Jonathan Zittrain, law professor and co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talks about body-worn cameras and how technology might change the relationship between police officers and communities.
via Marketplace Tech for Friday, December 5, 2014 | Marketplace.org.
It’s rare in the world of tech or politics when gurus go back and remind us of their early predictions and then admit how wrong they were. So Micah Sifry’s book, “The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet),“ is a refreshing read. In it, he looks back to 2004 and revisits all the exciting, optimistic things people were saying about how the Web would change politics. His big reveal: It just hasn’t happened.
Sifry was at the Harvard Berkman Center this week to talk about his book and give us a less euphoric, but still optimistic view of how technology and politics will support us in the future.
via Technology has yet to transform democracy — but change is coming | BetaBoston.
“The options for getting facts and personal information removed once it’s been posted online in the U.S. are fairly limited,” says Christopher T. Bavitz, managing director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. “It’s very challenging to regulate the spread of this kind of information, but it’s challenging for very good reasons. The first good reason is the First Amendment.”
via Regaining control of your online data | Marketplace.org.
Not everyone agrees, though. The group is focused on disrupting the flow of information from al-Sisi’s opponents, but also on trying to compromise them and expose anonymous online activists to identify them and facilitate their arrest, according to Helmi Noman, a researcher with the Berkman Center at Harvard University and the Ciizen Lab at University of Toronto.”They should be taken seriously because of the potential [harm] their attacks can cause, even if they use low level skills such as phishing,” he told Mashable.
via Egyptian Cyber Army: The hacker group attacking ISIS propaganda online.
This all points to a new normal for the way global Internet companies operate in Europe. Indeed, says Adam Holland, project coordinator at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the right to be forgotten reflects starkly different notions of privacy in Europe and the US.
“In the US, we value freedom of speech and freedom of info more highly than necessarily moral rights to that information,” says Mr. Holland. “It is a moral issue, not necessarily a legislative issue. The EU places a higher precedent on the rights of the person.”
via Google loses ground in fight against Europe’s ‘right to be forgotten’ – CSMonitor.com.
However, the ultimate irony is that in policing morality on the web, Chinese censors would be pushing citizens toward opportunities to communicate outside government controls. According to Rob Faris of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, unmonitored social networks are Beijing’s greatest fear. Beijing thus might not want to fully implement the censors’ guidelines. But that would force the government to backpedal and confront whatever clique has been pushing to curb titillation. As Mr. Faris notes, “Once you’ve put in the structures and systems for censoring the Internet, it’s vulnerable to the whims of people in power.”
Such transgressions have got Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, thinking about how to ensure that data are protected for the promised time period. Among other concerns, he worries for philanthropic donations of papers or personal effects to libraries and the like. Often, such donations are made with a proviso that they not be revealed for a fixed period of time. “That type of donation will not happen if their stuff is only one subpoena away from disclosure,” he says.
An exhaustive 2009 roundup by researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society found the 38 multi-country economic studies of broadband regulation and investment they looked at to be hopelessly split between positive, negative, and inconclusive results. The Berkman researchers also argued that we shouldn’t pay too much heed to the economists because (1) a lot of the studies were sponsored by broadband incumbents, (2) there simply isn’t enough data yet for the empirical surveys to be trusted, and (3) different theoretical models of broadband investment deliver dramatically different results.
Twitter publicly discloses all removal and information requests from government agencies, at home and abroad, and posts them on the website Chilling Effects, a research and transparency database project of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
via Twitter Is Not at War With ISIS. Here’s Why. | Mother Jones.
Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard, on free speech, privacy, and the long reach of the technology behemoths
Jonathan Zittrain is a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who examines issues of privacy and fairness in the digital world. He is co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society and of Chilling Effects, a clearinghouse for cease-and-desist letters ordering the takedown of certain information on the Web. Author of “The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It,” published in 2008, Zittrain recently addressed the current class of Nieman Fellows. Excerpts from the talk and the question-and-answer session that followed: