MediaBerkman

What does talk of cyber war mean for our liberties? The United States has a new military command for cyberspace, with the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) as its commander. At the same time, the Secretary of State has announced that the “freedom to connect” is an aspect of fundamental human rights and has criticized countries that attempt to filter the Internet. Computer networks remain insecure, as sensitive data is leaked or stolen at increasing rates.

In this talk, Timothy H. Edgar — visiting fellow at the Watson Institute and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center — examines the legal powers available to addressing network and computer insecurity and their impact on privacy, civil liberties, and other fundamental values.

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For decades, policymakers and futurists have heralded digital tools as essential to the the future of learning. Has the moment of disruptive transformational revolution finally arrived? If we are at a watershed moment, what futures are available to us?

Justin Reich — visiting lecturer at MIT, Berkman fellow, and educational researcher — discusses the intersection of technology, free-market ideology, and media hype in U.S. education reform.

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UPDATE: a bevy of notes, slides, and tweets from this event

In order to secure our future, we need to know how to organize our past. If we want to preserve accessibility to valuable information about legal, political, social, and cultural discourses in an era of information abundance, it becomes vital to design carefully how we distinguish between noise and significant pieces of information. In this talk, Daniel J. Caron — Librarian and Archivist of Canada — and Eric Mechoulan — professor at the Université de Montréal — discuss the challenge and opportunities for archiving in the digital age.

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Companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook are thought to provide some of the most envied work environments on the planet. But should employees be worried that their trust in their employer, so purposefully cultivated, has been built on promises that are more illusion than enforceable promise?

Some in the labor movement think these employers create nothing more than a mirage, that like the now-prohibited company unions of the past, these employers work to ensure workers feel a sense of ownership and voice but, when push comes to shove, have nothing the company cannot just as easily take away. Others, including many who work at these companies, disagree. In this talk, Heather Whitney — Berkman fellow, Harvard J.D. candidate, and former Google Global Ethics and Compliance employee — outlines the debate and tries to make headway towards some answers.

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SOPA, CISPA, CFAA, DMCA, mobile phone unlocking — how can a complacent Congress address real and systemic problems related to technology and antiquated legislation? In this talk, Derek Khanna — Yale Law Fellow with the Information Society Project and former House Republican Study Committee staffer (where he authored the widely read House Republican Study Committee report “Three Myths about Copyright Law”) — presents a strategy for re-framing the policy questions, winning small battles, and developing a working coalition to achieve positive technology policy reforms in Congress.

Find out more about Derek’s work on Twitter and Facebook.

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How does the Internet affect power? How does power affect the Internet?

Factors such as ubiquitous surveillance, the rise of cyberwar, ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, and a feudal model of security collide to create a circumstance in which those in power are using information technology to increase their power, at the expense of users.

Bruce Schneier—renowned security technologist and author—discusses these issues and more with the Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain.

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In the past decade, we’ve seen an unprecedented rise of powerful social networks, connecting millions or even billions of people who can now communicate almost instantaneously. But many of the promises that were made by the creators of the earliest social networking technologies have gone unfulfilled. In this talk, Anil Dash—entrepreneur, technologist, and writer—takes a look at some of the unexamined costs, both cultural and social, of the way the web has evolved.

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David Weinberger liveblogged this talk.

Once, personal technology and the Internet meant that we didn’t need permission to compute, communicate and innovate. Now, governments and tech companies are systematically restricting our liberties, and creating an online surveillance state. In many cases, however, we’re letting it happen, by trading freedom for convenience and (often the illusion of) security. In this talk, Dan Gillmor—a founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication—suggests steps we can take as individuals to be more secure and free, and to take back the permissions we’re losing.

An outline of his talk can be found here.

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5.9 billion people now use mobile phones, of which 1.1 billion are smartphones. With this kind of penetration smartphones will empower behavioral scientists to collect terabytes of ecologically valid data from vast global samples—easily, quickly, and remotely, transforming the behavioral sciences even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did. Smartphones can record where people are, what they are doing, and what they can see and hear. They can run interactive surveys, tests, and experiments through touch screens and Bluetooth peripherals.

Geoffrey Miller—Visiting Professor at the NYU Stern Business School—discusses what smartphones can do now, and will be able to do in the near future, as research platforms, and the new opportunities for understanding human nature and culture.

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The power of big data—analyzing huge swaths of information to uncover insights and make predictions that were largely impossible in the past—is poised to transform business and society. Yet there is a dark side. Privacy is eroded like never before. And a new harm emerges: predictions about human behavior that may result in penalties prior to actual the infraction being committed. In this talk Viktor Mayer-Schönberger—Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford—and Kenneth Neil Cukier—Data Editor of The Economist—take a look at big data’s power, the dangers it poses and how to address them.

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