Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

This book talk features Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a co-author of the recently published book Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil. The book explores how reframing some of the world's most challenging problems, particularly when it comes to technology, can create new opportunities and better outcomes for humans to not just survive but thrive in a world increasingly dominated by technology. Joining Viktor as discussants are Malavika Jayaram, the Executive Director of Digital Asia Hub, and Sabelo Mhlambi, founder of Bantucracy, who provide their own insights about the book.

The global information economy has provided freedom-enhancing affordances for previously marginalized groups, but has also enabled extractive practices in the form of digital imperialism, or as others term it, data colonialism. For so-called “periphery” countries such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, the information economy represents an opportunity to chase the long-elusive quest for industrialization, now dubbed “digital industrialization”, “digital development” or “data for development.” Despite the optimism represented in the digital development policy discourse, the limits and potentials of any kind of development are heavily constrained by background conditions rooted in past global power imbalances and a colonial legacy of non-contextual laws and institutions. This panel examines questions of unequal power in the global digital economy (through U.S corporations, China, and Brussels (i.e. dominance through legal rules), and the ways in which this manifests itself in developing countries in Africa.

Even before the storming of the US Capitol, mistrust in institutions like the press and the federal government was challenging the civic fabric of America. In Ethan Zuckerman's new book, "Mistrust", he explores the deep roots of this mistrustful moment and examines ways individuals can make social change whether or not they have faith in institutions. In conversation with legal scholar and human rights expert Martha Minow, the discussion considers how movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too are forcing changes in institutions that may lead to rebuilding trust.

Governments around the world failed to contain COVID-19, with more than 3.2 million deaths and counting. Even before the pandemic, the United States was questioning its commitments to global health, its leadership role, and a system of progressive prices for medicines whereby the rich pay more to subsidize access for the poor. The pandemic is far from over: cases are surging today in India, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Poland, Ukraine. Now, with the unprecedented pace of effective vaccine development and a new Administration in Washington, the US is called upon to lead again.

Beth Cameron (US National Security Council) and Loyce Pace (US Department of Health and Human Services) discuss plans to restore US leadership for global health.

Can humanitarian actors play a more intentional role in designing just and equitable digital futures? Could we, in fact, design worlds that don't imagine some figures, particularly populations that we serve in the global south, to merely be passive beneficiaries and outside of the borders of expertise we seek? Instead of looking at digital governance in terms of control, weaving in feminist and decolonial approaches might help liberate our digital futures so that it is a space of safety and of humanity, and through this design new forms of digital humanism.

Anasuya Sengupta, Sabelo Mhlambi, Andrew Zolli, and Aarathi Krishnan discuss how humanitarian actors can play a more intentional role in designing just and equitable digital futures.

The past few years have highlighted the range of problems that social media seems to amplify: harassment, hate speech, hoaxes, violent extremism, and more. Through traditional governing and research spaces (i.e., governments, academia, NGOs, and corporations), the default response is a focus on content moderation. However, this talk by Sahar Massachi, with Kathy Pham as a respondent, explores what it might be like to think about social media as a city. In this model, how can we rethink our approaches to these issues besides hiring more police to react to the problem? The conversation explores the use of integrity design to more meaningfully consider the underlying structures and how to more holistically address them.

What would the Internet look like if it was designed by sex workers? Taking a sex worker lens to tech ethics envisions a radically different online space. Sex workers hold unique insights into the real world impacts of platform capitalism, carceral politics, digital surveillance, and sexual gentrification. Yet sex workers face significant structural barriers to inclusion in both tech and academic spaces. This panel elevates sex worker expertise and offers new ways for regulators, ethicists, policy-makers, and technologists to think about community standards, technologies of violence, data privacy, online safety, and virtual intimacies, and explores how we might code sex worker ethics into future design.

In the first pandemic of the datafied society, the disempowered were denied a voice in the heavily quantified mainstream narrative. Diego Cerna Aragón, Shyam Krishna, Silvia Masiero, Stefania Milan, Irene Poetranto, and Emiliano Treré invited participants to explore the pandemic from the perspective of communities and individuals at the margins in the Global South and beyond. It introduces the editorial project of the same title.

Learn more: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/covid-19-margins

Since the federal stimulus bill has been signed, one of our nation’s major goals is to safely and rapidly reopen schools using funds allocated to State Departments of Education. This session focuses on some of the more complicated response measures necessary to make schools COVID-safe environments as they reopen: improving indoor ventilation and air quality and rolling out screening testing for staff and students. Implementation experts discuss how to tackle these complex issues in this session, co-hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

We are still in the early days of the Internet, but there is a growing sense that it's creating more problems than it’s solving. This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when we shared an overriding optimism in the Internet's capacity to make the world a better place.

Creator platforms and social media platforms saw us migrate our social lives to the Internet. While allowing us to share and interact with people we never could have before, it also fragmented our experiences and relationships. There's an endless list of unintended consequences.

Today's platforms were inspired by the many that preceded them — but along the way, we started to go astray. How can we make sense of where we are today? What can we understand about the decisions that were made and the structures we had in place? And, most importantly, how can the builders of new platforms that also intend to "bring the world closer together", "give everyone the power to create" or "organize the world's information" do it better?

Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr, David Bohnett, founder of Geocities, and Nancy Baym, Sr. Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research, reflect on the current state of creator platforms and social media as part of a long lineage and series of decisions that have made the Internet what it is today and discuss what today's builders should consider in the next iteration of the web. This conversation is moderated by BKC fellow Jad Esber.

Hannane Ferdjani, Nana Mgbechikwere Nwachukwu, and Dr. Allissa Richardson explore how young Black people around the world are utilizing tech tools to track and circumvent oppressive policies by repressive governments. The conversation includes how Black people of Nigeria, Uganda, and the United States are leveraging social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Clubhouse for artistic expressions on political and social issues in their countries. The panel also considers how young digital activists highlight the importance and place of the digital civic space to rights and freedoms offline. Finally, the discussion will address some of the limitations of digital tools in holding repressive governments and institutional bodies accountable. This event was moderated by Ellery Roberts Biddle.

