Berkman Center for Internet & Society

“Jimmy has had an ongoing valedictory lap for having catalyzed one of the greatest creations in the history of human knowledge,” Jonathan L. Zittrain, a Harvard law professor and co-founder of the school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said. “It’s hard to begrudge him for that. I think he’s been feeling his way around. It’s not like there’s a lot of precedent for this.”

In the event you don’t know Doc Searls yet, he is an author, a journalist and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology & Society CITS at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an alumnus fellow 2006-2010 of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University where he continues to run ProjectVRM.

In an age of fast-paced globalization, society does a great job moving people and products across borders, author Ethan Zuckerman said Tuesday during a discussion sponsored by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, “but we’re less good at moving bits across borders.”

“Certainly the world has changed in terms of the accessibility of historical information,” said Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “My concern is that efforts to create a so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ run the risk of becoming laws that allow individuals to edit history, and that’s dangerous, especially if it winds up being applied to public governmental records.”

Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Harvard who has written extensively on WikiLeaks and is a possible defense witness at the Manning trial, said he found it “tragic” that the interaction of both WikiLeaks and Mr. Snowden with the United States government had become so adversarial. WikiLeaks began as an innovative media venture, he said, but the government’s overreaction has turned it into more of an activist venture.

Crawford, who has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and Michigan, spent a year on the National Economic Council as a top telecommunications advisor to President Obama.

She’s been a fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In 2009, the magazine Fast Company named boyd one of the most influential women in technology, and in 2010, she was named by Fortune magazine as a rising star under the age of 40.

Harvard’s Berkman Center and IEEE Internet Computing have posted an an interesting series of peer-reviewed papers on the future of internet censorship and control.

Benjamin Mako Hill, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, thinks Facebook’s ability to connect people and bind them to the social network is overrated to begin with. “Facebook didn’t exist, what, 10 years ago,” he says, and in 10 years, he thinks, “a company called Facebook will exist, but will it occupy the same space in our culture? That’s certainly not something I’m willing to take for granted.”

An op-ed by Yochai Benkler.
NSA Scandal Requires a New Church Committee | New Republic.