 Hello everyone, welcome to the first Berkman luncheon in the new academic year. It's my great pleasure to welcome you all. My name is Urs Goster, I serve as the Executive Director of the Berkman Center. This is a very special event today. It's part of a Berkman Orientation Week, one could say. We've pulled up on the screen the different events that we pulled together this year to give you an opportunity to better understand what Berkman is doing. To keep it very brief, I think it's the most amazing place in the world, so I encourage you really to attend our events and learn more about it. Yeah, applause, please, come on. It's like a rock concert. No, it's really a fantastic place and I'm delighted to see so many familiar and new faces in the room. We're very much looking forward to the presentation by our faculty chair, Professor Jonathan Citrain, who will give us an introduction to the Berkman Center as a co-founder and now faculty chair, but also I think highlight some of the projects and hopefully this will be a very interactive session. So with that, thank you, Jonathan, over to you. Thank you, Urs, and welcome, everybody. Thank you for spending some of your hunger with us. I hope we've been able to alleviate it in some way. And I realize that for some of you, you may have classes at one, so we will not be offended should you walk out in time for your one o'clock class, although I also realize it might be over-determined. You could be both upset and bored and have a one o'clock class and we would never know it, but that's okay. So I wanted today to talk a little bit about the Berkman Center. It's not an easy thing to do. In past years, when we've done orientations like these, we've tried to put it all on one evening, and the range of activities of the Berkman Center and the people involved, many of you here are already involved, is so broad, so kaleidoscopic that it becomes reminiscent of one person's description of history as one damn thing after another. And in some ways, that's what the Berkman Center is. So we're doing our best to kind of blunt the relentless quality of describing to you as a way of inviting you to participate everything that we're doing, and instead thought we would have kind of an orientation season, or at least week, and you can see here a number of activities for which if you missed the internet policy symposium at the Kennedy School, that's okay. It's going to be on C-SPAN, and so if half of you watch it, we will break records on C-SPAN. Not since the Agriculture Committee hearing of 2002 will there be so many people watching. And then here we are at the open Tuesday luncheon. What makes a luncheon? I don't know, but Wikipedia probably does. But then this luncheon has just become a lunch, because Charlie Nessen is not here. But the food tastes just as good, which is not to say that it tastes good, it just tastes just as good. So anyway, what we're doing is we're going to have the introductory part today, where we'll talk a little bit, and then tomorrow is sort of the science fair-like research showcase, though I cannot promise a baking soda lava display, but there will be a showcase here on campus in a mystery location. It's up to you to find out where it is. Milstein. What's that? Milstein, I'm told. And Milstein, aren't we in Milstein? Yeah. Oh, so similar time, somewhat different time, similar place for the research showcase, where each of the projects will have a chance to tell you more individually what they're about. You can kind of be like a skeptical consumer going up to each one and like, why should I give my brain cycles to you? And then by the end of the evening, realize, while you may be a consumer of information, maybe you shouldn't be a skeptical consumer, this is a chance to join one of many projects, and that showcase will be a great chance to learn more about them in a more systematic way. We have the Dipsy Digital Problem Solving Initiative kickoff at the formerly known as Huggsy, the Harvard Graduate School of Education on the 11th. I don't know, Urs, if you want to just say something quickly about that, do you still have the mic? Yeah, I can say more about it. So that's a kickoff event for a university-wide initiative where we bring together students with mentors to work on concrete opportunities and occasionally problems that we can solve here in our Harvard community. So students in particular please join us to learn more about it and check out the website. Will there be food? There will be food, for sure, yes, free pizza. There will now, yes. So eventually students then, yeah. Excellent. And then you can see wrapping around to next week, there is the Special Electronic Frontier Foundation Berkman Cyber Law Pub Trivia Night. Kurt Upsall of EFF, do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Sorry to catch you mid-sandwich. That is a huge piece of lettuce. Yeah, so come next Monday to the Cyber Law Pub quiz, we will ask questions, trivial questions about law and technology policy, and then join together in teams and see who knows the most trivial thing. Is there a prize? Honor. You get the amazing honor of winning. Oh, that's too bad. I thought there was going to be a prize. And then finally we'll hear from the Berkman geeks with their technical project showcase. Sebastian, where are you? Where's our chief geek? We're in a lovely Nantucket pink. That's just for those watching the webcast in black and white. I wanted them to know. For which I should also remind you this is all being recorded and put on our permanent records, so be aware. Yes. So we're running a technical showcase and we're going to demonstrate what technologies we use to get the technical work done at the Berkman Center. Those include many projects that you've heard of, maybe Media Cloud or H2O or Chilling Effects or Tag Team, some of these tools that you've used and some that maybe you haven't. And we're going to be showcasing the technology that we use. So if you've heard of some of the languages like Ruby or PHP or Node.js or something like that. Lisp. If you've heard of Ruby. Just parenthetically, I won't forget it. Sorry. You have to drop the mic. Yeah. All right. Moving right along, so we have all of these events to help ease us in and you can pick and choose whatever you like. Basically the idea is sometimes I feel like if I used to read Wired Magazine, I guess everyone used to read Wired Magazine. Or some of those magazines like The Economist which is like one damn thing after another and you start to just feel this learned helplessness of there's too much going on in the world and nobody's noticing me or what can I do, that kind of thing. We don't want that to be the case. So each of these instances is meant to be participatory to have a chance to draw