Nathan Freitas leads the Guardian Project, an open-source mobile security software project, and directs technology strategy and training at the Tibet Action Institute. His work at the Berkman Center focuses on tracking the legality and prosecution risks for mobile security app users and developers worldwide.
Source: 6 Ways Law Enforcement Can Track Terrorists in an Encrypted World | MIT Technology Review
COALA regroups academics, lawyers, technologists and entrepreneurs. Its founding members include Primavera De Filippi, research fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Constance Choi, founder of Seven Advisory; and Amor Sexton, an attorney at Adroit Lawyers.
Source: Commonwealth Bank of Australia Announces Blockchain Workshops
“Zero-rating is pernicious; it’s dangerous; it’s malignant,” Susan Crawford, codirector of Harvard’s Berkman Center, wrote earlier this year. “Regulators around the world are watching how the US deals with zero-rating, and we should outlaw it. Immediately. Unless it’s stopped, it’s not going to go away.”
A 2012 paper on youth and social movements, a collaboration between Lady Gaga’s Born this Way Foundation and Harvard University’s Berkman Center, found young people to be powerful agents for social change, crediting undocumented-youth sit-ins for convincing President Obama to grant DREAMers a reprieve from deportation in 2012. The paper’s author writes of youth activists primed to “call out or identify systems of oppression, speak up, and mobilize their peers.”
A recent study by Professor Urs Gasser and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society examines the diverse efforts to develop an Internet Bill of Rights. In “Towards Digital Constitutionalism? Mapping Attempts to Craft an Internet Bill of Rights,” Professor Gasser and his co-authors conduct an analysis of 30 initiatives that have sought to articulate a Bill of Rights for the Internet. The authors find that each of the distinct initiatives are “engaged in the same conversation, seeking to advance a relatively comprehensive set of rights, principles, and governance norms for the Internet, and are usefully understood as part of a broader proto-constitutional discourse.” “Towards Digital Constitutionalism?” provides a comparative examination of these diverse efforts toward digital constitutionalism, and provokes new questions for further research and study.
But back doors aren’t the answer, others say. Weakening security for everybody doesn’t automatically mean you can catch the bad guys, says Bruce Schneier, a cryptography and security expert who has authored 13 books. “This notion that encryption suddenly makes this impossible to uncover makes no sense. Encryption isn’t magic,” says Schneier, who is also chief technology officer at Resilient Systems, a cybersecurity company, and a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “If the FBI, or the Chinese government, or the [National Security Agency] wanted to get into your computer, they’d be in your computer” via advanced hacking.
Source: Rethinking privacy after the Paris attacks – MarketWatch
As David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, explains, “You’re not simply a consumer anymore. By connecting with other people, you become a participant in the life of the band.”
Source: The Generation That Doesn’t Remember Life Before Smartphones
The Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Yochai Benkler ’94 has written extensively on the “networked public sphere,” including his influential book, “The Wealth of Networks.” He spoke about his proposal for a defense of whistleblowers, his testimony in a trial of a well-known leaker of military documents, and a problem he calls a growing crisis in the country.
“The lack of that data had a significant effect on how people viewed the law enforcement system in this country, how do you hold that system accountable if you don’t know what it’s doing?” said Clarence Wardell, a Presidential Innovation Fellow and affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Source: How sharing police data can improve relationships with communities – CSMonitor.com
Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer who is a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and chief technology officer at the security firm Resilient Systems, said the Paris attacks may be used “to scare people” to weaken encryption. Schneier said leaked emails from September suggest that the US administration would seek to use a terror attack to get more public support for surveillance.
Source: Paris Attacks Revive Debate on Encryption, Surveillance | NDTV Gadgets360.com