Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Jeffrey Schnapp is on a mission to save our libraries.As the director of both the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the metaLab at Harvard, he typically spends his days grappling with the urgent questions of the wired world, but right now, his most pressing concern is more concrete. In a rapidly digitizing world, he is asking what will become of physical libraries — and their material soul, books.

To date, Macgillivray’s pro-user, damn-the-man attitude has permeated Twitter. He honed his philosophy at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and then at Google, where he was instrumental in introducing the company’s transparency reports and fought the Justice Department when it requested information on user search queries. He brought over a number of colleagues from Google, including head of litigation and intellectual property Benjamin Lee, who shared his views.

The recent revelations about the scope of the Obama administration’s secret surveillance programs have at least one silver lining: provoking a national debate about the right to privacy and prompting people to learn more about its ethical, legal and practical dimensions. Readers approaching this fascinating subject for the first time might want to begin with the best article on privacy ever written: Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s “The Right to Privacy,” first published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 and available online. After that warm-up, here are some of my favorite privacy books.

“It’s hard to imagine that we’re going to get to a one size fits all music royalty rate for musical compositions,” Bavitz says. Until then Pandora is getting into the FM radio business.

The ideas are not new or untested, but recently two heavyweights, former Federal Communications Commission chair Julius Genachowski and Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain both backed using Boston as a wireless testbed before the next time such a plan is needed.

Outgoing FCC chairman Julius Genachowski is calling for an emergency, private network in times of emergency for the city of Boston. In an op-ed penned for the MIT Technology Review with Harvard internet law professor Jonathan Zittrain, Genachowski makes the case for Boston to be the “first city where these networks are operational” in the wake of the bombings at the Boston Marathon in April.

We can start with an idea that needs no additional technology. Many people and companies operate Wi-Fi access points. Each of these points—whether used by apartment roommates, Starbucks patrons, or cell subscribers who get Wi-Fi “off-load” from their service providers—is connected to the Internet and often remains so even if cellular voice and data towers are out or overloaded.

Mary Madden, senior researcher at Pew, and Sandra Cortesi, director of the Youth and Media Project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, were among the authors of the report. danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at the Berkman Center, has done extensive studies on youth’s social media use.

“Mutual aid” may not be the first phrase that comes to mind in connection with law schools and lawyers, yet consider these examples. Harvard Law School’s Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 created a course joining HLS students with Stanford Law School students to brainstorm “Ideas for a Better Internet.” One student group tackled Internet security at Facebook, whose 1 billion users experience about 5 percent of all phishing attempts—600,000 of which succeed every day in locking users out of their accounts and compromising their personal data, including photos. The students developed an idea for improving security: allow a “cabinet” of friends to help reset a compromised account, instead of going through customer service, which has been chronically (and understandably) overloaded. The students called it the “25th Amendment” approach, modeled after the U.S. Constitution’s authorization of the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to declare the president unfit for office. The students presented the idea to Facebook—and the public—in J-term 2011, and on May 1, 2013, Facebook implemented a feature that resembled it. The approach deploys mutual aid of trusted friends—identified by each user—to veto suspicious activity. It improves on-the-ground user privacy and security without relying upon traditional regulatory approaches (see “Locked Out Of Facebook? Your Friends Will Soon Be Able To Help You Get Back In”).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, partnering with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is asking the public to identify examples of ideas similar to podcasting that were published before Oct. 2, 1996.