you in and if there's any point of connection with almost anything going on over the course of the next week or so, we hope that you'll have a chance to find it. So let me give you just a little bit of background about the Berkman Center and as I'm doing it, I've asked Shailen Thomas here, my intrepid research associate, saved from being a 1L this very month by signing up for full-time research work and you don't regret it, do you Shailen? Not yet. Yes. Very good. Let's see how long the lunch lasts. So I've asked Shailen to be able to Google some of the stuff that I'm talking about so you don't have to. So think back to 1997. Those were good times. The West Wing was enjoying one of its early seasons on television. People remember television. Programs would come on. You'd watch them, that kind of thing. And it looked like maybe there might be something to this internet thing at a time when we had been mostly exposed to copy-serve, AOL, Prodigy, the source, MCI mail, things like that. All these pay services and this internet was sort of coming into prominence and there were folks who studied, oh yeah, that's, copy-serve still exists as the walking dead. They use Lisp. Yes, they use Lisp. They're showing all the banner ads so other sites don't have to. But anywho, in 1997 the state of kind of cyber law such as it was was, it was not in high gear. There were lots of ways of asking questions that would say, here's a new computer-like phenomenon. Now what? Or is there a law against this? Is there a law against this? There might be. That is all. And that would prepare young lawyers for writing memos of exactly that sort and then sending exorbitant bills afterwards. And then a guy named Larry Lessig came along and long before there was tweet-length sensitivity came up with something even shorter than a tweet, a bumper sticker really, in which he declared Code is Law in this famous article responding to Judge Easterbrook who had said that cyber law doesn't really exist. It's like the law of the horse. And we have no horse law. He had to remind everybody, you can't take a class in that. Instead, contracts will tell you about selling horses and tort will tell you about stealing them or hurting them, and crime will tell you about stealing them, won't they? Well, you'll find out if you're one out. Anyway, there's no law of the horse. Why should there be a law of the computer? So Frank Easterbrook wrote this article in 1996. Larry Lessig wrote a response trying to take up this challenge directly. I have, you know, Frank Easterbrook is coming back to this campus to deliver the Scalia lecture in November and I have asked if he would be willing to do a retrospective conversation with Larry Lessig entitled, Larry Was Right. And I haven't heard from him yet, but I'm willing to tweak the details if he is and we'll see if we can make that happen. But Larry's basic point distilled into a book that's now gone through two versions and is available free and open online. I think codev2.cc was that what makes this space so special is less the law part. It's because code is law too and the constraints that we encounter in the world often determine our behavior, both limiting it and incenting us to other behaviors just as much or maybe even more strongly than a law does, but more subtly and we don't notice it as much as we tend to protest against it the way we would against a law that we don't like. And he says that makes it very powerful, a very special dynamic across many areas and that's why we should be studying the code as much as we might be studying the law and the institutions producing the code because often this code ends up as a platform. It's something that everybody might be or many people sharing together at once. It's not just a little code here and code there. So figuring out who was making the code and how they might be influenced or what their goals might be really did turn kind of cyber law as a field around and made it broader than just any study of old law and that's one reason why over the years the Berkman Center founded around 97, 98 at a time when it was recommended to be called the Center on Law and Technology just to hedge our bets. We ended up saying no, Internet and Society, so far that's proved pretty good and now it's a university-wide center precisely because the methodologies we would use, the things we study go so far beyond just what's studied in the halls of this business school-like looking part of the law school. We do have a little B-school NB which is now satisfied, I believe, by the Milstein complex. So asking the question of what if no one owned the code? The code still might influence us but what if no one owned it? Is that even possible to have unowned code? And the answer turns out to be yes. Richard Stallman over at MIT really was a pioneer of what he would later insist to be called the free software movement free as in speech, not as in beer and the idea that you could release code into the wild, others could modify it, fork it, come up with new versions and before you know it, it's everywhere and as some might remember from last spring a module of code called OpenSSL passed around from one website to another and one web server to another like a Christmas fruitcake. If you want the website to communicate securely why not pull OpenSSL off the shelf? It is free as in beer and as in speech and it turns out that the graduate student in Germany who maintained it had a mistake in it, a mistake that meant it was hackable and in fact not only hackable but you could find out random pieces of stuff on any server running it and if you were assiduous enough you could basically slurp nearly everything in the server's memory. Bruce Schneier is sort of giving me you're not really getting this precise pedantic move but I respect that in Bruce Schneier, although am I right Bruce that on a scale of one to ten in terms of internet security breach in Hartley and 11? I did. Do you regret it? No, at the time the uncertainty was so high it was the right thing to do and there was a complicated fix. How would you rate it now? Four, six. Okay, so it's kind of the Ebola of it's like we get really worried it's very lurid but it turns out it may be up a piece with other major cyber security problems. Let me just double check with Andy Ellis on the scale of one to ten. Where's Hartley? Probably more of an eight or a nine. Alright, so panel discussion right after the Easterbrook-lessic debate for different reasons. It turns out it's semantics and we all actually agree. Very good. We don't have to have the debate after all. So anyway just think about that fact though like we don't find it weird that some German graduate student makes a mistake and like the Bank of America is brought to its knees