 Hello, I'm Charles Nesson. I am a professor at the law school next door and with Jonathan Zittrain over here, founder of, co-founder of the Berkman Center. It's a pleasure, I've just been called upon to perform the duty of introducing Harry. How? How was your video? Oh, well, I'll be happy to introduce either one of them. Well, I say it's a particular pleasure because I have so appreciated this book. The internet has been a fascination of mine and of Zittrain's and yet there has not really been a good solid introduction to the internet. And Harry and Hal and Ken by doing this book and even better, I have to say a course that Harry is now engaged in teaching with Ken that I've been following on the net, brings the possibility to people who are curious about the net who may think they know what's going on, but who really want to get in much deeper. The possibility of a solid, fun course to follow. And so I've just been totally impressed with the contribution that they've made by this effort and it is a pleasure to introduce Hal Abelson. Hal, in case you don't know, just seems to be at the heart of everything having to do with the net. He has been the inspiration at MIT for the open access movement, at least as I've seen it. He's been a leader from the very beginning, always with the most amazingly acute sharpness of attention to not just the technical side, but the policy side. And has just been an avatar for all of us, so, Hal. Okay, well thank you for coming and I need to thank a lot of people here. Particularly I want to thank Charlie. Charlie said nice things about me, but I think Charlie has been the real inspiration of thinking about the network and society with a combination of just brilliant legal insight, but I also think real compassion. And when I think about how I've learned to think about the internet, there's a tremendous perspective that comes directly from hearing Charlie's insights and his real sense of humanity in dealing with this stuff. This book is about the future. And you know the story about the future, that it just comes to us all at a different rate. Most of the people here, we all live in the far future. There are other parts of the world, maybe some people in this room were sort of in the present and then some people who will kind of hit that future in about 20 years. But for us, even those of us who are in the future somehow don't often appreciate just how weird it is as you run across these different currents that go through society and different attitudes. And Bloomington Bits is really about some stories. I'm not gonna say anything. I'm just gonna tell you two stories. And maybe you'd like to comment on some people who already know these stories, but I find them kind of quizzical in the music. Probably, I don't know if anyone here, probably only Jonathan, right? You know where Fair Grove, Michigan is, right? I grew up there. It's a Fair Grove, Michigan, which is just written off by the McCann campaign, by the way. It's a tiny town in central Michigan. It doesn't even have a host office, really tiny. And in 2006, right? So two years ago, in a couple of months, Catherine Lester was an honors student at Fair Grove High School, right? Someone who sort of walked to school. I don't know how she got her mail with the host office. This tiny town was her whole world. And in September 2006, she disappeared. And her parents, of course, were completely freed, called the authorities. And after three days of her missing, they found her in Amman, Jordan, where she had gone to meet Abdullah Jimzawi. So the way she'd met Abdullah, of course, is on MySpace. She saw his MySpace page, she liked it, and sent him a penetrating message, you are cute, they got together. And somehow, she talked her parents into letting her get a passport, right? She was 16 and a half at that point. And took off for Amman. Well, after three days, the authorities came and found her and she said she was sorry and she went, she came back. A year went by and now she was 18 and no longer a minor. And she said, I really do love this guy. So she got on a plane again and went back to Amman to be with her, her true love. But teenage true love being what it is, they broke up after a couple of weeks. He said she was running around with the guys that she found in Amman and she said he was being abusive. And they finally broke up publicly over satellite TV on the doctor field. And that's just a myth, you have to think about the elements of that story, sort of going from panic, the great, the point we think about privacy, right? And we're gonna do it on Dr. Phil. But this part, we're gonna ask Judy Bigger who still is Republican Congresswoman from Illinois and a couple of other people got together and decided that this was a real problem. Judy Bigger in the House of Representatives got up and said, here's Judy on the house. MySpace and other networking sites have become hunting grounds for child predators. We were all horrified by the story of Catherine Lester. At least let's give parents some comfort. Their children won't fall prey while using the internet in schools and libraries that receive federal funding for internet services. So Representative Bigger and some others got together and created Dopa, the delete online creditors. And what Dopa said is that places that get federal funding like schools and libraries have to prevent children from being members of online social