People who have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, or have become infected with it, need to quarantine or isolate from others so that they don’t spread the disease to others. However, staying away from others for weeks at a time is difficult for many people. This seminar addresses how US state and local public health leaders can better organize wraparound services so people can successfully complete periods of isolation or quarantine. Specifically, it will cover the types of services typically needed, how to organize support programs, how to budget for them, and the costs of inaction.

The seminar was co-hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the National Governors Association, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

The seminar addresses:
- How quarantine and isolation practices can help stem the COVID crisis
- What services people need in order to successfully complete periods of quarantine and isolation
- How providing services to people in quarantine and isolation can address inequities in COVID response
- What types of quarantine and isolation support programs already exist and what we have learned from them
Estimating the costs of wraparound quarantine and isolation services programs versus the costs of inaction.

Increasingly, marginalized women are opting against calling the police in response to intimate partner violence (IPV). Many report going to faith communities and online platforms to seek help — especially since COVID-19 policies were implemented. This event brings together practitioners and experts in law, psychology, technology, religion, communication, and ethics to discuss the concerns specific to intimate partner violence. Is there potential for a public sphere online that can assist victims in surviving their unique suffering?

Dr. Apryl A. Williams and Dr. Allissa V. Richardson address the long-standing history of White vigilante-style surveillance of Black people in public spaces, exploring the role of White women in extending the power of the state to surveil and regulate the movement of Black people in public – tying in Karen actors with historical examples such as Emmitt Till and others. They discuss how memes and other digital artifacts contribute to collective action that responds to this surveillance.

Learn more about this event: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/white-surveillance-and-black-digital-publics

Professors Khaled Beydoun and Justin Hansford join IfRFA Director Kendra Albert for a discussion of the way in which First Amendment work could better engage with critical race theory. This event highlights Professor Beydoun’s work on surveillance of Muslims, Justin Hansford’s work on the freedom of assembly as a racial project, as well as discussing how the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment creates space for these conversations (and more!)

Tracking the spread of COVID-19 has proved critical to efforts to contain the virus, but to do so, public health officials need to collect and utilize large amounts of data. Tarah Wheeler, Cyber Project Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University‘s Kennedy School of Government, joins Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, to investigate how the United States Public Health System can do this differently and responsibly.

Jacqueline Patterson, Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, and Dr. Michelle Morse, Founding Co-Director of EqualHealth, Hospitalist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and social medicine course director at Harvard Medical School, join Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, to discuss how environmental injustice and racism have contributed to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic.

It all feels like a precursor to a bad joke: What do foreign agents, white supremacists, conspiracists, snake oil salesmen, political operatives, white academics, and a disgruntled bunch of zoomers have in common? The groups have collided in a centrifuge of chaos online, where the tactics they use to hide their identities and manipulate audiences are more prevalent than ever. Social media companies are trying to patch the holes in a failing sociotechnical systems, where the problems their products have created are now shouldered by journalists, universities, and health professionals, just to name a few. What can be done to restore moral and technical order in a time of pandemonium?

Joan Donovan answers these questions and more during a presentation and Q&A.

Yochai Benkler and Rob Faris present their recent research that assesses how asymmetrically polarized media in the United States shape political discourse and explains how the structure of media ecosystems sustains two starkly different versions of reality in American politics.

This talk draws upon research into the propagation of disinformation about mail-in voter fraud and an analysis of political discourse in the first five months of 2020 from the Democratic primaries and impeachment to the emergence of the pandemic. It is moderated by Jasmine McNealy.

This book talk discussion included:

Introduction: Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, director of the Harvard Law School Library, and co-founder and director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

John Palfrey is president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a former faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Dr. Urs Gasser is the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School. His research and teaching activities focus on information law, policy, and society issues and the changing role of academia in the digitally networked age.

Moderator: Leah Plunkett is the Meyer Research Lecturer on Law Special Director for Online Education 2020-2021 at Harvard Law School where she also teaches a course on Youth, Privacy, and Digital Citizenship. She is formerly the Associate Dean for Administration, Associate Professor of Legal Skills, and Director of Academic Success at the University of New Hampshire School of Law.

This book talk was co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School’s Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change, the National Governors Association, and Partners In Health’s U.S. Public Health Accompaniment Unit hold a session exploring how US state and local public health leaders can implement retrospective contact tracing to identify Covid-19 clusters and mitigate their spread.

Currently, almost every US state relies on prospective contact tracing: when an infected person is identified, contact tracers try to identify and notify the infected person’s contacts since being infected. However, there’s an additional, effective method that states can add to their toolkit: retrospective tracing. Once tracers identify an infected person, they can look backwards to find when and where the person was infected and identify who else might have been infected simultaneously as part of a ‘cluster’. Experts are increasingly aware of the outsized effects of superspreader incidents in the transmission of COVID-19 — these are occasions where one or a few persons infect a disproportionate number of other individuals due to a combination of environmental factors, timing, and the activities people are engaged in. As pioneered by Japanese scientists and officials, retrospective tracing identifies those events and allows tracers to discover more cases, more efficiently.

Participants

Dr. Hitoshi Oshitani, a member of Japan’s Subcommittee on Novel Coronavirus Disease Control whose pioneering work helped develop the retrospective tracing methodology, presents on the retrospective tracing methodology, how it was developed, and how it has been implemented in Japan.

Dr. KJ Seung, chief of strategy and policy for Partners in Health’s MA COVID-19 Response, Associate Physician at the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School presents on how the state of Massachusetts is implementing retrospective tracing methodologies.

Professor Zeynep Tufekci, a techno-sociologist at the University of North Carolina who writes publicly on pandemic response for outlets including The Atlantic and is a member of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, joins Drs. Seung, Oshitani, and Bourdeaux for a question and answer panel focused on implementation of this methodology.

Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux, Research Director of the Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change and co-lead of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Policy Practice, introduces and moderates the session.

evelyn douek and Julie Owono discuss how platforms are preparing for—and anticipating—a variety of issues related to disinformation in the lead up to, and immediate aftermath of, the 2020 US election on November 3. douek focuses on what platforms have and haven't learned from 2016. Owono explores how this election, and others in the world, will challenge freedom of expression on global social media platforms. This event was moderated by Oumou Ly, Staff Fellow on the Assembly: Disinformation project.

Together, they highlight the intricate challenges that platforms are facing and provide insight into what to look for and anticipate in the days to come.