and everybody's panicking for a matter of weeks about an insecure internet. If that doesn't feel weird to you I say you haven't thought about it enough it's very, very weird and that open source and free software also is recognized in this weird collective hallucination network that we call the internet that is a set of protocols by which anybody wanting to join the internet can communicate and anybody can build an app on top of it which is why famously the internet has no main menu, no CEO no director of customer service no abuse desk no board of directors and no capitalization. That also strikes me as weird it just has kind of stewards loraxes who speak for the trees some of whom I think are in this room Lynn St. Amour are you here? Is Lynn here? former president of the internet society ISOC am I getting right the description of the internet? This is your chance to tell me I'm not sort of just nodding affirmatively in a way that says please don't ask me a follow up question so Lynn is a great example of somebody in the Boston area I hope soon to be affiliated formerly with Berkman who has run an organization for a decade that has not controlled the internet not even built the internet but just tried to be sort of the watering hole the umbrella under which a lot of salutary activities can take place that results in the building of the internet and ditto for the web a guy named Tim who happens to work down the street at MIT at the time taking time off from thinking about particle physics was like there ought to be a web and like here's a server here's a client you can start building web pages and start browsing them and it started working and you end up with a web and you can put anything on the web because it's just a protocol and I'm sure Tim would be open to your putting up your website but you don't have to consult with him in order to have the hamster dance or cats that look like Hitler other sites out of the Kittlers now too soon but it's just one of those things where you can pretty much do whatever you want and just get the top, the best Kittlers not the latest, there's a few that are look at that one, oh my god alright well now that we've offended nearly everybody moving right along this is the kind of phenomenon we're trying to study and it is truly a gift that keeps on giving and it is the gift that keeps inviting us to build upon it not just to study it but to be part of the contact sport that is building and existing online whether you're writing code whether you are writing content things like Wikipedia it's no surprise it didn't come out of academia can you imagine the committee meetings about wait a minute it's going to be a compendium of all knowledge we need to consult Borges first and instead a guy named Jimbo running a search engine that made some money is like let's do Wikipedia and he starts off with new which is a model of commissioning people to write articles like experts and he ended up with like seven articles and nehh Penyer what are you going to do and then the back room was a wiki where people could make edits to them and the wiki soon took over the whole project and you ended up with Wikipedia and there was a time when it looked like it was only good for canonical descriptions of start-track episodes and then it moved beyond that and looking at phenomena like that shows that the kind of contribution the internet invites is not just nerdly it is at the content layer and the artistic layer and the rhetorical layer as well so if I had to try to give a kind of framework for the sorts of things the Berkman Center studies I want to tell you about three rough areas that describe more or less what we do and then a number of stances or approaches that we take to studying it that tries descriptively to capture the great variety of things you're going to hear about should you go tomorrow to the showcase and the first area I would say is platforms platforms being those commonalities in a technological environment that can greatly empower people who want to contribute to it and greatly shape the uses of that environment and our studies of platforms range from the owned platforms we were one of the first to really dig into the Microsoft case as it unfolded at the end of the 1990s Larry was dubbed special master in the case for a while until the DC circuit had some reason to rule that cases should be heard by Article 3 lifetime tenure holding judges rather than some random guy the judge appointed as a special master I don't know why and that includes any provision of Internet access Susan Crawford are you here today? Susan so how worried should we be about the way in which we get our broadband is it sort of like look there's Wi-Fi there's LTE or whatever the kids are cooking up these days in the relevant engineering groups and yeah there's no choice or is it something that the future might not resemble this wonderfully bountiful present no choice and I might not be on Susan Crawford one of our faculty directors in residence all year and teaching a number of classes here there was being stentorian and no one could hear me what's the point? you were very John Kerry like but what you were saying is two thirds of Americans will have no choice that always confused me when is it one choice no choice other than other than they have their for broadband and that is a problem is what you're saying and you're working on it well I think the whole country is working on it and a lot of mayors are working on it and you're also working on municipal platforms right exactly fiber access in America needs to take off in cities and that's where the Berkman Center is quite active in coordinating mayors across Massachusetts and ultimately across the country Massachusetts should lead the country in fiber as it did in health care so with the so-called Internet Hourglass you might learn about in Susan's class or in my class which this year is being held at Stanford and the Harvard students will be flown to Stanford by Stanford for the three weeks of January term so that should be fun you'll hear about the Internet Hourglass that's an example of platforms at like the hardware and protocol layer but it's true all the way up the so-called stack so like Michael Papish I see is here Michael you've been at this for a long time you did a startup called media unbound many years ago how did that work out it took about a ten year long startup to do music recommendations and the finding was you should stay away from the music industry it's not a fun place to work another satisfied customer but you got bought right and that's where we learned that the saving grace of having patented the entire EPG television grid is that no one conceives a television grid anymore so luckily those patents will hopefully not