sites. Of course the problem is it's kind of hard to write laws. So they couldn't quite figure out what an online social site was. It was a place where people put information. So it turned out that there's definition covered MySpace and Facebook and Amazon and Wikipedia and I don't know probably MIT OpenCourse where lots of other things. And when this was pointed out to the congressman, they sort of said, well, yeah, it's kind of tough to define what these things are that children should be kept away from. So we simply won't define it and turned it over to the FCC. They configured it. And the FCC, of course, was not particularly pleased by this and they didn't want to do this. And the whole thing sort of fizzled. That's a funny story. Because it kind of goes, you can even hear yourself thinking about internet, online creditors, the problem of saying what it is we actually don't like. And imagine, this is for all of us in the future. So for people who are a little bit in the present, they have these ways to go through. It's kind of hard to say exactly what we think about the internet. Let me do another story. This story, just for the lawyer, they're real lawyers. So for the real lawyers, we'll just hold their ears. There actually is a definition of obscenity in the US called the Miller Test. And one of the interesting things about the Miller Test is that one of the problems of the test is whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the work appeals to the query of their test. So this is a story that goes back to the early days of the internet. The name of the story is the nastiest place on earth. So the nastiest place on earth, as some of you know, is Milpitas, California. And in 1994, Robert and Carleen Thomas had a little business in Milpitas, California called Amateur Action, which specialized in distributing stuff over bulletin boards. I remember you never bulletin boards, right? Or bulletin boards? Well, bulletin boards that distributed things that you don't sort of show in polite company. This is 1994. 1992, two years before, they'd been raided by the Milpitas police. They looked at that and they said, well, this stuff is raunchy, but it doesn't meet the obscenity standards by the standards of Milpitas, California. Well, that's two years ago. But two years later, there's a knock on the door and it's the Milpitas police again and they're back with the U.S. Postal Inspector who charged them with the felony of using means of interstate commerce, namely a modem. You remember a modem? A modem had a computer to send obscene materials interstate to David Dernmauer. Who's David Dernmauer? David Dernmauer turns out to be a postal inspector in Tennessee who got this complaint that there's all this stuff. There's this thing called the Internet which has all this bad stuff on it. And so what he does is he goes to the amateur action bulletin board that says, welcome to amateur action, the nastiest place on earth. Here's a sample of our stuff, but you know if you want the really good stuff, you have to play 50 bucks in register. So he pays us 50 bucks. And next day he gets a phone call from Robert Thomas. He sort of says something like, well, thank you, John Smith. For your 50 bucks, use your password, go to TAMP. So Dernmauer loads down some stuff and he goes files a complaint and the Thomas's are arrested and thrown in prison and eventually lose the appeal. The appeal has to do with why should the community stand, should the community standards of Memphis, Tennessee apply to Milpitas, California? And that was one of the first cases where we see this thing has just exploded in recent years that has to do with should Google, does Google have to worry about the censorship standards in China? Or do people selling Nazi memorabilia on the internet have to worry about the laws in France? And this is kind of the beginning of it. It turns out the court ducked this by, they kind of said, boy, Thomas, are you stupid, you called the guy, so you knew he was in Tennessee. So they got around that, but nowadays, here in the future, we don't have to guess what the community standards are because we can just ask Google. So here's another case that happened in the summer of a guy who was charged with distributing obscene material. And as part of his defense, his lawyer said, well, here in Florida, that doesn't violate community standards, but we can compare, we can go on Google Trends. Anybody who hasn't gone on Google Trends, you should do it, it's fascinating, it shows you the numbers of queries that have gone to Google about it. So we can compare, for example, the number of queries about Obama in Florida in June, Florida, around June, but the number of queries about sex. You know, so it's obvious this stuff about sex can't be violated community standards. Notice, by the way, this is for one month, so note the nice periodicity of this upper curve. It's a four-week segment that you're looking at. So we can, we're gonna do a demo here. I thought we'd update the demo. We'll give a quiz, so we can go look at the US. So let's go to do, let's search for Obama again. So we can do, let's look at the US, and how much? At the US, and in August, I think. No, it's September, it's not supposed to work. So there's Obama, in September, we can compare that with McCain. This is going on. I'm gonna compare them, this is the US, this whole US, I'm talking about in history. And we can compare