The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its 2020 MacArthur Fellows, which include two BKC Faculty Associates, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Mary Gray.

Watch Cottom and Gray discuss their previous and forthcoming projects as well as explore the intersections of their equally impressive research. The event was moderated by Joan Donovan.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science and senior research fellow with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author, most recently, of Thick: And Other Essays.

Mary L. Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Joan Donovan is the Research Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Dr. Donovan leads the field in examining internet and technology studies, online extremism, media manipulation, and disinformation campaigns.

How Should U.S. public health officials lead in this political moment? Rivka Weinberg, Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College and Jennifer Prah Ruger, Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, join Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, to discuss the Covid State of Play.

Board Members James Mickens and Jonathan Zittrain explore cybersecurity beyond its traditional boundaries of protecting data or code from bad actors. Increasingly, the pervasive integration of computing systems into modern societal processes (e.g. news, election results) creates new tensions such as the exponential growth of disinformation. After all, disinformation stems from issues about how users are authenticated and what abilities they are granted on a given network.

These challenges move the concerns of access control into more nuanced considerations about the kind of content that users within computer systems may be able to submit. This session considers how redefining cybersecurity might help address such issues more effectively.

Learn more about the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at cyber.harvard.edu

What’s the Covid State of Play? Joseph Allen, professor and head of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, joins Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, to discuss the issues of ventilation and airborne transmission of the virus, the unique challenges and risks posed by school reopenings, and possible solutions.

What’s the Covid State of Play? Join Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-chairs of the Berkman Klein Center’s Digital Pandemic Response Working Group, as they try to untangle the challenges in the fight against COVID-19 in a chat with former NSC pandemic policy staffer Beth Cameron and Chief of Strategy and Policy for Partners in Health's MA COVID-19 Response KJ Seung.

Zittrain, Bourdeaux, and Cameron recently published a call to U.S. governors for a coordinated response to the pandemic, sounding the alarm on testing paralysis: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/op...

The pandemic is a portal, the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote in an essay for the Financial Times. “We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

In many ways, the coronavirus pandemic has resurfaced and amplified the worst in the world: intensification of surveillance, racism, nationalism, anti-scientism, bigotry.

But something strange has happened as well. Changes, ideas and solutions that were previously deemed impossible have suddenly become possible. Many of these changes still don’t go far enough, come with caveats and fine print, are subject to absurd means-testing, or are only temporary. These aren’t necessarily the changes we want, but they give us a glimpse of what has suddenly become possible.

A number of projects are seeking to capture and document the new possible. In this lunch hour, three of these projects, COVID-19 Policy Response, The New Possible, and Don't Go Back to Normal talk about their experience and debate how we can ensure that the new normal doesn’t turn into the old normal.

To learn more about the Berkman Klein Center, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu

Low-income countries have several systemic disadvantages that cumulatively inhibit their capacity to cope with the spread of COVID-19. These systemic disadvantages, a result of long-term poverty and resource-constrained healthcare systems, are further worsened by other socio-economic outcomes of lockdowns and the spread of infection. BKC hosted a seminar on the economic and healthcare fallouts of COVID-19 in low-income countries, with a specific focus on groups such as women, refugees, and informal laborers, alongside options for international collaboration.

BKC’s Padmashree Gehl Sampath sets the stage and moderates the discussions, joined by BKC’s Yvonne Macpherson, who shares her work on COVID-19’s impact on women and refugees, and Dr. Madani B. Thiam, Chief of Health and Nutrition, UNICEF Myanmar, who speaks on the impact of COVID-19 on health systems capacity and healthcare from his experience in the field.

Ever since Florida 2000, it seems the US cannot hold an election without horror stories about equipment failing, votes lost, and disenfranchised voters says Ben Adida, co-founder and Executive Director of VotingWorks. "Why does a country as powerful and resourceful as the United States have so much trouble running an election?" is a central question to this virtual event. In "Building Better Voting Systems,"

Adida discusses why running an election in the US is particularly challenging. He focuses on voting equipment; it's conventional wisdom that voting machines are universally terrible, and Adida argues that we need to understand how we got here. But it doesn't have to be that way: Adida explains how the US can do much better, and specifically what VotingWorks is working on. Finally, Adida covers how VotingWorks and others are going to help run safe and trustworthy elections in the COVID-19 era.

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) sweeps the world in devastating fashion, scientists are scrambling to develop effective vaccines and treatments. But how should those medicines be priced globally?

Following Donald Trump’s “America First” policy with respect to vaccine and drug pricing would be tragic, argue Quentin Palfrey and John Stubbs. Instead, Palfrey and Stubbs propose a pharmaceutical pricing policy modeled on progressive taxation to distribute costs equitably worldwide. This discussion was moderated by Ashveena Gajeelee.

Governments and publics are increasingly asking that tech companies work to address the challenges and adapt to the changes technology has unleashed, from digital security to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the core of these new expectations is the sense that world-changing technologies must be governed in accordance with a broad ethic of responsibility – to individual users and to society at large.

In this conversation, Jonathan Zittrain was joined by Microsoft President Brad Smith to discuss how big tech might rise to these new challenges and opportunities.

As people turn to news outlets for information, journalists -- and data journalists in particular -- are under pressure to make sense of droves of complicated information.

Data Overload discusses the challenges journalists face obtaining, analyzing, and explaining data about the current pandemic.

Todd Wallack, a Berkman Klein-Nieman Fellow and data journalist at the Boston Globe, is joined by Caroline Chen, who covers health care for ProPublica, and Armand Emamdjomeh, an assignment editor, graphics at the Washington Post.

This event was co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation.

Fairness and discrimination in algorithmic systems are globally recognized as topics of critical importance. To date, the majority of work in this area starts from an American regulatory perspective defined by the notions of ‘disparate treatment’ and ‘disparate impact.’ But European legal notions of discrimination are not equivalent.

In this talk, Sandra Wachter, Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Law and Ethics of AI, Big Data, robotics and Internet Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford, examines EU law and jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice concerning non-discrimination and identifies a critical incompatibility between European notions of discrimination and existing work on algorithmic and automated fairness.

Wachter discusses the evidential requirements for bringing a claim under EU non-discrimination law and propose a statistical test as a baseline to identify and assess potential cases of algorithmic discrimination in Europe.

