The letter to Mr. Cuomo was also signed by a founder of Meetup, Scott Heiferman; the scholars Yochai Benkler, Lawrence Lessig and Clay Shirky; and the founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, Andrew Rasiej, who is the chairman of the New York Tech Meetup.

via Technology Leaders Endorse Effort to Overhaul Campaign Finance – NYTimes.com.

The rise of low-cost, peer-to-peer transactions facilitated by the Internet presents challenges for privacy, yet regulation of it may be difficult due to the First Amendment, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor. He spoke Nov. 9 at a symposium on privacy and technology held by the Harvard Law Review.

via Zittrain: Peer-to-peer transactions risk privacy – FierceGovernmentIT.

Access is another biggie — to what extent is it in the country’s interest to be sure most people get fast Internet. Susan Crawford, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who focuses on internet access and worked for a time for the Obama Administration, says, “It’s being provided by a few giant companies that are almost laughably profitable, and the cable industry in particular faces no competition and they are actively constraining demand through usage based pricing and data caps so they don’t have to expand their services. Meanwhile, a third of Americans don’t sign up for Internet access because it’s too expensive and the country as a whole isn’t making the upgrade to fiber that many other countries are. This is a huge issue for the country and it’s going to confront this next administration.”

via Tech President, The Next Generation | Marketplace.org.

Would-be election monitors should be cognizant, however, of state laws about filming and photographing at polling places, says Harvard’s Citizen Media Law Project.

via ‘It’s a little bit like Yelp, for democracy’ – CNN.com.

“The privacy that libraries traditionally have been preserving is not always valued by their patrons, especially in an age of social networking,” says David Weinberger, co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, which was behind the Twitter experiment.

via As Libraries Go Digital, Sharing of Data Conflicts With Tradition of Privacy – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He’s the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.

via Internet Trolls | On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

What does sharia say about the issues that are relevant? What about voters who are interested in whether Islamic law could actually be relevant to the most pressing issues in this year’s presidential election? For the most part, there has been little in the way of authoritative, accessible information. Now, a newly published guide from islawmix offers one expert’s opinion on what Islamic law could have to say about the economy, healthcare, reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and more.

via Sarah Moawad: How Would the Prophet Muhammad Vote? You Might Be Surprised.

Superstorm Sandy turned out the lights along the Eastern Seaboard, but Twitter was ablaze with comments. Host Michel Martin looks at the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media during Sandy, including intentional hoaxes. She speaks with Rey Junco of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society about why some users spread misinformation.

via Why Some Spread Misinformation In Disasters | Minnesota Public Radio News.