them both with sex. You really do need to worry about that. So here's the quiz. Name something that's gonna rank higher than sex in terms of Google. Right, me? So what search query can we type in, and we'll get some of them. We'll actually rank higher than sex. My computer completed the completed one. Why you weren't looking? Every time he's having sex, you're like, they're auto-completed. Somebody gonna say what it is? Payment, really. Right, here you go. So Sarah Palin, at least at the beginning of September, right, was more interesting than sex. Anyway, there's a whole, for those involved in legal, in legal arguments, you now have a scientific way to start talking about contemporary community standards. How do you know that payment and sex are mutually exclusive? Any here from Google, we find something from Google to tell us what the algorithm from Google channel is. Okay, for example. Okay, because if you were to put it together in quotes, then you could see if it was sex and or anything, but otherwise it treats it as separate. Anyways. Those are just two stories that we can, you're free to use, laugh at, think about. They're funny parts and they're scary parts. Just like the rest of the internet. So Harry. So just to finish this great story, the actual article that, I don't know if you saw this, this fellow was up on obscenity charges, and his argument was that more people were interested in the stuff that he was interested in selling them than were interested in Apple Pie. So he did the Google Trends for Georgie and Apple Pie, discovered of course that there were a lot more suitings for that. Okay, so this is a book about the new world. It is a book about the future, and it's a book about the difficulty that we have figuring out even what we want of this new world and how our social structures and institutions legal and otherwise are having a hard time adapting to it, and how nonetheless adaptations are happening because institutions, government and corporate among others are figuring out how to take advantage of it and making decisions for us. So it's our effort to educate the citizenry about things that they ought to be thinking about because decisions are being taken without their being fully aware of it. So we do have to tell a lot of stories and about things that are possible that we hope people will find interesting and in some cases surprising. Many people don't find them terribly surprising until they hit one that say where they say wow, and each of the three of us actually had our own oh wow moments that never occurred to me that that could happen. But let's just start with a simple one. If you wanna know what kind of house somebody has, whether they have a swimming pool in their backyard, you can now just check. College kids now do this all the time as soon as they find out what the roommates are and first thing they do is go and Google satellite map and find out if they have a swimming pool in their background. So I wanna know if Charlie Messon had a swimming pool in his backyard. So I just kind of brought up the picture. I don't know if that's actually your house but that's what Google says your house is, Charlie. No, that's not it. Wrong side of the street. Next door to it. Next door to it. Okay. So I haven't actually been to the house so I didn't kind of turn the camera around. So I got it wrong. I really wanted to polish this. I would have gone. And driven by the house first but that would have been cheating of course. Anyway, I'm not saying you can see there are night and day swimming pools in the neighborhood. So, you know, so this is sort of funny. We're in coming because we walked over there practically to take a look as Charlie lives in Cambridge but you can do this from Kazakhstan, right? You can do this from Algeria. You can do this from China. Anywhere people can sit and pull this from the north as far as down and of course even get the street view. Some, including sometimes, you know, identifiable images of people. Little hard, the resolution is good not to look through the windows, but. But then, you know, there's all kinds of other stuff that you can put this together with. So if you want to know who's contributing to whom politically, which has been for decades publicly available data. Now there are these wonderful tools. This is a particularly nice one. And if I took the time to play with it, we could just sort of very nicely be animated and so on. So this is Charlie's neighborhood. And all the blue dots and donkeys represent people who donated to Democrats and all the many, many red dots. And all the red dots represent people who've contributed to Republicans. So there they are, 15 of her homemaker, Hillary Clinton, $4,600. Alvin Warren, professor. What's the professor of? I didn't check. Tax. He's a tax professor. $2,300 to Barack Obama. And so on and so forth. Alex Zayden, Craig Burr, Antonio Chast. And, you know, and it's great. You just go to your neighborhood and you can just like see what all your neighbors are giving to. Now you always could have done it from any particular place. It would have required probably going to the city hall or I don't know, sending a registered letter on a selvedrass stamped envelope. I don't know how you used to have to get this data. But now you can sit there in Nigeria and figure out what Charlie's neighbors are contributing through this beautiful, beautiful, you know, interface. I, in