The identification of bots is an important and complicated task. The bot classifier Botometer was successfully introduced as a way to estimate the number of bots in a given list of accounts and has been frequently used in academic publications.

Given its relevance for academic research, and our understanding of the presence of automated accounts in any given Twitter discourse, Adrian Rauchfleisch and Jonas Kaiser studied Botometer's diagnostic ability over time. To do so, Rauchfleisch and Kaiser collected the Botometer scores for five datasets in two languages (English/German) over three months. For this virtual event, Rauchfleisch and Kaiser discussed their findings and answered questions about the implications of their research.

This virtual talk features Jessica Fjeld, assistant director of the Cyberlaw Clinic and lead author on the “Principled AI” report, in conversation with Ryan Budish, an assistant research director at Berkman Klein and a member of OECD’s AI Governance Expert Group, which proposed high-level AI principles. Fjeld and Budish discuss AI principles both generally (the high-level landscape in which they exist) and in practice (the creation and implementation process for principles.)

“In our data-driven society, it is too easy to assume the transparency of data. Instead, we should approach data sets with an awareness that they are created by humans and their dutiful machines, at a time, in a place, with the instruments at hand, for audiences that are conditioned to receive them,” says Yanni Alexander Loukissas, Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.

All data are local. The term data set implies something discrete, complete, and portable, but it is none of those things. Examining a series of sources important for understanding public data in the United States—Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, the Digital Public Library of America, UCLA's Television News Archive, and the real estate marketplace Zillow—this talk explains how to analyze data settings rather than data sets.

This talk sets out six principles: all data are local; data have complex attachments to place; data are collected from heterogeneous sources; data and algorithms are inextricably entangled; interfaces recontextualize data; and data are indexes to local knowledge. Then, it provides a set of practical guidelines to follow. These findings are based on a combination of qualitative research on data cultures and exploratory data visualizations. Rebutting the myth of “digital universalism,” this work reminds audiences of the meaning-making power of the local.

Rural broadband is currently having a moment in American political discourse. No less than 5 presidential candidates have released plans to connect the country’s rural places, and the FCC has recently announced a $20billion funding program for fixed broadband and a $9billion program for 5G deployment in rural America. Despite these initiatives and interests, however, rural America remains woefully disconnected from a digital world that the urban and wealthy take for granted. Worse yet, the digital divide is growing, not shrinking despite billions of dollars of yearly investment and dozens of legislative proposals.

This talk explains the policies that help and hinder broadband deployment in rural America. Christopher Ali argues that our current policy architecture grossly over-privileges incumbent telephone companies and systematically discourages new entrants from offering broadband, and demonstrates how the largest telecommunication companies have an economic incentive to keep the digital divide alive. “

Dr. Howard Stevenson of the University of Pennsylvania kicked off the Berkman Klein Spring 2020 Luncheon Series with a talk and discussion on Advancing Racial Literacy in Tech. Racial literacy provides a framework for considering how to combat the proliferation of racially-biased technology. Dr. Stevenson was joined in conversation by Jessie Daniels and Mutale Nkonde.

Dr. Howard Stevenson is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education, Professor of Africana Studies, in the Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the Executive Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative at Penn, designed to promote racial literacy in education, health, community and justice institutions.

Our current legal system is to a great extent the product of an earlier period of social and economic transformation. From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, the U.S. legal system underwent profound, tectonic shifts. Today, struggles over ownership of information-age resources and accountability for information-age harms are producing new systemic changes. In Between Truth and Power, Julie E. Cohen explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. Systematically examining struggles over the conditions of information flow and the design of information architectures and business models, she argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it too is transforming in fundamental ways. For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/between-truth-and-power-legal-constructions-informational-capitalism

A new book by BKC Faculty Associate and Youth & Media team member Leah Plunkett joins works by Margaret Atwood and Stephen King on Wired's list of "must-read" books for fall 2019. Leah's book from MIT Press, Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online, "illuminates children's digital footprints: the digital baby monitors, the daycare livestreams, the nurse's office health records, the bus and cafeteria passes recording their travel and consumption patterns―all part of an indelible dossier for anyone who knows how to look for it. Plunkett thinks the offspring surveillance ought to stop and has suggestions for how to kick the sharenting habit. They are worth considering." For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/sharenthood-how-parents-teachers-and-other-trusted-adults-harm-youth-privacy-opportunity

This panel discussion will address the topic of “Napster @ 20,” looking back from our vantage point in 2019 and examining the direct and indirect legacy of Napster over the past two decades. The panelists are Christopher Bavitz, Nancy Baym, David Herlihy, and Jennifer Jenkins. For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/napster20-reflections-internets-most-controversial-music-file-sharing-service

Israel went through two full election campaigns in 2019, featuring the cutting edge of network propaganda technologies. Justice Hanan Melcer of Israel's Supreme Court chaired Israel's Central Elections Committee during both elections and speaks about his experiences managing the two election cycles and ruling on campaign practices as they unfolded in real-time. For more information about this event, including a transcript, visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/protecting-elections-online-manipulation-and-cyber-threats-experience-israels-2019-elections

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin presents the concept of the “New Jim Code" to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Ruha will also consider how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends. This presentation delves into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges the audience to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves. For more information (and a transcript), visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/new-jim-code

The twenty-odd year mainstream digital revolution has transformed in the public eye from one of promise to threat. This pessimism is reflected in assessments of the latest pervasive technology: AI generally, and machine learning specifically. How different is this technology from what preceded it, and do we need new ways to govern it? If so, how would they come about? For more information about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/can-tech-be-governed

There is growing awareness and concern about the role of automation in hiring, and the potential for these tools to reinforce historic inequalities in the labor market. In this work, Wilson performs an algorithm audit of the resume search engines offered by several of the largest online hiring platforms, to understand the relationship between a candidate's gender and their rank in search results. He and his team audit these platform with respect to individual and group fairness, as well as indirect and direct discrimination.

For more info about this event, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-05-21/auditing-bias-resume-search-engines

Berkman Klein community members Elettra Bietti, John Collins, Andrew Gruen, Daniel Jones, Mariel Garcia Montes, Jasmine McNealy, Sabelo Mhlambi, Sarah Newman, Kathy Pham, and Salome Viljoen share their research, passions, and musings in five minute Ignite Talks.

