Cornell Law Review Volume 99 Article 1 Issue 5 July 2014 Digital Innocence Joshua A. T. Fairfield Erik Luna Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Joshua A. T. Fairfield and Erik Luna, Digital Innocence, 99 Cornell L. Rev. 981 (2014) Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol99/iss5/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. \\jciprod01\productn\C\CRN\99-5\CRN501.txt unknown Seq: 1 21-JUL-14 12:02 DIGITAL INNOCENCE Joshua A.T. Fairfield† & Erik Luna†† Recent revelations have shown that almost all online activity and in- creasing amounts of offline activity are tracked using Big Data and data mining technologies. The ensuing debate has largely failed to consider an important consequence of mass surveillance: the obligation to provide access to information that might exonerate a criminal defendant. Although infor- mation technology can establish innocence—an ability that will only im- prove with technological advance—the fruits of mass surveillance have been used almost exclusively to convict. To address the imbalance and inform public dialogue, this Article develops the concept of “digital innocence” as a means of leveraging the tools of Big Data, data mining, ubiquitous con- sumer tracking, and digital forensics to prevent wrongful convictions and to provide hard proof of actual innocence for those already convicted.