be so important so Roe v is like a patent troll masquerading as a company sure let's yes that's probably about correct okay yes we'll see you at the deposition that'll be great I hope your stock has vested so those interested in startups to the extent that you could be thinking about the larger ecosystem at the time you're doing this thing that your confidence will change the world seems great and that's one way in which our relationship with the iLab over at the B school or near the B school is so fruitful that we tend to be thinking about the larger ecosystem and the ways in which all those great ideas being cooked up over there and elsewhere may fit in so platforms is one zone that we're really interested in I would put privacy as another current area that captures a lot of what the Birken Center is doing whether that is privacy foregrounded against governments these days because of Snowden's leaks and such or whether it's corporate privacy with firms like Axiom I don't know Sarah Marie Watson you want to just tell us something quickly about Axiom that will inform and puzzle us well there's a lot of data that's coming offline so there's this whole thing called onboarding which is matching up all of our those CVS cards and all these response to finally my loyalty to my loyalty card will be rewarded by matching it up with all your other digital information so so that what can happen we can do all kinds of things like target people for predatory loans for making them or obtaining them I see alright so that can be referred directly to our predatory loan clinic and another kind of nice link between the Birken Center and the rest of the law school so corporate privacy another issue and you might put in that category something like the right to be forgotten recently recognized by the European Court of Justice trying to sort that out as best I can tell Google was like OMG when that came down and they're starting the process that figure out how to implement it we have many scholars fellows here thinking that through trying to figure out is it good is it bad the right to be forgotten threat or menace and but they're really on all sides of that debate and also just wanting to get the data what kind of requests are being made what kind of requests are being granted how could you document that without it being a stick in the eye of the right to be forgotten here are the things that have recently been forgotten so we're thinking about that and people like Wendy Seltzer and Adam Holland of our trillion effects project and others are working on that kind of stuff and finally it might be worth thinking about peer to peer privacy which is to say as things like Google Glass and civilian drones get more and more common it's much harder to think about defending your privacy against your neighbor who will see the right to record and to send a drone somewhere is like a first amendment right and we have folks thinking about that Jesse Rossman are you here today Jesse did you not make it over I guess not two folks from the ACLU of Massachusetts are wanting to teach a study group this year at the Berkman Center which you have a chance to enroll in on when the first amendment needs the fourth amendment or when the first amendment meets privacy expectations and how we can think about balancing with Google Glass and drones and such those sorts of things the titanium collection you need your thing to be titanium so when the fist hits it you don't have to send it back under warranty so very good stuff so that's sort of privacy and Solil are you here Solil? and you're doing a great project on privacy tools for research so Professor Vadawany tell us just quickly about that over from the CS perspective I don't think so can the computer science professor turn on the microphone awkward it's analog it is zero and one that's true yeah the the big problem is that anonymization doesn't work you strip the data set of identifiers and often people still can be identified and that's a big problem for researchers who want to share data with each other for replication the companies have never gotten in trouble for sharing research data or experimenting on their users right? maybe I'll defer that question to the legal side of the project but the point is that there is hope for better solutions coming from a mixture of computer science and law and other approaches it's a fascinating project I should also add that Solil runs our circus our center for research on computation and society over at CS so a number of folks thinking about these things yeah that's right there's a massive center of the Berkman center based over in the school of engineering just hop in and skip away very close by here and we welcome the entire Berkman community at all of our activities in particular our lunch seminar series you can see some of the upcoming talks there on the right hand bar and there's Bruce Schneier here very good thank you Solil and I should say too I think in approximately one minute this is really like a disastrous thing for me to say in the context of this presentation but I think in one minute Apple is about to unveil its new like health watch it's like you've seen companies like basis and jaw bone up do it but now watch us do it and it'll be very interesting to see what sort of privacy rules they have about that kind of data and I think about it not just in terms of your personal privacy what happens to all that telemetry that your eye watch is soon going to be health kit it's called not eye watch health kit is the framework for storing the data so health kit not to be confused with Heath kit which was when you could build your own clock but health kit how is that framework going to protect privacy and how do we think about it collectively when you can start asking such interesting questions once everybody buys or steals one like is the city of Cleveland upset tonight you know generally speaking are they awake so jaw bone the up folks did a neat little thing from the jaw bone up personal data gathering quantified selfie things yep there they are they're so fashionable earthquake jaw bone earthquake I love how we're just nominating searches to do that should be our pub trivia to have who has the best Google so yeah that's it that's it click click click click very exciting I get carried away damn you non-neutral internet where is this link when you need it but yeah yeah all right there we go corpus image of sleep deprivation followed by this wonderful chart which actually shows you where the epicenter of the earthquake was for breakage purposes because in Napa look how many more people were jolted awake at 3 a.m. than say in Modesto and Santa Cruz so this is the kind of data that if you're looking to figure out where to deploy your next