Topics include the data economy in the European Union, maternal health around the world, youth and privacy online in Latin American, Ubuntu as an ethical framework for AI, collecting secrets, and more.

For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-05-07/ignite-talks-bkc

How can advocates, activists, and academics work with technology companies to advance human rights? In this talk, David Sullivan, director at the Global Network Initiative, and BKC Fellow Chinmayi Arun draw upon a contentious exchange with Steve Jobs about the Democratic Republic of Congo to offer insights into how companies and civil society can work together on tough issues at the intersection of technology and human rights online.

For more info about this event visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-23/how-work-tech-companies-human-rights

AI Now Director of Policy Research Rashida Richardson discusses recent research on the data provenance of police data commonly used in predictive policing system. The research reviews Department of Justice consent decrees and other federal court monitored settlements related to police practices to examine the link between unlawful and biased police practices and the data used to train and/or implement these systems.

For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-16/dirty-data-bad-predictions

We're never going to get a global set of norms for online speech, but do the platforms pick our global values and constitutionalize them? Is there something to tie our global values to the mast when hard issues arise? What would those values even be?

This event features a presentation and discussion with Kate Klonick and Thomas Kadri along with panelists, Chinmayi Arun, Kendra Albert, and Jonathan Zittrain with moderation by Elettra Bietti.

For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-09/constitutionalizing-speech-platforms

BKC Executive Director Urs Gasser speaks with Jason Farman, author of the book "Delayed Response: The Art of Waiting from the Ancient to the Instant World," about how our communication media shape not only how we understand human intimacy and connection, but also how we learn and build knowledge about our world and the universe.

For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-08/bkc-meet-author-series-urs-gasser-conversation-jason-farman

Predictive algorithms can often outperform humans in making legal decisions. But when used to automate or guide decisions, predictions can embed biases, conflict with a "right to explanation," and be manipulated by litigants. HLS Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law Ryan Copus suggests we should instead use predictive algorithms to identify unjust decisions and subject them to secondary review.

For more info about this event visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-02/machines-learning-find-injustice

In her new book, How We Win, Farah Pandith, a world-leading expert and pioneer in countering violent extremism, lays out a comprehensive strategy for how we can defeat the growing extremist threat, once and for all. From technology companies and entrepreneurs to businesses in the private sector, she says, this is an all-encompassing global issue that we must address together.

For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-03-25/bkc-meet-author-series-urs-gasser-conversation-farah-pandith

Author Nanjala Nyabola speaks with BKC Fellow james Wahutu about Nanjala's book, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya. The book explores of efforts to contain online activism, new methods of feminist mobilization, and how “fake news,” Cambridge Analytica, and allegations of hacking contributed to tensions around the 2017 elections.

For more about this event visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-03-12/digital-democracy-analogue-politics

Roger McNamee is the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. He is joined by Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School.

Facebook, Google and other internet platforms employ a business model – surveillance capitalism – that is undermining public health, democracy, privacy, and innovation in unprecedented ways. They use persuasive technology to manipulate attention for profit and they use surveillance to build data sets with the goal of influencing user behavior.

The negative externalities of internet platforms are analogous to those of medicine in the early 20th century and chemicals in the mid-20th century, situations that required substantial regulatory intervention.

For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-26/waking-internet-platform-disaster

In this talk, Professor Woodrow Hartzog argues that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products.

Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation.

Hartzog speaks on the need to develop the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law that is responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust.

For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-03-05/privacys-blueprin

Why has the Internet had such a powerful impact? What are the challenges that may cause the Internet of tomorrow to be significantly less revolutionary than the Internet to date?

This talk provides a history of the reasons for and the technology of the Internet.

Scott Bradner has worked in the areas of computer programming, system management, networking, IT security, and identity management at Harvard for 50 years. He was involved in the design, operation and use of data networks at Harvard University since the early days of the ARPANET. He was involved in the design of the original Harvard data networks, the Longwood Medical Area network (LMAnet) and New England Academic and Research Network (NEARnet). He was founding chair of the technical committees of LMAnet, NEARnet and the Corporation for Research and Enterprise Network (CoREN).

Mr. Bradner served in a number of roles in the IETF. He was the co-director of the Operational Requirements Area (1993-1997), IPng Area (1993-1996), Transport Area (1997-2003) and Sub-IP Area (2001-2003). He was a member of the IESG (1993-2003) and was an elected trustee of the Internet Society (1993-1999), where he was the VP for Standards from 1995 to 2003 and Secretary to the Board of Trustees from 2003 to 2016. Scott was also a member of the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA) as well as a trustee of the IETF Trust from 2012 to 2016.

Mr. Bradner retired from Harvard University in 2016 after 50 years working in the areas of in computer programming, system management, networking, IT security and identity management. He continues to do some patent related consulting.

More about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-05/history-internet

A recent wave of worker actions at major tech firms have challenged company contracts with the Pentagon, ICE, and other government agencies; organized for safe and equitable workplaces, free from sexual harassment and discrimination; and demanded better wages, benefits, and working conditions for both white and blue collar contractors.

Scholar and a founding editor of Logic magazine Moira Weigel places these actions in context, drawing on several years of research and writing on the movement. She proposes that these actions point to the need for new frameworks for interpreting the culture or world view of the tech industry—frameworks beyond "The Californian Ideology" that has dominated since the 1990s. She shares several recently proposed alternatives for thinking about "tech work" (e.g. platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, data colonialism) that members of tech worker organizations themselves have studied and drawn on.

This talk is moderated by recent Berkman Klein Fellow, Yarden Katz.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-26/goodbye-california

Professor Jonathan Zittrain discusses the social media giant’s ‘long year’ with Facebook's head of global policy management Monika Bickert. Citing his sense of the “pessimism and near-despair that permeate our feelings about social media,” Zittrain opens the conversation by recalling a September 2017 discussion in which he and Bickert looked at the rise of white nationalism and the first indications of how social media manipulation had been at play in the 2016 elections. Since then, of course, more information about fake accounts and online attacks has come to light.

Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-12-03/state-online-speech-and-governance

Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services.

