The Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Yochai Benkler ’94 has written extensively on the “networked public sphere,” including his influential book, “The Wealth of Networks.” He spoke about his proposal for a defense of whistleblowers, his testimony in a trial of a well-known leaker of military documents, and a problem he calls a growing crisis in the country.

Source: Yochai Benkler on whistleblowers, the news ecosystem and self-organizing in the commons – Harvard Law Today

“The lack of that data had a significant effect on how people viewed the law enforcement system in this country, how do you hold that system accountable if you don’t know what it’s doing?” said Clarence Wardell, a Presidential Innovation Fellow and affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Source: How sharing police data can improve relationships with communities – CSMonitor.com

Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer who is a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and chief technology officer at the security firm Resilient Systems, said the Paris attacks may be used “to scare people” to weaken encryption. Schneier said leaked emails from September suggest that the US administration would seek to use a terror attack to get more public support for surveillance.

Source: Paris Attacks Revive Debate on Encryption, Surveillance | NDTV Gadgets360.com

Over the past year we have been working with some of Europe’s leading digital experts to identify areas where an inducement prize would be useful in stimulating new ideas from a wide-pool of innovators. We asked Primavera De Filippi from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard to write about peer-to-peer technology for social good.

Source: Digital Europe: Peer-to-peer technology for social good | Nesta

It’s also a matter of fairness, some said. “If data is indeed being misused, there should be a remedy. What the question doesn’t ask is what should count as misuse. But there’s no reason to offer differing protections here based on the citizenship of the person whose data a company is handling,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor. “And protection irrespective of country of origin is not only the right thing to do.  It also gives US companies an important competitive advantage.”

Source: Influencers: Europeans should be able to sue over data misuse in US – CSMonitor.com

“Email is the last great unowned technology,” said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in the first episode of Codebreaker, “and by unowned I mean there is no CEO of email… it’s just a shared hallucination that works.”

Source: Kill the Email – The Atlantic

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is a multistakeholder forum for policy dialogue on issues of Internet governance. This year is the 10th annual meeting, and it’s being held in João Pessoa, Brazil, Nov. 10-13. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is thrilled to be an active participant in key discussions about some of the most pressing, complex, and exciting issues facing our increasingly networked world.The full schedule of sessions is here.

Source: The Berkman Center at the Internet Governance Forum 2015 | Harvard Gazette

Offering a rare look at the activity of Chinese internet users on Twitter that is largely unregulated by the state and only reachable through the use of tools that circumvent state-mandated internet filters, the report found that Chinese internet users – activists, journalists and others – are actively circumventing content restrictions.

“In this paper, we map and analyse the structure and content found on Twitter centered around users in mainland China,” said the team of Sonya Yan Song, Robert Faris and John Kelly from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Source: Chinese activists, scribes jumping firewall to use Twitter

Schnapp, professor of Romance languages and literature at GSD, director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, and director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, explained: “All of us are striving to make this project not just about renovating and upgrading a library of key importance to the Science Center, in a key building on campus, but also to make it a state-of-the-art library that really attempts to implement new functions, new kinds of spaces, new kinds of opportunities to really begin to answer the question of what a library is and what a library could be in the 21st century.”

Source: A revitalized Science Center | Harvard Gazette

The project, now called Lumen, was launched in 2001 under the name Chilling Effects. It was a response to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal law that allowed companies, governments, and people to request that Internet companies take down any material that was infringing on their copyright.By keeping a record of takedown requests, the site would “allow people to see what kinds of requests were being made, who was making them, what kind of content we were talking about,” said Christopher Bavitz, a co-director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society which hosts the project.

Source: ‘Lumen’ and its international partners will track takedown requests | BetaBoston