Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies

Tuesday, March 8, 12:00pm ET **please note earlier time, Griswold Hall Room 110, Harvard Law School

The United States has moved large portions of business and commerce, including the control of critical infrastructure, onto IP-based networks. This reliance on information systems leaves the U.S. highly exposed and vulnerable to cyberattack, yet U.S. law enforcement remains focused on building wiretapping systems within communications infrastructure. By embedding eavesdropping mechanisms into communications technology itself, we build tools that could easily be turned against us. Indeed, such attacks have already occurred. In a world that has Al-Qaeda, nation-state economic espionage, and Hurricane Katrina, how do we get communications security right? Susan Landau is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the 2010-2011 academic year. Her book, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies was published by MIT Press in February 2011; she is also the co-author, with Whitfield Diffie, of the 1998 Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Rethink Music Conference

April 25-27, Boston, MA. Hosted and organized by the Berklee College of Music.

The Berklee College of Music, in association with Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Harvard Business School, will host the Rethink Music conference which will examine the business and rights challenges facing the music industry in the digital era and formulate solutions to promote the creation and distribution of new music and other creative works. Registration is now open. more information on our website>

Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw on The Internet, Young Adults and Political Participation around the 2008 Presidential Elections

How are online and offline political activities linked? Using data collected soon after the 2008 presidential elections on a diverse group of young adults from Obama's home city of Chicago, this presentation will look at the relationship of online and offline political engagement. Thanks to detailed information about political participation, political capital and Internet uses in addition to people's demographic and socioeconomic background, we are able to consider the relative importance of numerous factors in who was more or less likely to vote and engage in other types of political action. Watch the video or download the audio>

Sasha Costanza-Chock on Transmedia Mobilization

Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock — Berkman Fellow and Assistant Professor of Civic Media at MIT — introduces the theory of transmedia mobilization and invites us to rethink the relationship between social movements and the media opportunity structure. Based on five years of research within the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, the theory of transmedia mobilization involves engaging the social base of the movement in participatory media making practices across multiple platforms. This marks a transition in the role of social movement communicators from one of primarily content creation to aggregation, curation, remix, and recirculation of rich media texts through networked movement formations. Watch the video or download the audio