Asked in court about something you are not allowed to answer Say you own a company in the USA that offers services via the internet. I read that in some situations, you are required to give personal data of a user to the US government and you are not allowed to tell anyone. Now what happens if you are witness in a trial and questioned about this? If you say you never gave user data to the government, you lie. If you say you are not allowed to answer, then it is clear that you did. Or is such a question inadmissible in the first place?
National security letters can compel the production of some kinds of (non-&quot;content&quot;) user data, and (according to Wikipedia) typically contain a nondisclosure requirement forbidding the recipient of the letter from disclosing it. I assume that a witness has received and complied with a national security letter, and a non-government party wants to ask the witness questions which outside the courtroom, the witness would be forbidden to answer by the national security letter. The witness, or the government if represented in the lawsuit in question, may object to the questions. The purpose which justifies the secrecy requirements of a national security letter is also likely to justify the exercise of state secrets privilege. If the judge thinks a statute might otherwise be violated, they might intervene in the absence of any objection, or consider alternative remedies like an in camera hearing. If the court does not intervene to prevent the evidence being given, and the witness is charged with breaching the secrecy law, this would raise complex questions about the interpretation of the law imposing criminal penalties. The common law doctrine of absolute privilege for witnesses giving evidence in judicial proceedings applies in the United States, and could be raised in defence to any criminal charges.
No Voluntary disclosure, even accidental, by the client ends privilege. The information may still be confidential (inadmissible) if it happened in the appropriate circumstances, for example, as part of a mediation. Edit A recent decision of the High Court of Australia has determined that a litigant can use material that comes into its possession that would have attracted privilege irrespective of how this happens. In that case, the law firm was hacked by an unknown party, the information was given to a journalist and published and the litigant wanted to use it in their case - they were allowed to do so. The court decided that privilege is not a legal right that could found a course of action. Basically, it only prevents the compulsory production of such information - it doesn't protect the information itself.
The court should not compel the witness to disclose the information because there is a state secrets privilege which bars disclosure of governmental secrets in litigation. An interlocutory appeal of some sort would generally be permitted in cases where the privilege is not honored, and typically, the federal government would become an intervenor in the litigation with respect to that issue. Not infrequently, the state secrets privilege will prevent a matter from being litigated at all, rather than merely preventing the admission of evidence, or requiring that the matter be resolved in a sealed secret bench trial. For example, spies cannot sue the government for not being paid for spying as a result of the state secrets privilege. Similarly, someone who suffers a personal injury arising from a covert operation can not sue the government for that injury.
Your VPN scenario is why you have to show the banner to everyone. If you somehow knew beyond any doubt that someone was not in the EU, then you would not have to show a banner, but because you can't verify that, you should always show the banner. Doing so also protects against accidentally violating a similar law in another country; the GDPR is the best-known privacy law, but it is far from the only one. It's good practice to ask for people's permission before collecting their information anyway.
Generally they don't. If the conversation was made while there was a third person present, the person can be a witness at trial. Unless the witness is impeached, the witness's statement may be sufficient for you to meet your burden of proof to show the statement was made, because the burden is just a preponderance of evidence in most civil cases. Note that, the existence of a statement is not sufficient to prove breach of privacy. The context surrounding the statement is important. If you intend to record communications from the landlord in the future, please check with your jurisdiction's laws regarding recording of communications. Many jurisdictions (such as California) only permit a private communication to be recorded when all parties give consent. Not only an illegally recorded conversation is inadmissible as evidence (with the exception to rebut a witness), it is also a crime to do so. Some other jurisdictions in USA allows one party to record the conversation without obtaining consent from the other party.
Caution: I am not a lawyer. It depends on who is doing the collecting and storing. If it is done "by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity", then it is exempt from the GDPR, as per Art. 2. Beware, however, that "purely personal activity" means that you do not share or publish them. In this court case, having the name or phone number of someone else on your "personal" website constitutes "processing of personal data wholly or partly by automatic means within the meaning of Article 3(1) of Directive 95/46".
Attorney-client privilege is normally waived if a privileged communication is voluntarily disclosed. Submission of an attorney-client privileged document to a judge to review in camera does not waive the attorney-client privilege. Most of the case law involves inadvertent "oops" style disclosures of attorney-client privileged documents (keep in mind that big lawsuits often involve exchanges of terabytes of data that have to be reviewed page by page for attorney-client privileged materials by armies of junior lawyers and paralegals, so mistakes are inevitably made now and then), which is a somewhat convoluted area of law. Basically, if it is caught soon enough, the person accidentally receiving it can be ordered to not look at it any more and to destroy it without keeping copies if it remains within an accidental recipient law firm or government agency's possession and has not been further disseminated into public records yet. In particular, such documents can't be presented as evidence at trial if the mistake is caught before it is too late to correct the mistake. In those cases, the legal system does its best to pretend that the mistaken disclosure of attorney-client privileged materials never happened.
Defamation requires communication to a third-party I can say (or write) anything I want about a person directly to that person and, unless it is a threat, they have no recourse at all. I can call them a liar, a thief, a Nazi, or a goat fornicator. Of course, I have to be careful – calling them a “bastard” might be a slur on their mother communicated to a third-party (them) which would give her a right to sue although that would require a literal and largely archaic use of the term. That said, you do need to check with your lawyer if you can redact names in the face of a subpoena - complying with a legal obligations is a legitimate use of personal data under GDPR.