Today: Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee Meeting

Today the Berkman Center and Harvard Law School are hosting the Department of Homeland Security Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee Meeting, a public hearing for the US Department of Homeland Security on privacy and technology. The schedule is available here, and the general website is here.  Attendance is open to the public.  The meeting is in the Ropes-Gray room of Pound Hall, Harvard Law School (if you don't know where that is, here's a map of HLS campus).

Charles Nesson, the founder and co-Faculty Director of the Berkman Center and the William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, welcomed the advisory committee this morning.  Nesson illustrated the advisory committee's essential challenge as that of looking at a Necker Cube -- one can look at it one way or another, but can never perceive it both ways at the same time.  The challenge is, then, that the advisory committee can opt to see the protection of privacy and security as systems of permissions to cyberspace users, or the advisory committee can see the protection of privacy as the promotion of a culture of trust for cyberspace. Nesson's recommendation to the committee was for the latter -- to see their goal as the design and follow through on the most astute technological strategy, and to understand the strategy's success as being dependent on the world's support.  

Nesson's opening remarks are posted on his blog, Eon.