riot police this could also be of interest for which the health kit framework may not have anticipated those kinds of requests and thinking about how that data should be treated what should be thought of as a private custody or public all of that falls within sort of the things that many of the people here are interested in the third kind of substantive area I think to identify is surprisingly public discourse there are so many ways in which just in a short period of time really might peg it from 2004 2006 or so the rise of Facebook and Twitter in the United States the public discourse has been changed how the agenda is set on what to think about if you think about where you go to figure out what you should be worried about really isn't that what news is what should I be worried about today fewer and fewer people getting it from television and traditional media and even that media getting its agenda set from what's trending on Twitter and Facebook and it makes you wonder for example if Facebook should decide in the interests of public safety that there's enough rioting going on in Ferguson and these posts about it are just getting people angrier and angrier and possibly more violent so let us dial down any posts about Ferguson do we have a problem with that is that yes and how about if they say damn the ice bucket challenge there's just too many of those in the name of consumer sanity and making a better product with more relevant results we're going to dial down ice buckets do we have a problem with that please when can we start so sorting out the difference of decisions that the companies might be making that in one place we cheer on and the other we don't that maybe get to motive or these sort of intangible things really tricky questions that relate back to the platforms thing because often we are getting our news from one of a handful of sources many of which now are being assiduously astroturfed rather than grassroots by organizations that realize the power of authenticity and if you can fake that you've got it made and that's what they're working on I think public discourse is also an opportunity to think about the role of academia in this world academia had a role in building the internet much of its protocols came from researchers who did not seek to patent what they came up with and saw it as contributing to a common wheel academia is in a tricky place today there are many outside of it who adopt its forms and functions chalkboard is covered in chalk for example that may not subscribe to the ideals of neutrality such as it is in our post-modern world or a recourse to facts and to rigorous argument and to find oh look at that it's hard though to really get it going autocomplete another issue that we can look at so I love Professor Beck there doing his thing and again ideologically speaking there is no shortage of this form of truthiness across the spectrum and thinking about it both outside of academia and thinking about the role of academia and does it stand apart from simply being yet another dog in the fight are some of the things I think that we look to ask here and we have a number of projects our Harvard open access project which Peter Suber I don't know if you're here you're thinking about how to get information freely available among scholars out to the public in ways that don't lock it up so that it can't be part of the debate I don't know if there's anything else you want to add about open access at Harvard and what you're working on Harvard has open access policies providing free online access to new scholarly articles written and published by Harvard and interestingly those policies take the form of mandates of requirements that faculty must lodge their papers in the depositories and open archives unless of course they protest and say they don't really want to in which case they can get a waiver they can get a waiver but the waiver only applies to the granted rights to Harvard we still require deposit into the depository but in the coming bad years we can have the seed bank in Norway and the paper bank so we can reconstruct society on the basis of it sometimes we get permission to distribute apart from the policy and then we can open it in any case usually 95% of Harvard faculty don't choose the waiver so we get rights instantly as soon as we get the article we have other projects you'll find out about tomorrow like media cloud tracing how memes make their way through society and a lot of people thinking about civic life, civic discourse Kate Contreras I don't know if you're here one of our new fellows looking at how to get people more civically oriented in life that kind of thing and our youth and media project which is working really hard to think about when folks are young this is something the record industry thought it could try to do in the early 2000s to change the course of copyright history where they had a report come out I don't know if you can oh yeah, there's the media project the copyright office in the UK came out with a report about how to make people respect copyright more and the idea was get them to respect it when they're younger by urging them to place the copyright symbol on their schoolwork as they turn it in to really take ownership and say that a B plus should be an unauthorized derivative work you can only make this an A so all sorts of ways in which we're thinking about public discourse, open access libraries such as our MetaLab all sorts of things that you should keep an eye out for okay so those are sort of the three main areas let me just talk briefly about the stances which we tend to approach this generally I've already adverted to building and not just writing a lot of the Berkman Center projects build stuff online and sees what happens which sometimes results in interesting telephone calls with the office of the general council but they usually end happily and often results in spin-offs will start something off here and then let it find its way in the world creative commons began at the Berkman Center in fact began a sort of a consolation prize after we lost the Eldred case Eldred versus Reno at first and then Eldred versus Ashcroft challenging a retroactive extension of copyright for another 20 years and it's been about 20 years so we're going to be interested to see if they come back for another retroactive extension but in the meantime creative commons was one of the things that came out of that now thriving you've probably used it or benefited from it Global Voices another project that began at the Berkman Center about getting voices you might not normally hear able to set up on a blogging platform and blogging platforms were still pretty new and as you can see it's totally routine now with the intrusive pop-ups and would you