. In a cut-away scene, Stahl explained that hackers had contacted the car’s emergency communications system, flooded it with sound data, and inserted a piece of code, which reprogrammed the car’s software so the researchers could take complete remote control of the car. Further demonstrating this control, Koscher caused the horn to sound, again without Stahl’s knowledge or action.

Cosmopolitan Catering joins Compass Group USA

April 5, 2018 | Silicon Valley Law Group

Silicon Valley Law Group, through corporate attorneys Bernard Vogel and Bill Bretschneider, advised Cosmopolitan Catering, LLC (See www.cosmocaters.com), Silicon Valley’s premier full-service corporate catering and café management company, in connection with its acquisition by Compass Group USA, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of United Kingdom based Compass Group PLC, a global leader in contract foodservice and hospitality. See www.compass-usa.com. Congratulations to Cosmopolitan Catering’s owners, Rick Angelini and Jake Caputo, on their joining the Compass Group USA family of companies. We thoroughly enjoyed working with, and appreciated the levelheaded professionalism of the professional members of the Compass Group USA team.

Please contact Bernard Vogel if you would like more information about how SVLG’s corporate transactions team can help your business.

Legal Help for Your ISO 27001 Audit

February 19, 2018 | Stephen S. Wu

The ISO 27001 standard[1] is a specification for managing an information security program in an organization. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) developed and maintains this standard. Worldwide, ISO 27001 has become the most popular standard for managing information security programs, and many organizations have received a certification that their information security management system complies with the standard.

When companies obtain an ISO 27001 audit, they usually envision working with auditors to complete the project using operational, management, information security, and internal audit teams within the organization. What they may find surprising is that the ISO 27001 framework contains a number of legal topics, and the input of the legal team is vital as well. Some organizations may consult legal counsel about these topics, but I believe most organizations try to address these topics without legal help or use “off the shelf” documentation offered as samples from their auditors.

Writing documentation without the help of legal counsel creates risk for the organization. In the event of a security breach, for instance, government or plaintiff’s lawyers will ask for, and be entitled to examine, the “off the shelf” policies and procedures adopted by the company. If the policies and procedures were never implemented properly, these lawyers would point to the lack of adoption as evidence of knowing failure to implement security practices properly. If the policies and procedures are inconsistent with actual security practice, the inconsistency will make the company look lax in its security practices.

GDPR: Long Arm of EU Law in the U.S.

February 11, 2018 | Stephen S. Wu

In my first blog post on GDPR, I talked about why some U.S. businesses have an obligation to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This post expands on the territorial scope of GDPR. Which U.S. businesses have to comply with GDPR and which don’t?

Starting first with GDPR’s direct coverage, GDPR talks about businesses established in the EU. If a business has a division or office in the EU, then it has activities covered by GDPR. Also, if a business offers goods or services in the EU (even if free), the business must comply with GDPR. In addition, if a business is monitoring the behavior of EU residents, GDPR applies. Finally, if EU law applies because of public international law, then GDPR applies there as well. This last basis will not affect most U.S. businesses. These bases for GDPR’s coverage all appear in GDPR Article 3.

In addition to direct coverage, a U.S. business may have compliance obligations indirectly because it is processing data on behalf of a company that is covered by GDPR. The customer may be a controller collecting personal data from EU residents or may itself be a data processor receiving data from a controller covered by GDPR. In either case, a controller and any downstream processor have an obligation to protect personal data collected from EU residents. They will need to make sure any U.S. businesses providing data processing services meet the standards of the kind imposed by GDPR through an agreement or other mechanism. The two most common mechanisms are “standard contractual clauses” – essentially an addendum to a service agreement that impose data protection requirements – or a U.S. business’s self-certification under the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield program of the U.S. Department of Commerce. A U.S. business providing services for a European controller or processor can import EU personal data to the U.S. if it provides assurances of an adequate level of protection under either of these two mechanisms. These U.S. businesses, then, have an indirect obligation to comply with GDPR standards.

Six Steps Towards GDPR (and Other Data Protection) Compliance

February 2, 2018 | Stephen S. Wu

This is my third blog post on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For basic information about GDPR and why U.S. businesses need to watch out for GDPR, see my first blog post in the series. Or to see what GDPR says about information security requirements, see my second post.

What is the first thing your business should do in taking steps towards GDPR compliance? The short answer is you should assess your current privacy and security program.

More specifically, you will need to understand your organization, its business context, its culture, and the types of personal data it processes. You will need to understand in a detailed way what kinds of personal data the business is collecting and receiving, how it uses personal data, its practices in sharing and transmitting personal data, its retention of personal data, and its disposal of personal data. Your business should understand its entire personal data lifecycle and where personal data flow through your business’s systems. You need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your current data protection program. Once you have made this assessment, you can plan future steps to enhance the data protection function within your business. You can then assess its effectiveness and make improvements.