fact, when I looked for some of my friends, I eventually figured out that some people who were my friends who like are sophisticated about this stuff are giving in their spouse's name from their summer residence. So you can't actually see them on the easily, unless you know where to go, look for them or do a certain name and so on. So something's changed here. Not that the date is public. This data was always public, right? But it feels very different. It feels quite voyeuristic in some way. It feels quite intrusive. And, you know, are we still okay with our notion of what our expectations about, you know, what should be public data and what shouldn't and, you know, how to deal with it? So that's my example. Here's the sort of my big sort of grand vision for this book, all right? This is a map showing data traffic between certain points. It's a great map done by Chris Harrison who got his PhD at Carnegie Mellon last year. And you can see the United States over here and Europe here and some connections down to Australia and a little bit down in Africa into the Far East. And, you know, we just know that this picture in 10 years is going to look just glowing everywhere. There's just gonna be, or do we? Or do we? Or is there going to be throttles and spigots and other things put on all of these interconnections? And my sort of premise here is that this whole business about what the internet and is doing is a Promethean story. This is a Promethean story. This is about bringing light to the earth and fire. This is what Prometheus went up to Mount Olympus. Zeus was there, he brought fire down to earth and all of the useful arts of mankind. That's the tale of how we got so inventive and so creative and so knowledgeable in the Greek mythology. But what happened to Prometheus? Things did not end well for Prometheus. Things did not well. Remember, he got chained to a rock by Zeus with an eagle eating at his liver in perpetuity. So he was severely punished for his liberating gesture. So he was punished. But there's more than that. All the rest of us were punished too. So this is Pandora, this is one of the things, Rosetta's pain, Rosetta's pain of Pandora. So Pandora, you may not realize, was Prometheus's sister-in-law. Married the wife of Prometheus's brother. She was sent down with these temptations which she had in her box. And she was told to keep out of the box but she couldn't resist. She opened the box and of course it was full of all of the evils that have beset mankind ever since. Okay, so the question about the internet is, and other digital technologies, you know, how do we make the choices so that we get the good stuff and not the bad stuff and who's gonna decide what's good and what's bad? So I'm just gonna run through a few story examples. We did try to tell this book not in the form of sort of random discussions of the Prometheus myth, although he's there in the conclusion for a few moments. But, you know, just some stories. Constantly trying to make the point that the technologies are inherently neither good nor bad. They're both wonderful and awful at the same time. And we as a society have to think about how to strike the right balance. How's already told a couple of these stories. So here's a, here's something. This is the technology that makes it possible for me to read a newspaper column or a blogger in Uganda. And not only to read his column, but when he writes a story mentioning my book to know about it instantly. Okay, not this book, some other book that I wrote. Doesn't matter. Okay, so imagine that. Imagine how hard that would have been for, you know, I don't know, he must have got a physical book in Uganda, so I don't know. But anyway, there we are. But it's also the instantaneous transmission of information is exactly the same technology that made United Airlines stock crash a few days ago and Apple stock crash earlier this week or late last week or whatever it was. Because of a piece of misinformation that was posted in a place where people who own the stock or the computers who were controlling the trade of the stock reacted to this. This is United Airlines stock. And somehow an old news story about United Airlines being bankrupt got posted on a Bloomberg site without anybody reading that beyond the headline. They read the story, they would immediately determine that the story was six years old when United Airlines really had declared bankruptcy. But because they just posted the title, no one felt they had the time to read the story before selling their stock. Because in the time it would have taken to read the story and determine whether it was true or not, they would have lost millions of dollars. So United Airlines stock value dropped by a million dollars in about 30 seconds. And then they stopped, it kind of recovered. And some people made out like bandits, you know, these guys who bought that were great. Okay, and this immediately, of course, he gave somebody the bright ideas, doing something similar. I'm sure that's what happened, but I don't know, with Apple stock this week or maybe he was just a foolish prankster and posted a rumor that was an incorrect story that Steve Jobs had just had a heart attack. So we have enormous instability that frankly, you know, a certain kind of evil that's facilitated by exactly the same technology that enables the information. Here's another, this is the same technology that makes it possible to