like to make the world a better place yes or not now and Stop Badware another organization that works on dealing with malware and dealing with lists of sites that might be inadvertently dealing out malware that then Google warns you from clicking on which then destroys the businesses of the sites in question which then turn out to be in denial about whether they're dealing out malware and they talk to Stop Badware about it and usually that ends happily and the digital public library of America another sort of great organization started at Berkman so a lot of those things that sort of just stayed here and then find their own way that's one stance another stance is that we tend to have an instinct that often distributed in cooperative solutions are overlooked amidst a panoply of solutions for a given problem centralized ones are quite often called for just often in plain view Professor Benkler and others have had a cooperation group and work on those sorts of things in a really interesting way another stance we have is that we tend to swing for the fences we go for the A or the C but not the B plus just showing up just publishing that reporter that paper which somebody reads and says you know I cannot disagree with anything in this we don't take that as four stars that sort of would not come again even if I'm forced to read it and we tend to want to elicit from ourselves a level of work and of insight and of effort that people may disagree with where individuals come from here because we're often a little bit out there and we embrace that identity rather than running from it we couple that with wanting to be an honest broker there's just not an ideological litmus test for participation in the center we want to see where the data takes us and we tend to be really excited when we are proven wrong that's a great moment to be able to meet our new selves rather than to just hang on tight for something and finally I think the animating spirit is exemplified by my predecessor Terry Fisher over the many years a dozen that he was the chair of the Berkman Center was that all of this is because we want to see a better world about we're going to have different versions of what better means but we're actually out to have an impact and make a difference and in particularly in Terry's case for disadvantaged populations for people that might otherwise themselves be overlooked and that's still very much our spirit so how is this all done we have regular courses that you can take I've already mentioned the one I'm teaching in the winter at Stanford Susan what are you teaching this year the law of surveillance topical topical Chris who runs our clinical program I'd love for you just to say a word or two about the clinical program another mode of getting involved sure we're essentially a small pro bono legal services organization based at the Berkman Center we have Harvard Law School students who enroll every semester we're up to almost 60 a year now who kind of come through the program we do legal work for clients the students get the sort of firsthand real world practice experience the clients get the free legal services and it's a win-win situation and we couple that with a seminar that we teach which has the students sort of doing case rounds and kind of discussing the work that they're doing along the way got it and there are also lots of opportunities for independent research or study or other ways to connect with our faculty only a few of whom happen to be here right now again possibly because of our awkward scheduling for which I only blame myself and there are also just innumerable projects and that's again what you'll see in the showcase the ones that we didn't happen to mention here today some of them are going fast enough trying to change the engines on the airplane while it's flying in a way that they may not have a structured onboarding or on ramp for participation and I just want to urge you if it's something that seems interesting to you go to that extra layer of persistence send that extra email to talk to the person or people running the project and see if you can get involved and a number of the things we have happening you can just turn up our fellows themselves are working on amazing things and often will welcome assistance so that's sort of a general overview of what the Berkman Center is about I thought it would be good now just to open the floor and see if there are questions and also if there's anybody at the center who wants to say something that he or she is working on in the spirit of what we've already been talking about so who wants to be the bold soul to ask the first question there's a mic from Kerry we'll foster former government relations for the commercial internet exchange what are you guys doing in terms of critiquing Obama's deployment of offensive weapons with the military China's retaliation Russia's retaliation and are you clear that this was in a network area ideological? a substantive question well the first was an activity question and as best I can tell we are doing nothing in that area but when I say we of course we rarely act institutionally as a center we have an umbrella under which people can be doing things I don't know this sounds more like a belfer kind of question it's our belfer center at the Kennedy School for Science and International Affairs that tends to has Graham Allison and Ashton Carter I wanted to auto complete that with a different name but then I didn't Ashton Carter they are often thinking about nuclear issues and nuclear security the closest I can say individually is I did just write a piece for some publication I'm forgetting its name now Scientific American an oldy bit of goody ouch they're the comp you serve of modern publishing sorry guys thank you for publishing my article I wrote an article for Scientific American asking in a sort of trolley kind of way which I later regretted we have kill switches in iPhones so if they are stolen somebody can have it shut off why don't we have kill switches in military weaponry so that if it gets stolen as ISIS came upon three divisions worth of sophisticated U.S. military hardware when it captured the Iraqi city of Mosul and then promptly put it on parade and then you can see one of them turning donuts in this Vice video Sam Gustin are you here Sam are you no oh he was here yesterday one of our new fellows works at Vice Media they they embedded with ISIS and caught them turning donuts in American tanks in Syria and then deployed it against the Mosul dam and the question is why shouldn't those tanks have been turn offable like a stolen iPhone oddly enough tanks do not even have ignition keys you can get yourself inside the tank it's just like one button start up which first I guess we're not in