In "The Smart Enough City," Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-19/smart-enough-city

After two decades of little direct legislation of the internet, national laws and related court decisions meant to govern cyberspace are rapidly proliferating worldwide. They are becoming building blocks in new legal frameworks that will shape the evolution of Internet governance and policymaking for years to come.

In the Global South and particularly under repressive regimes, these frameworks can be imposed with little regard for human rights obligations and without a full understanding of the technologies and processes they regulate or their implications for the preservation of the core values of the internet: interoperability, universality, and free expression and the free flow of information.

In this panel, practitioners from five international organizations monitoring the development of legislation and case law related to cyberspace discuss the implications for the future of human rights online.

Moderator: Robert Faris

Panelists: Dr. Hawley Johnson (Project Manager for Columbia Global Freedom of Expression), Robert Muthuri (Research Fellow – ICT at the Centre for IP and IT at the Strathmore School of Law), Juan Carlos Lara (manager of the Public Policy and Research team at Derechos Digitales), Gayatri Khandhadai (lawyer with a background in international law and human rights, international and regional human rights mechanisms, research, and advocacy), and Jessica Dheere (co-founder of the Beirut–based digital rights research, training, and advocacy organization SMEX (smex.org) and a 2018-19 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center.

More about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-01-31/cyberlaw-and-human-rights

Technology is the American mythos (Dinerstein 2006); a belief system powering the relations between—and politics of—culture and technology. In the Western context, technoculture incorporates Whiteness, White racial ideology, and modernist technological beliefs. This presentation is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting “race-as-technology” (Chun 2009) to incorporate Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things."

Utilizing critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this presentation employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.

Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-12-04/my-constellation-space-towards-theory-black-cyberculture

Perspectives from Europe and the US on a Law and Policy Agenda

Digital technologies affect the lives of billions of people around the world daily. The decisions of private platforms and tech developers — and the public institutions that regulate their conduct — can shape public discourse, with profound impacts on democracy, liberty, autonomy, and governance.

This panel provides a broad overview of the landscape for regulating cutting-edge digital technologies in Europe and the US. The discussion focuses on mechanisms for ensuring tech developers and platforms build and deploy their products and services in a manner that is consistent with fundamental human rights, including the rights to freedom of expression and privacy.

Panelists bring a wealth of experience to the table and will address considerations with respect to the role that strategic litigation, legislation and regulation, and multi-stakeholder initiatives that operate outside of government can play in setting a human rights tech agenda. Topics of discussion will include the advent of a new privacy regime in Europe in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation; challenging surveillance in the age of mass data collection; the complex landscape for platforms making content moderation decisions; and the long-range impact of technologies that incorporate algorithms, AI, and, machine learning.

Participants include Nani Jansen Reventlow, Can Yeginsu, Vivek Krishnamurthy, and Jessica Fjeld (Panel Moderator).

For more info on this event visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-30/promoting-fairness-equity-and-human-rights-tech

Infectious disease emergencies are opportunities to test the efficacy of newly developed interventions — for example, drugs, vaccines, and treatment regimens. Yet they raise many intertwined challenges around politics, logistics, ethics, and study design.

In this talk — part of our Digital Health @ Harvard series — Professor Marc Lipsitch describes his work on computer simulation of vaccine trials during epidemics to assess options for trial design, as well as some of his recent work on the ethics of trials in emergencies, and stimulates discussion on the intersection of these two topics to help disentangle ethical from political and logistical concerns, as well as to reduce the time pressure to make a decision and encourage rational deliberation by future stakeholders.

Find out more info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-27/computer-simulations-enhance-vaccine-trials

Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that’s increasingly making us behave like simple machines? Brett Frischmann discusses what’s happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and supposedly smart environments. He explains how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people.

For more information, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-13/re-engineering-humanity

Assessing Government Development, Deployment, & Use of Tech Tools

A close look at the inner workings of government, with a particular focus on the ways in which federal, state, and local government institutions leverage technology and technical resources to best serve citizens.

Alvand Salehi and Kathy Pham bring deep expertise in federal and state government deployment of technology and in establishing policies within government to foster and promote responsible tech development initiatives. They share stories from their time in government and offer thoughts on best practices for government institutions developing approaches to technology development and procurement that enhance the provision of government services.

The event is moderated by Berkman Klein Center co-director, Chris Bavitz.

For more info on this event, visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-06/state-government-technology

Platforms, Content Moderation, & the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media

In this talk, author Tarleton Gillespie discusses how social media platforms police what we post online – and the societal impact of these decisions. He flips the story to argue that content moderation is not ancillary to what platforms do; it is essential, definitional, and constitutional. Given that, the very fact of moderation should change how we understand what platforms are.

For more information, visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-30/custodians-internet

Virginia Eubanks joins us for a rousing conversation about her timely and provocative book, Automating Inequality.

In Automating Inequality, Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. "This book is downright scary,” says Naomi Klein, “but with its striking research and moving, indelible portraits of life in the ‘digital poorhouse,’ you will emerge smarter and more empowered to demand justice.”

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-23/automating-inequality

Rachel Gershon — Senior Associate at the Center for Health Law and Economics at UMass Medical School — discusses the nature of disability and disability determination; the resulting limitations in data availability; and implications for public policy.

This year, several states applied for and received permission from the federal government to implement work requirements in their Medicaid programs. Policy designs vary by state, but all states build in considerations for people with disabilities. These considerations include exemptions and exceptions from work requirements for individuals unable to work due to a disability.

Due to the nature of disability and the nature of disability determination processes, states will face limitations in identifying all individuals who are unable to work due to a disability. Medical claims do not necessarily provide enough information to determine a person’s ability to work. Medical diagnoses and disability determinations both can lag symptoms by months or years. As a result, relying on claims or disability determination data could leave out individuals who are unable to work due to a disability. At the same time, waiting for a diagnosis or a disability determination is a critical time period for individuals with disabilities to be able to access health care.

For more information visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-16/determining-disability

Universities have automated many aspects of teaching, instruction, student services, libraries, personnel management, building management, and finance, leading to a profusion of discrete data about the activities of individuals. Universities see great value of these data for learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities, governments, and private individuals also see value in these data and are besieging universities with requests for access.

In this talk, Christine L. Borgman discusses the conflicts & challenges of balancing obligations for stewardship, trust, privacy, confidentiality – and often academic freedom – with the value of exploiting data for analytical and commercial purposes.