spread information everywhere, makes it possible to shape the information that you see. So this is what you see in the US, if you Google follow and gone, which is a practice that I won't pass any judgment on myself, but it's considered very, very, very bad in China and apparently not so bad by at least the people who write the Wikipedia entry in the US. And you know, here's what you would see if you use the Chinese version of Google, if you just say you can just actually play this game at home, just change the .com to .cn with Google and type the same entry and you get a completely different picture of the world. There's a horrible cult and there are people that have been killed in prison and it's bad and so on and so forth. So, you know, a lot of people assume that whatever Google tells you is true and important and all the rest of that, but we have no idea how Google is really decided in what to show you and what isn't. They made some agreements with the Chinese government about filtering out certain things. This, by the way, if you actually try this in China, you just lose your internet connection. I actually tried it in Shanghai and it's like, sorry, you know, a squirrel must have chewed through the wire or something like that. You can't get your connection anymore, okay? So, this is actually coming from a server in the US that is following Google's Chinese Taylor algorithms. Convenience. There's so much that we have so much information about us that we've made available because of the convenience that it allows. So, this is, again, this is a very familiar example. This is a statement from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority shows when you get on transponder number, date and time that you get on, where you got on and the mileage, helpfully, gives you actually the mileage between the two exits where you got on and off. It doesn't actually say what time you got off but obviously they had that earlier somewhere too. Why as a society don't we just print the speeding find at the bottom instead of saying ending balance 2985 why don't we just charge me 20 bucks because I obviously was speeding, which they certainly know. There's no, well, because people would rise up in arms but the Commonwealth is in, after we pass question one, you might see this happening because we might decide that something has to be done. Here's one. You know, the internet, you can find information about whatever it is in your kids' case. Most of your kids are given an assignment to find, go on the internet, find information about medieval weaponry, okay? So, what are they gonna do? They're gonna go to Google, right? And they're gonna type something in and what are they gonna get? They're gonna type something and this is what they're gonna get back, right? This is like spears, you know? Okay, so engine companies give you the information that most people want most of the time. So, one question I have, but you know, they don't tell us exactly how they decide that. Of course, they don't decide an item at a time. They have their algorithms for how people respond to the various searches that they make. But I think we're getting into a very peculiar state of the world where we rely so heavily on these private institutions to give us the kind of information that we used to get from encyclopedias and going to the library and through other things that we, that had a different kind of motivation and control. And, you know, maybe we need to know more. I don't know. Cell phones, we got a whole bunch of stuff about cell phones. We opened the book with the following story, which is a quite wonderful story about the puzzle that we have. So, first there were just cell phones, and they just, people just thought they were wonderful because they kind of worked well. They didn't really work very well. They had dead spots. We still had dead spots up. When people began to realize that cell phones work by communicating with cell phone towers, and that therefore there was location data on where you were moving and the cell phone companies actually kept that data. So then there became privacy issues about your tracking data. And some more progressive states began to pass privacy laws. So here's what happened last year. A woman named Tonya Ryder drove off the road near Seattle, Washington, tumbled into a car, rolled into a ditch, and she was not found for a week. And the police eventually located her. And she was nearly dead, but she happily was very dehydrated, but she survived and is now up and about again. Now the happy part of the story is that they found her because they had the cell phone data record. And until her cell phone died, they knew where she was. But the question is why did it take them a week to find her? Okay, and the reason it took them a week to find her is that her husband kind of walked into the police station and said, my wife's gone missing, please find her. And the police said, we can't under Washington's law because your wife has a right to privacy and maybe she wants to get lost. And in particular, maybe she doesn't want her husband knowing where she is. And the law was written in such a way, and then it was, there was a further complication because there were some more bits involved here. There was some ATM withdrawal on her ATM, her bank account. And there was some confusion about, it was actually his withdrawal, but they assumed it was hers and that therefore