military the first reaction is well that seems weird and then your second reaction is well do you have the keys dammit I left it under the turret where are the keys so it makes sense that they wouldn't have keys now of course the first thing you're probably thinking is well what if it gets hacked like haven't you seen Battlestar Galactica spoiler alert the Cylons hack the ships so not one to countermand the wise advice of commander then Adama you could come up with all sorts of ways to deal with that for instance maybe the tank should expire after a while it'll keep working until it doesn't and then it needs a renewal code that you can either punch in or it can be sent by satellite we can work on this we have a can-do-ism about so much and then a lot of people are like nope there is no way to make a tank not be in the hands of ISIS and do terrible things I'm really sorry so as you can tell that thing in particular and borrowing a little bit from the permissive action link framework of nuclear weapons so that even if the two guys in the silo want to launch it on a lazy Wednesday they can't without the codes from the nuclear football we've been thinking about action at a distance in this mode before other questions yes hi do we introduce myself Yes, Yuni Hong and you just came out with a book called the birth of Korean cool that's right you're just about to get a plug for it on the big screen it's a great cover thank you you're like that was my question certain forms must be observed the question actually was do you think in the foreseeable future there are going to be ways to deal with cross border privacy problems with for example the apple Fitbit or whatever in the UK as you know to help that is completely private yes right so that would be something that would be problematic right yeah which is a nice subset of the question of if law isn't global but technology is how can the technology adapt or reconcile with that can it be zoned so it behaves differently in one place or another and I don't know if anyone especially among our European cohort has any thoughts on this question or don't you teach a class on this subject I don't know why I made him mad well but yeah the class only adds to the confusion so there is honestly not an easy answer to that but yes it's very much of course the topic that you're interested in which also allows me to add the dimension to our work which is that we do a lot of international work exactly looking into issues such as privacy but also speaking of platforms intermediate liability as another example and how it's treated differently exactly in different countries and what the problems are and how we can approach these differences so the network of centers would be the search term which brings together over 30 centers internet and society centers around the world including 10 from the global south where we explore some of these cross-touristictional questions among many others and this has been one of these like we're slowly building the house out of bricks getting each internet research center in different countries on board and actually gather a number of them together over the summer in the Radcliffe yard to be able to contribute to a great understanding either immediately on an issue that suddenly unfolds or over time looking at some of this stuff from a comparative perspective and of course one way is to look at how the different laws may or may not apply the other is to see ways in which the technology itself will be zoned so that location might be nearly everything and when you land in a certain place what you see in Google how your Apple Watch behaves will be different than if you had stayed home whether that's a good thing or a bad thing of course depends on your priors for those who thought of the internet as sort of a first amendment imperialist tool weird to see those trucks to post I know this kind of zoning may not be great I don't know if the fact that you can if you're in Thailand and you go to one of those great videos making fun of the Thai king it's blocked for you in Thailand but not everywhere else in the world is that a happy medium or not I don't know yes sir there are some minor league zoning operations already in force in say on DVDs you can only play them in zone one or zone two or you can only play them five times in zone two and then it'll shut off or you can only download this music or that film in the country of origin or you can't do it here in any case so there are already some zoning operations exactly and I had that actually wonderful experience kind of Berkman center moment where I was talking to one of the lawyers that we work with a lot who taught a classroom on a number of occasions and talking about this regional DVD zoning and of course what do you do with a PC when it's like it doesn't know where it is and I don't know if you've ever had this happen your Mac is like alright I'll change your region this time user but you only get four more changes it's like but what if I'm parapetetic and it doesn't talk back it's not that version but I was mentioning this once to this lawyer he was like yeah I invented that it's like you you invented regional DVD zoning he's like summers different Australia like they want to window the movies and of course whether or not the industry is going to a place where it's still thinking in those terms or whether we're feeling like there's just this instant gush galt is one of the questions but you're right regional DVD zoning is just one of those examples Peter was just having you were gonna jump in with no other questions thoughts comments yes sir professor Flaviano from Brazil welcome is there thank you is there any research project concerning sensitive sensitive personal digital digital information and democracy I mean the relation between privacy and democracy does Berkman center have any research project concerning this interrelation between sensitive personal information and democracy give me a verb okay well what we in Brazil we our concept of sensitive information personal information is that is the one that the kind of information that can cause discrimination for example my health information health information if I have a health problem and if an employer knows about it it might discriminate against me and not give me a job yes and in Brazil we're totally concerned about that yes no days because that's pretty it really has to do with democracy yes and our concept democracy has to do with distribution of power and if government and big corporations yes get access to this kind of information you know yes democracy they're going to have more power yes yeah so sorry no no quite alright sure we think about privacy of course as we were talking about we think about democracy in the sense