For more information about this event visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-09/open-data-grey-data-and-stewardship

Photo by @AlyssaAGoodman

Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives.

Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analyzing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment.

Authors Yochai Benkler, Rob Faris, and Hal Roberts present their years-in-the-making research on the media ecosystem, and discuss their findings with Martha Minow and Claire Wardle.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-04/network-propaganda

Bruce Schneier, the author of Click Here to Kill Everybody in conversation with Abby Everett Jaques, MIT.

From the description of "Click Here to Kill Everybody":

Computer security is no longer about data; it's about life and property. This change makes an enormous difference, and will shake up our industry in many ways. First, data authentication and integrity will become more important than confidentiality. And second, our largely regulation-free Internet will become a thing of the past. Soon we will no longer have a choice between government regulation and no government regulation. Our choice is between smart government regulation and stupid government regulation. Given this future, it's vital that we look back at what we've learned from past attempts to secure these systems, and forward at what technologies, laws, regulations, economic incentives, and social norms we need to secure them in the future.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-09-25/click-here-kill-everybody

Drawing from memes, magazine covers and legal documents from the past 60 years, Jonathan Zittrain gives a lively overview of the Internet since its inception, spanning the debates, concerns, and hopes in the years since, and how the Berkman Klein Center fits into—and contributes to—these conversations.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-09-18/platforms-politics-and-power

Narrative manipulation issues - such as manufactured consensus, brigading, harassment, information laundering, fake accounts, news voids, and more - are increasingly well-documented problems affecting the entire social ecosystem.This has had negative consequences for information integrity, and for trust.

In this talk Renee DiResta (Director of Research at New Knowledge, and Head of Policy at nonprofit Data for Democracy) examines the ways that these same manipulative tactics are being deployed on Amazon, which is now the dominant product search engine and a battlefield for economically and ideologically motivated actors.

For more info on this event visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/05/DiResta

Computational creativity—a subdomain of artificial intelligence concerned with systems that replicate or assist human creative endeavors—has been the subject of academic inquiry for decades. Now, with recent improvements in machine learning techniques and the rising popularity of all things AI, computational creativity is a medium for critically and commercially successful works of art. From a 2016 Rembrandt to Jukedeck’s instant music (or muzak?), AI-assisted and AI-driven works are a reality. This raises mind-bending questions about the nature of creativity, the relationship between the artist and the viewer, even the existence of free will. For many lawyers, it also raises a more immediate question: who owns all of this art?

Cyberlaw Clinicians Jess Fjeld and Mason Kortz discuss copyright in AI-generated works, the need for a shared understanding of what is and isn’t up for grabs in a license, and how forward-thinking contracts can prevent AI developers and artists from having their rights decided by our (often notoriously backwards-looking) legal system.

Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/05/Fjeld_Kortz

Harvard Law School is one of the top law schools in the world and educates the intellectual and financial elites. Lawyers are held to the highest professional and ethical standards. And yet, when it comes to digital piracy, they overwhelmingly perceive file sharing as an acceptable social practice – as long as individuals do not derive monetary benefits from it. So should digital files be considered a commons? In this talk, Dariusz and Jerome identify and discuss the social and economic contexts in which file sharing is considered more or less acceptable by law practitioners. In the process, they foster a conversation on the possible changes in regulation that would allow us to catch up with the established social norm.

Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/05/Jemielniak_Herguex

Founding members of the CryptoKitties team, Dieter Shirley and Alex Shih, discuss the unique governance, legal, and regulatory challenges of putting cats on the Ethereum blockchain. CryptoKitties is an early pioneer in the space, and, having navigated securities law early on in its release, will share unique insights on classifications. They also discuss some of the more ethical challenges they've been facing, and best practices for approach.

Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/05/CryptoKitties

Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ’s turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing — extensively borrowing — from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process? The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race — again and again, race — and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate ones. They still are.

Professors James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins (Duke Law School) discuss Theft! A History of Music, their graphic novel about musical borrowing.

Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/04/Boyle

“Cheap speech” has massively increased ordinary people’s access to mass communications — both for good and for ill. How has the system of remedies for defamatory, privacy-invading, and harassing speech reacted? Some ways are predictable; some are surprising; some are shocking. Prof. Eugene Volokh (UCLA) lays it all out.

Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/04/Volokh

The online world is no longer a distinct world. It is an extension of our social, economic, and political lives. Internet access, however, is still often considered a luxury good in the United States. Millions of Americans have been priced out of, or entirely excluded from, the reach of modern internet networks.

Maria Smith, an affiliate of Berkman Klein and the Cyberlaw Clinic, created a four-part documentary series to highlight these stark divides in connectivity, from Appalachia to San Francisco, and to uncover the complex web of political and economic forces behind them.

Learn more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/03/Smith

Algorithms for predicting recidivism are commonly used to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood of committing a crime. Proponents of these systems argue that big data and advanced machine learning make these analyses more accurate and less biased than humans.

In this talk researcher Julia Dressel discusses a recent study demonstrating that the widely used commercial risk assessment software COMPAS is no more accurate or fair than predictions made by people with little or no criminal justice expertise.

Learn more about this event here:
http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/03/Dressel

The Global Lives Project presents 24-hour-long videos of daily lives of individuals from around the world both online and through in-person exhibits. This 15-year project is an online and real-world collaboration between thousands of filmmakers, photographers, translators and everyday people from around the world.

The project's latest exhibit, Lives in Transit, showcases unedited footage of the daily lives of transportation workers from around the world, including Vietnam, Nepal, Turkey, China, India, South Korea, Colombia, Spain and Canada

Global Lives Project Founder David Evan Harris speaks about the evolution of the project, and its ambitious goal of connecting the diverse experiences of humanity around the globe, and building empathy.

For more information on this event visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/02/GlobalLivesProject

METRO/599 is a studio in Hell’s Kitchen that connects more than 250 of New York’s libraries, archives, and knowledge organizations. With 6,000 square feet of event and studio space, supporting projects in digital privacy, multimedia media archiving, metadata aggregation, and podcasting, and offering tools for everything from software preservation to signage prototyping to spaghetti and meatball crafting, METRO/599 is reinventing the multi-type library consortium as a metacommunity center.

