Berkman Klein Center For Internet And Society: Audio Fishbowl

Predictive algorithms can often outperform humans in making legal decisions. But when used to automate or guide decisions, predictions can embed biases, conflict with a "right to explanation," and be manipulated by litigants. HLS Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law Ryan Copus suggests we should instead use predictive algorithms to identify unjust decisions and subject them to secondary review. For more info about this event visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-04-02/machines-learning-find-injustice

In her new book, How We Win, Farah Pandith, a world-leading expert and pioneer in countering violent extremism, lays out a comprehensive strategy for how we can defeat the growing extremist threat, once and for all. From technology companies and entrepreneurs to businesses in the private sector, she says, this is an all-encompassing global issue that we must address together. For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-03-25/bkc-meet-author-series-urs-gasser-conversation-farah-pandith

Author Nanjala Nyabola speaks with BKC Fellow james Wahutu about Nanjala's book, Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya. The book explores of efforts to contain online activism, new methods of feminist mobilization, and how “fake news,” Cambridge Analytica, and allegations of hacking contributed to tensions around the 2017 elections. For more about this event visit:https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-03-12/digital-democracy-analogue-politics

Roger McNamee is the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. He is joined by Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Facebook, Google and other internet platforms employ a business model – surveillance capitalism – that is undermining public health, democracy, privacy, and innovation in unprecedented ways. They use persuasive technology to manipulate attention for profit and they use surveillance to build data sets with the goal of influencing user behavior. The negative externalities of internet platforms are analogous to those of medicine in the early 20th century and chemicals in the mid-20th century, situations that required substantial regulatory intervention. For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-26/waking-internet-platform-disaster

In this talk, Professor Woodrow Hartzog argues that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Against the often self-serving optimism of Silicon Valley and the inertia of tech evangelism, privacy gains will come from better rules for products, not users. The current model of regulating use fosters exploitation. Hartzog speaks on the need to develop the theoretical underpinnings of a new kind of privacy law that is responsive to the way people actually perceive and use digital technologies. The law can demand encryption. It can prohibit malicious interfaces that deceive users and leave them vulnerable. It can require safeguards against abuses of biometric surveillance. It can, in short, make the technology itself worthy of our trust. For more info about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-03-05/privacys-blueprin

Why has the Internet had such a powerful impact? What are the challenges that may cause the Internet of tomorrow to be significantly less revolutionary than the Internet to date? This talk provides a history of the reasons for and the technology of the Internet. Scott Bradner has worked in the areas of computer programming, system management, networking, IT security, and identity management at Harvard for 50 years. He was involved in the design, operation and use of data networks at Harvard University since the early days of the ARPANET. He was involved in the design of the original Harvard data networks, the Longwood Medical Area network (LMAnet) and New England Academic and Research Network (NEARnet).  He was founding chair of the technical committees of LMAnet, NEARnet and the Corporation for Research and Enterprise Network (CoREN). Mr. Bradner served in a number of roles in the IETF. He was the co-director of the Operational  Requirements Area (1993-1997), IPng Area (1993-1996), Transport Area (1997-20

A recent wave of worker actions at major tech firms have challenged company contracts with the Pentagon, ICE, and other government agencies; organized for safe and equitable workplaces, free from sexual harassment and discrimination; and demanded better wages, benefits, and working conditions for both white and blue collar contractors. Scholar and a founding editor of Logic magazine Moira Weigel places these actions in context, drawing on several years of research and writing on the movement. She proposes that these actions point to the need for new frameworks for interpreting the culture or world view of the tech industry—frameworks beyond "The Californian Ideology" that has dominated since the 1990s. She shares several recently proposed alternatives for thinking about "tech work" (e.g. platform capitalism, surveillance capitalism, data colonialism) that members of tech worker organizations themselves have studied and drawn on. This talk is moderated by recent Berkman Klein Fellow, Yarden Katz. More info

Professor Jonathan Zittrain discusses the social media giant’s ‘long year’ with Facebook's head of global policy management Monika Bickert. Citing his sense of the “pessimism and near-despair that permeate our feelings about social media,” Zittrain opens the conversation by recalling a September 2017 discussion in which he and Bickert looked at the rise of white nationalism and the first indications of how social media manipulation had been at play in the 2016 elections. Since then, of course, more information about fake accounts and online attacks has come to light. Learn more about this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-12-03/state-online-speech-and-governance

Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In "The Smart Enough City," Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2019-02-19/smart-enough-city

After two decades of little direct legislation of the internet, national laws and related court decisions meant to govern cyberspace are rapidly proliferating worldwide. They are becoming building blocks in new legal frameworks that will shape the evolution of Internet governance and policymaking for years to come. In the Global South and particularly under repressive regimes, these frameworks can be imposed with little regard for human rights obligations and without a full understanding of the technologies and processes they regulate or their implications for the preservation of the core values of the internet: interoperability, universality, and free expression and the free flow of information. In this panel, practitioners from five international organizations monitoring the development of legislation and case law related to cyberspace discuss the implications for the future of human rights online. Moderator: Robert Faris Panelists: Dr. Hawley Johnson (Project Manager for Columbia Global Freedom of Exp

