Bravo to YouTube and CNN

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Tonight’s debate on CNN for the Democratic presidential hopefuls was a big step forward for the way campaigns are covered.  The producers deserve a lot of credit for the innovative format they introduced.  The videos they chose were terrific: authentic(-seeming, anyway) voices from ordinary voters speaking directly to candidates.  The final video, about “the candidate to your left,” was a brilliant parting shot.  The effect was at once to empower voters and to render more human the candidates.  I loved it.  Well done, CNN and YouTube/Google.

Sunshine Hillygus on Internet and Campaigns

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Prof. Sunshine Hillygus is presenting about her study of the persuadable voter here at SDP 2007. She has a book coming out with Princeton University Press shortly on her research. I asked her what the most surprising/biggest finding of her book is. She said that she is trying to get away from the question of “do campaigns matter?” to a more nuanced view of how the various actors (including voters and the candidates) are using new information in such a way that they change their minds, and one another’s minds, over the course of a campaign. She also alluded to the conclusion of the book, in which she is “sounding the alarm” about the hyper-targeting of voters based on the aggregation of new data elements and the used of these data to target individual voters in ways that raise privacy issues. I am eager to read the book!

Internet Filtering Session at the SDP 2007

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This morning — at the Summer Doctoral Program in Cambridge, MA — we’re taking up the topic of Internet filtering and the work of the ONI (and what we’ve written about in our forthcoming book from MIT Press, called Access Denied). Some of the questions that students raised about the topic and after reading our work on it:

– One student says that her dad read a copy of Dr. Zhivago, censored at the time in his country, where each page was accessible to him only as a photograph. One of her points, I think, is that history repeats itself and we should understand how this story is a repeat and where it is new and different than previous stories of censorship. One student suggests, as a follow-up: let’s test the hypothesis that the Internet is revolutionary. A second of her points, I take it, is that people will figure ways around censorship in clever ways.

– How do you measure filtering of the Internet and then analyze what you’ve learned in a way that informs decision-making?

– How do you measure the impact of filtering on access to knowledge?

– Do we need to have ISPs that act like common carrier who do not ever filter?

– What is the role of large countries as neighbors to smaller countries, raised by the possibility of in-stream filtering?

– What is the role of the commercial filtering providers?

– How can we determine whether the practice of Internet filtering violates a universal right to access information?

– How can we study how copyright and trademark owners carry out filtering?

– Is there legitimate filtering? (A student posits: there is legitimate filtering, including via search engine. This concept invokes what Urs Gasser blogged about, provocatively, at the ONI conference about “best practices in Internet filtering.”)

– How do we study the circumvention piece and include it in our story? What about developing the tools of circumvention?

– How do you overlay cultural differences on this survey?

– To what extent does control of communications facilitate control of other institutions, tools, or otherwise? To what extent is control of communications a priority for a given authority?

– When does one state have the right and/or ability to influence what another state does in this domain?

See Daithi and Ismael for more, better than what I’ve posted here.

Summer Doctoral Program(me) Comes to Cambridge

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In the course of the past 5 academic years, I’ve come to think that one of my favorite things that happens in our little world is the Summer Doctoral Program (or, Programme, as our friends at the Oxford Internet Institute, the OII). Three of the past five years it’s been in Oxford, where it was established by Bill Dutton and his team at the OII. Two years ago, it was in Beijing. This year, for the first time, it’s on American soil here at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

The SDP is for graduate students in Internet studies. The vast majority of students are ph.d. students. A few are lawyers, studying perhaps for a j.d. or an s.j.d. The 30+ members of the group are from many different places: this year’s group has every region of the world represented, I think. It’s a fun, interesting, serious two weeks of talking about our work, our areas of interest in future, our methodologies, and lots of other things.

It’s useful to me personally on many levels. I love to hear what 30+ ph.d. students are puzzling over. One of the big trends since 2003 has been the growth of projects related to web 2.0 and blogging and Wikipedia and so forth; the corresponding trend down has been the decrease in projects on copyright, DRM, and related concepts. Another big benefit is spending reflective time with these smart people as well as with my colleagues at OII (like Bill and Jonathan Zittrain), the University of St. Gallen (Urs Gasser and his team), and other guest faculty who join us (this year, a whole slew of Berkman fellows — Bill McGeveran and Dan Gillmor are already here; Henry Jenkins from MIT, and many other great people).

Expect lots of blogging, especially from Ismael of ICTology and the UOC in Barcelona. He’s working up a bibliography here, which I expect will become a great one.

Steve Gibson at the Anti-Spyware Coalition

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We have the great honor of hosting the ASC‘s third big public meeting here at the Harvard Law School. We’re grateful to Ari Schwartz and Ross Schulman for bringing the meeting to our campus. We’re proudly a member of ASC through our StopBadware project, which has grown into one of the biggest and most interesting projects at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Steve Gibson, the podcaster of Security Now! and InfoWorld columnist and computer developer and many other important things, is giving the keynote right now. Steve is recounting his personal experience in discovering spyware creeping onto the network and onto his PC, and leading to him coining the term “spyware.” He says his PC is his temple. He recalls having been “immediately pissed off” when PKZip for Windows brought “the first bit of nastiness” to his PC by trying to phone home. Steve says that that current story is the “Tyranny Of The Default” — default settings that are still not safe.  His stories evoke much the same picture that Jonathan Zittrain paints in his article, The Generative Internet, and his forthcoming book, The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It.

Berkman Books

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The faculty and fellows of the Berkman Center will publish four books this year. Two of them are out already: David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and John Clippinger’s A Crowd of One. In celebration of this high-water mark for the team, we’ve put together a new page on the Berkman web site called Berkman Books, which features most of the relevant books written by Berkman faculty and fellows since our founding nearly 10 years ago. We’ll keep it updated as new ones come online, such as the ONI‘s Access Denied (on Internet filtering) and Prof. Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It, both due out later this year.

IS2K7 Conference: Charlie's Avatar Speaking

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In real life, Prof. Charles Nesson has been flat on his back the last few days, sadly just in time for the conference that he’s spent a year or more pulling together. It’s the 2007 Internet & Society conference, this time on the topic of University. His co-chair, Charles Ogletree, has done a masterful MC-ing job in Charlie’s (physical) absence. The virtual Charlie has been very much present, though: eon, and his Second Life avatar, have been in the ether throughout the event. And blogging it. Charlie, we miss you, eon, we’re thrilled you’re here in the room.

OpenNet Initiative Study, New Web Site Released

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I couldn’t be more excited about the release today of our new ONI web site and the release of our first global study.  We’re here in Oxford, England, at what my colleague Ron Deibert calls “the first ONI Woodstock, without the drugs.”  The headline of the study is a substantial growth in the scale, scope and sophistication of Internet filtering worldwide, in 25 of the 41 states in which we tested.

OpenNet Initiative Conference, Study Release This Week

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We’re gearing up this week to host our first big Internet filtering conference this week, which is already oversubscribed. The event is taking place in Oxford, England, hosted by our partners at the Oxford Internet Institute, in cooperation with our other partners at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and the University of Cambridge’s Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme. At this event, we will release the full set of data from the first-ever global survey of Internet filtering. In many ways, this release is the culmination of five years of work, since the ONI partners began testing for Internet filtering back in about 2002. The work is thanks to a number of grants, most notably a $3 million grant to ONI from the MacArthur Foundation, as well as key gifts from OSI, IDRC, the Ford Foundation, and others.

Feel free to add a question for discussion to the online question tool.

An even more complete version of this story, including chapters that set the data in context, will appear in our book, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Internet Politics, will be released this fall by MIT Press.