“Machines are increasingly a form of intelligence approaching a biological level of complexity,” she said. Tufekci, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, New York Times contributor, and Berkman Center Fellow at Harvard, among other things, is a self-proclaimed “techno-sociologist.” Originally from Turkey, she got her start as a computer programmer. Tufekci soon realized the major implications of computers on our lives and has devoted her career to studying the intersection of technology and society.

Source: It’s time to become aware of how machines ‘watch, judge, and nudge us,’ says Zeynep Tufekci – TechRepublic

“A good Librarian of Congress would have gotten us to a national digitization strategy, and built consensus around it, years before Google came on the scene,” says University of Maryland law professor James Grimmelmann, who has studied the case extensively. “We could have had a much more constructive last decade.” With Isaacson out of contention, other names still circulating include those with technological bents: University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, who has embraced “innovation” as one of the three pillars of the school’s future; John Palfrey, a former director of Harvard’s Berkman Center on Internet and Society now bringing digital learning to Phillips Academy as its head of school;

Source: Library of Congress: Can the LOC be saved? – POLITICO Magazine

“Dangerous speech has preceded episodes of terrible intergroup violence, over and over in many different contexts,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Source: This Algorithm Could Show When the Next Genocide Is About to Happen | Motherboard

Bruce Schneier, fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and author of “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World”: “I think it’s posturing. It’s basically the same thing that the U.S. says, and the U.S. hacks foreign government and corporate networks all the time. The problem is that there aren’t any laws that protect foreign networks, and there aren’t any relevant international treaties that limit commercial espionage. So I wouldn’t expect China to be any less aggressive on the Internet than the U.S. is.”

Source: U.S. and China agree not to spy on each other in cyberspace, but experts say ‘promises don’t get us very far’ | National Post

A new tool from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University provides users with a snapshot of threats, news chatter, and activity taking place on the Internet at any given time.Launching for free on Monday, the Internet Activity Monitor is a real-time dashboard tracking blackouts, news hits, Internet speeds, and outages across the world.

Source: Harvard’s Internet Monitor tracks web traffic and outages across the globe | BetaBoston

“One of the crucial insights from the research is that toxic behavior doesn’t necessarily come from terrible people; it comes from regular people having a bad day,” says Justin Reich, a research scientist from Harvard’s Berkman Center, who has been studying Riot’s work. “That means that our strategies to address toxic behavior online can’t be targeted just at hardened trolls; they need to account for our collective human tendency to allow the worst of ourselves to emerge under the anonymity of the Internet.”

Source: Using Artificial Intelligence to Police the Bullies on League of Legends | MIT Technology Review

Marvin Ammori, Susan Crawford, Tim Wu Legal scholars, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia universities The open-Internet brigade.

Source: Marvin Ammori & Susan Crawford & Tim Wu – The POLITICO 50: Ideas changing politics and the people behind them – POLITICO Magazine

Susan Benesch is the Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and Director of the Dangerous Speech Project, where she has a built a framework to identify dangerous speech and diminish its violent effects, while upholding freedom of expression. In India for a public lecture and to begin work on a three-year study, she spoke to Rukmini S. about the Internet as a means to disseminate dangerous speech content. Excerpts:

Source: ‘I’m sceptical of law enforcement’, says Susan Benesch – The Hindu

Security experts, however, believe this could cause trouble. There are a lot of unanswered questions around these “always listening” devices that have yet to be answered, such as how they can use the data, who they can share it with, and whether or not they’re using the data for alternative purposes.”[The license agreements] have an extraordinarily wide latitude,” Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law, said to Business Insider. “And that’s a huge worry.”

Source: New Apple TV with Siri may be bad for privacy – Business Insider

Bruce Schneier is a well known cybersecurity author and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He agrees with the premise that the government is well positioned to spur cybersecurity innovations and believes it should. “There’s a lot of room for governments to step in and solve problems the markets can’t,” he said.

Source: Report: What is the U.S. Government’s Role in Cybersecurity?