In this talk, Nate Hill, Executive Director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, gives an overview of the programs at METRO/599, talks about the challenges associated with this organizational recalibration, seeks input and ideas from the group, and extends an invitation to attendees to come take part in the fun.

For more information visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/02/Hill

Health spending continues to outpace wages and GDP, while some new insurance designs transfer greater shares of that to patients’ own out of pocket costs. In this talk co-hosted with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, Dr. John Freedman, President & CEO of Freedman HealthCare discusses what is driving health care costs up, who is benefiting, and how data is harnessed to study problems and remedy them.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/02/Freedman

What is the role of libraries in a technological society? A group of librarians, technologists, journalists, and researchers, including new DPLA executive director John Bracken, come together to reflect on the Digital Public Library of America’s past, present and future, and explore the way in which libraries can contribute to a stronger civic life in the midst of disruptive times.

Read more here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/node/100128

Learn more about the Digital Public Library of America:
http://dp.la

In this talk, Berkman Klein affiliate Jonas Kaiser shares some of his research on the networked public sphere. "The right-wing is rising. Not only in the United States but also in Germany and other European countries. And the internet helped," he writes. "Right-wing actors are active all over the internet, adapt to platforms, game the system, blur the lines between off- and online, and create their own virtual spaces. In addition, social media platforms like YouTube contribute involuntarily to the right-wing's reach and, perhaps, influence with their algorithms." In this talk Kaiser will explore these issues and potential ways forward.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/01/Kaiser

The January 4, 2018 release of the Federal Communications Commission’s "Restoring Internet Freedom Order" marked the most recent turn of events in the longstanding and ever-changing debate over net neutrality.

In this lively debate, Christopher S. Yoo (Founding Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania) and Matt Wood (Policy Director of Free Press) explore the consequences of this action, including the implications of the Order, the outcome of the judicial challenge, and the possibility of legislative reform.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/01/NetNeutrality

After a photographer left his camera equipment out for a group of wild macaques to explore, the monkeys took a series of photos, including selfies. Once the photos were posted publicly, legal disputes arose around who should own the copyrights — the human photographer who engineered the situation, or the macaques who snapped the photos. This unique case raises the increasingly pertinent question as to whether non-humans — whether they be monkeys or artificial intelligence machines — can claim copyrights to their creations.

Jon Lovvorn, Lecturer on Law and the Policy Director of Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Program, hosts a discussion panel featuring Jeff Kerr, the General Counsel of PETA, which sued on behalf of the monkey, and experts on copyright, cyber law, and intermediary liability issues, as well as Tiffany C. Li of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and Christopher T. Bavitz and Kendra Albert of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/01/monkeyselfie

Can diversity and free expression co-exist on our campuses? How about in our town squares, our cities, and our world? In this talk, John Palfrey — Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, and author of the new book "Safe Spaces, Braves Spaces" — leads a discussion of two of the foundational values of our democracy in the digital age.

Learn more about this event, and watch the video here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/10/Palfrey

Since the rise of the web in the 1990s, technological skeptics have always faced resistance. To question the virtue and righteousness of tech, and especially computing, was seen as truculence, ignorance, or luddism. But today, the real downsides of tech, from fake news to data breaches to AI-operated courtrooms to energy-sucking bitcoin mines, have become both undeniable and somewhat obvious in retrospect.

In light of this new technological realism, perhaps there is appetite for new ways to think about and plan for the future of technology, which anticipates what might go right and wrong once unproven tech mainstreams quickly.

In this conversation, author and an award-winning game designer Dr. Ian Bogost considers a technology that has not yet mainstreamed—autonomous vehicles—as a test case on how we should think about the future of tech.

More info on this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/luncheon/12/Bogost

Black users have consistently been at the vanguard of digital and social media use, pioneering and anticipating digital trends including live tweeting and the podcast boom. As harassment on social media platforms becomes increasingly aggressive, and increasingly automated, users must develop strategies for navigating this hostility. Having long endured coordinated campaigns of harassment, Black users are again at the forefront of a shift in digital practices – the creation of digital enclaves.

With new patterns of use, Sarah Florini — Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Department of English Arizona State University — explores emerging methodological and ethical questions regarding research in this space.

For more info on this event visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/luncheon/12/Florini

Black women have historically occupied a unique position, existing in multiple worlds, manipulating multiple technologies, and maximizing their resources for survival in a system created to keep them from thriving.

In this talk, University of Maryland Professor Catherine Knight Steele presents a case for the unique development of black women’s relationship with technology by analyzing historical texts that explore the creation of black womanhood in contrast to white womanhood and black manhood in early colonial and antebellum periods in the U.S.

This study of Black feminist discourse online situates current practices in the context of historical use and mastery of communicative technology by the black community broadly and black women more specifically. By tracing the history of black feminist thinkers in relationship to technology we move from a deficiency model of black women’s use of technology to recognizing their digital skills and internet use as part of a long developed expertise.

Find out more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/luncheon/11/KnightSteele

eBay resolves 60 million disputes a year and Alibaba 100 million. How do they do that? At the other less impressive extreme, in 2015 the IRS hung up on telephone callers 8.8 million times without making contact. Are there online solutions for that? Disputes are a “growth industry” on the internet, an inevitable by-product of innovation but often harmful to individuals. Drawing on his recent book, Digital Justice: Technology and the Internet of Disputes, (co-authored with Orna Rabinovich), Professor Katsh considers opportunities for online dispute resolution and prevention in ecommerce, health care, social media, employment, and the courts.

Find out more about this event here:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/node/100073

Caroline Weinberg — one of the co-chairs and organizers of the March for Science — discusses two broad questions: How is the Internet involved in the planning of large scale, high visibility political demonstrations? And, how can we harness the potential of demonstrations to build into movements?

For more information on this event visit:
https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/luncheon/10/Weinberg

Information communication technologies and the data they produce are transforming how natural and manmade disasters alike unfold. These technologies are also affecting how populations behave and organizations respond when these events occur.

In this talk, Nathaniel Raymond — founding Director of the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) of the Harvard Chan School of Public Health — addresses the ethical, legal and technical implications of this pivotal moment in the history of humanitarianism.

For more information on this event visit:
http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/luncheon/10/Raymond