Enlarge / Cyrus Farivar will talk about the history of tech law, and Annalee Newitz will speculate about where these laws lead us in the future.

Tech history is an endless tug-of-war between new innovations and old laws. But behind this legal machine are often bizarre court cases full of petty criminals, old-fashioned gumshoe detectives, and… robots who want civil rights.

In a very unusual Ars Technica Live event on June 13 in Oakland, your co-hosts Cyrus Farivar and Annalee Newitz will discuss their recent books about the people whose lives (and deaths) become test cases for new tech laws that govern millions of others.

Farivar, one of Ars’ tech-policy reporters, is the author of Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech, a book that explores 10 historic court decisions that defined our privacy rights and matched them against the capabilities of modern technology. There’s the 1960s prosecution of a gambler that established the “reasonable expectation of privacy” in nonpublic places beyond your home. Then there’s the 1970s case where police monitored an obscene phone caller, which led to the legal decision that formed the linchpin of the NSA’s controversial metadata tracking program revealed by Edward Snowden. And what about that time when a 2010 low-level robbery revealed that police had tracked a defendant’s past 12,898 locations before arrest? That’s just the tip of the digital iceberg.