Technology is the American mythos (Dinerstein 2006); a belief system powering the relations between—and politics of—culture and technology. In the Western context, technoculture incorporates Whiteness, White racial ideology, and modernist technological beliefs. This presentation is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting “race-as-technology” (Chun 2009) to incorporate Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things." Utilizing critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this presentation employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic. Learn more about this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-12-04/my-constellation-space-towards-theory-black-cyberculture

Perspectives from Europe and the US on a Law and Policy Agenda Digital technologies affect the lives of billions of people around the world daily. The decisions of private platforms and tech developers — and the public institutions that regulate their conduct — can shape public discourse, with profound impacts on democracy, liberty, autonomy, and governance. This panel provides a broad overview of the landscape for regulating cutting-edge digital technologies in Europe and the US. The discussion focuses on mechanisms for ensuring tech developers and platforms build and deploy their products and services in a manner that is consistent with fundamental human rights, including the rights to freedom of expression and privacy. Panelists bring a wealth of experience to the table and will address considerations with respect to the role that strategic litigation, legislation and regulation, and multi-stakeholder initiatives that operate outside of government can play in setting a human rights tech agenda. Topics o

Infectious disease emergencies are opportunities to test the efficacy of newly developed interventions — for example, drugs, vaccines, and treatment regimens. Yet they raise many intertwined challenges around politics, logistics, ethics, and study design. In this talk — part of our Digital Health @ Harvard series — Professor Marc Lipsitch describes his work on computer simulation of vaccine trials during epidemics to assess options for trial design, as well as some of his recent work on the ethics of trials in emergencies, and stimulates discussion on the intersection of these two topics to help disentangle ethical from political and logistical concerns, as well as to reduce the time pressure to make a decision and encourage rational deliberation by future stakeholders. Find out more info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-27/computer-simulations-enhance-vaccine-trials

Have forces been unleashed that are thrusting humanity down an ill-advised path, one that’s increasingly making us behave like simple machines? Brett Frischmann discusses what’s happening to our lives as society embraces big data, predictive analytics, and supposedly smart environments. He explains how the goal of designing programmable worlds goes hand in hand with engineering predictable and programmable people. For more information, visit https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-13/re-engineering-humanity

Assessing Government Development, Deployment, & Use of Tech Tools A close look at the inner workings of government, with a particular focus on the ways in which federal, state, and local government institutions leverage technology and technical resources to best serve citizens. Alvand Salehi and Kathy Pham bring deep expertise in federal and state government deployment of technology and in establishing policies within government to foster and promote responsible tech development initiatives. They share stories from their time in government and offer thoughts on best practices for government institutions developing approaches to technology development and procurement that enhance the provision of government services.  The event is moderated by Berkman Klein Center co-director, Chris Bavitz. For more info on this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-06/state-government-technology

Platforms, Content Moderation, & the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media In this talk, author Tarleton Gillespie discusses how social media platforms police what we post online – and the societal impact of these decisions. He flips the story to argue that content moderation is not ancillary to what platforms do; it is essential, definitional, and constitutional. Given that, the very fact of moderation should change how we understand what platforms are. For more information, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-30/custodians-internet

Virginia Eubanks joins us for a rousing conversation about her timely and provocative book, Automating Inequality. In Automating Inequality, Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. "This book is downright scary,” says Naomi Klein, “but with its striking research and moving, indelible portraits of life in the ‘digital poorhouse,’ you will emerge smarter and more empowered to demand justice.” More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-23/automating-inequality

Rachel Gershon — Senior Associate at the Center for Health Law and Economics at UMass Medical School — discusses the nature of disability and disability determination; the resulting limitations in data availability; and implications for public policy. This year, several states applied for and received permission from the federal government to implement work requirements in their Medicaid programs. Policy designs vary by state, but all states build in considerations for people with disabilities. These considerations include exemptions and exceptions from work requirements for individuals unable to work due to a disability. Due to the nature of disability and the nature of disability determination processes, states will face limitations in identifying all individuals who are unable to work due to a disability. Medical claims do not necessarily provide enough information to determine a person’s ability to work. Medical diagnoses and disability determinations both can lag symptoms by months or years. As a resul

Universities have automated many aspects of teaching, instruction, student services, libraries, personnel management, building management, and finance, leading to a profusion of discrete data about the activities of individuals. Universities see great value of these data for learning analytics, faculty evaluation, strategic decisions, and other sensitive matters. Commercial entities, governments, and private individuals also see value in these data and are besieging universities with requests for access. In this talk, Christine L. Borgman discusses the conflicts & challenges of balancing obligations for stewardship, trust, privacy, confidentiality – and often academic freedom – with the value of exploiting data for analytical and commercial purposes. For more information about this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-09/open-data-grey-data-and-stewardship Photo by @AlyssaAGoodman

The Berkman Klein Center's geek team helps build amazing tools that help us study the Internet and advance the public interest. In this talk they discuss and demo some of the tools we produce, including TagTeam and Media Cloud. Learn more about this event: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-10-02/software-social-good