In a recent report published by Havard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a team of experts pointed out that some powerful trends will continue to “facilitate government access” to personal information.

Source: Lessons from Apple vs. the F.B.I. – The New Yorker

“Apple may never discover the vulnerability, and the government is not compelled to disclose it either,” says David O’Brien, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

Source: Don’t Expect The FBI To Tell Apple How It Broke Into That iPhone | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

“Courts look very unfavorably in circumstances where the government forces a private citizen or an organization perhaps to speak, to say something—especially if it [is] a view that they don’t side with,” said David O’Brien, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, in Forbes.

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“The goal is to make the documents so modular that much of the text disappears, leaving parties with only specific deal points and clear relationships,” according to Primavera de Filippi, a research fellow at Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “These relationships can be ‘rendered’ at any time into full legal documents, for verification and enforcement.”

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With the withdrawal of the San Bernardino case, no resolution is possible and it’s going to take time for the government to have such a strong case again, said David O’Brien, a senior researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Source: 1,000 locked devices in limbo after FBI quits iPhone case

Much of Silicon Valley’s dream work “is not really clearly governed by any well-defined existing bodies of law,” says Vivek Krishnamurthy, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw clinic.

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They create “points of control” in what used to be largely an “open system”, as Yochai Benkler of Harvard University puts it in a recent article in Daedalus, an American journal.

Source: The data republic | The Economist

“The security of a product used by so many people – including and especially Americans – is part of national security,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard Law School. “While it is appropriate for law enforcement, with a warrant, to use a security flaw to gain access to which it is legally entitled, the flaw should be patched as soon as possible for everyone else’s sake.”

Source: Influencers: FBI should disclose San Bernardino iPhone security hole to Apple – CSMonitor.com

As to the plan itself, the US government has selected Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society to carry out an assessment of it and report back. A contract shows the Center being engaged for five months to do the job.

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The forum was hosted by Healey’s office, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Internet Policy Research Initiative at MIT and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Source: At MIT, Mass. AG talks dangers, opportunities of big data – Boston Business Journal