that we think about public discourse a lot too and public discourse is often seen not just as an end unto itself which it surely is but in a sunsteen sense as a means to effective democracy and being able to engage in public discourse without worrying that the price of doing so is a level of trolling bullying release of data whether to the government that might disagree with you or to the public at large wanting to dox you is surely something some of our projects have taken up including literally one on bullying I believe which we'll see if Shailen can find or worse can whisper some search terms over to Shailen on that but you also raise the question of how do we figure out what questions to focus on and at what's the right level of generality and that is a constant semiotic battle we don't feel like it's that fixed and what we trust is in bringing into the community people who come with their own questions through a form of dialogic education fellows hours other events and gatherings have a chance to hone them to say oh maybe the question I meant to ask was more this rather than that and then to make progress and publish the results and see what we can do it's been really interesting over the summer to see among the Berkman cohort a lot of talk about the tyranny of the algorithm emerge whether it's the right to be forgotten which is really in some ways the right of the European governments or the private litigants that they're empowering to determine what the Google search engine will do despite what it would naturally otherwise do and then when you look at Facebook Ferguson question or I had written a piece on could Facebook determine the outcome of the election by salting news feeds with selectively with where you're pulling places kind of thing and it was great to see out of that come questions around this algorithmic stuff which none of us had quite focused on at first as the issue so it would be interesting to see the way in which your question would be processed relating the privacy and democracy components together so yep Nick Grossman from Union Square Ventures one of the most interesting and confounding developments in tech and law recently has been blockchains in bitcoin back to your original question of like is it illegal I don't know when the internet just started that's happening now in that whole space that seems conspicuously absent from the things you've highlighted is there anything going on with that yeah again bitcoin blockchain stuff it has certainly all the hallmarks of like wow we have definitely covered I actually covered bitcoin in a reading group in 2011 and we just stupidly didn't pool our lunch money and like buy two to create a new endowment for anything at Harvard it was our mistake not to realize that the public would be as weird enough as to what's the wonderful tweet somebody said my grandmother asked me what's dogecoin answer it's a cryptocurrency based on the meme of a Shiba Inu grandma I don't understand a single word of what you just said it's a great piece called like things are getting really weird so there are folks here I don't know if primavera is here ah so primavera is thinking a lot about bitcoin with a number of other fellows I don't know if there's something you quickly want to say about that well not really but I do think it's a really important issue we organized last year a discotech on bitcoin you should say what a discotech is otherwise people are going to think we're just saying discotech is not about dancing but is about discovering technology and dancing at the end to celebrate we did organize on mesh networking and on bitcoin and I do actually hope that this year we're going to organize a lot of things and bitcoin and ethereum and all those smart contract things which I think in terms of legal issues actually raising really interesting legal issues yes and I should say bitcoin is an example of something that bursts into the public eye may have been brewing for quite a while has a lot of technical detail to it for which many people including experts will weigh in on it without actually understanding the tech and a lot of our first move as a center is just to get the tech in order to have like a teaching about that to know what bitcoin is and is it a bitcoin or the bitcoin I kind of like remember the wikipedia so really getting to the bottom of that and then starting to map out well if this turns out to be true about it then these are the implications in a way that again has that kind of most broker field to it there's a lot of stuff going on at the center that surely hasn't been talked about today this is one of them with folks thinking about not just bitcoin again but about the so called ledger oh there's dogecoin how nice and then it's d is for dogecoin and there's also coigne west so like why doesn't everybody have a cryptocurrency you now can too and the form of public journaling is oh well too bad the billboard thing was yeah oh well we really should have given everybody a coigne west as a door maybe that's the prize for the pub trivia quiz oh Kurt already left he's going to call his broker right now so all sorts of topics like that that we try not to just make the topic of the week but really dig in I'm sitting right in front of you thinking a lot about robot ethics and many issues on that lots of ways in which we're kind of in for the long haul on and I should also say it's to our credit as a center that when everybody else was worried about y2k in 1999 Boston University had a center for millennial studies like what they're doing now I don't know only 990 years until the next millennium where will you celebrate and a lot of people were pushing us to be like why 2k liability what are we going to do we were like you know call us in 2001 I don't know if that was right I'm looking at Andy now maybe it was a problem back then but 2005 oh look at that the center for millennial studies from the rooster to the owl talk about the trademark search it was like I guarantee no one else has this mark so anyway we're at 130 can I just say holy crap alright well on this totally absurdist dada ask note let me just once again on behalf of oours and all of the great staff here at the berkman center just give you the warmest of welcomes and really hope you'll find some time to take part of the other who's going to say initialization activities that sounds rather Borg like but really to be involved and to reach out to any of the folks you've heard from today or that you'll find on the website or in the activities we live in a really interesting time and as oours said this is one of the best vantage points not just to see it unfold but to be thinking about it and to be making a difference where we believe we can thank you very much thank you salem