she was, in fact, running away. So there's a great example of where society sort of tried to do the right thing on the privacy front and has somehow not gotten it quite right. But cell phones get better and better. The notion of geolocation is no longer considered a privacy violation by one of the new G1s and you can run an application like this on it, which is absolutely wonderful. I don't know if this is actually up and running, this is a Japanese app. And it's very simple. You walk into a department store, you walk up to the big screen TV that you're interested in purchasing, you find the bar code, you point your cell phone, camera at the bar code, take a picture. The product information is identified and then the phone, knowing where you are because there's a GPS system in the phone, queries the local stores and ask them if they have that item and how much they're charging for it right now. And if they have it cheaper across the street, then you just walk across the street and buy it there. I had no idea once this technology is out there how high overhead department stores are gonna survive because you do your shopping where they have nice people helping you shop and you do your buying. And then the discount store, you know, and your buy if they have the same. One of the scarier things that I learned, maybe everybody else here knew it, was that the, although this is the kind of thing that's sort of personally obvious when you know it, is that you can do, the cell phone company can do a remote software upgrade to your cell phone. Probably happens all the time, you don't even realize it, right? Buggy code, they just upload the software. Well, it turns out the FBI can get the cell phone company to do that too and to reprogram it in such a way that the buttons don't do what you think they do. So this little red button here that says off, you know, if you push it, there's no mechanical switch in there, of course, it's just a software thing. So the FBI has been known to, with a proper wiretap order always, I'm sure, reprogram the cell phone so that the microphone just stays on and everything that you're saying is being sent to the FBI headquarters. And the only way you would know that was happening is that the cell phone battery would run down a little too quickly. So if you ever are in like meetings where you see guys taking the batteries out of their cell phones, you might wonder what they think might be going on. You know, less dramatically, but sort of equally, you know, what he's got on Star System, right? On Star is the one you push the button and then that's the nice lady at the other end, you know, where the nearest pizza parlor is or something like that. And she tells you or if you go into a dish, the thing, the impact sensors automatically connect you and she asks you if you're okay and telling you she said, yeah, ambulance and so on. Same thing, the police can get the microphone turned on so that they listen to them. That has been kind of evidence, has been used in court cases. It was thrown out in one case that we talk about but on a lot of technical technicality. Okay, the last part of the book, and I'm not gonna say a lot on this, but sort of takes us out of view on the internet. I got so intrigued by a paper that Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler wrote about broadcast censorship that I kind of tried in the last chapter to pull the whole story together. And we begin with this example. This is from the G8 summit a couple of years ago. There's a YouTube video version that I just put this frame from where Tony Blair and George Bush were talking to each other, the two leaders of the free world discussing the conflict in the Middle East. And it's a photo often, so people are there filming and taking photos, but what Bush didn't realize was that his mic was on. So on the open mic, he says to Blair, you see, the irony is that what they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over, okay? And CNN put this up on its news report and it was all over the internet and so on. The broadcast networks wouldn't air this because the word shit is presumptively profane in the language of the FCC censorship rules under the standard that was born of the, who was it? Nicole Richie and who? George Carlin. Well, yeah, but then they upped the standard from the Carlin things, it was Nicole Richie and somebody else anyway. Anyway, this thing is before the Supreme Court right now, as to whether this thing applies, but it raised the question of how it is the federal government can sow Trump, First Amendment free speech rights as to say that you can't say that word over the airwaves and the argument goes that radio spectrum is nationalized, it's national, it's federal property. There's a whole real estate metaphor here and that story that goes back to the 1930s and that the federal government gets to decide how it's used in the public interest and in particular it's not in the public interest that people say very words like that then they have a right to prohibit it. But this whole argument, as I said, this is an article which I believe in this environment must be terrible to give proper attributions to the finding of the end notes in the book. Whitbank Veranlassi is based on a technological contingency of the 1930s and this story is a wonderful story which I'm not gonna tell here, but has to do with this fellow Dr. John Romulus Brinkley who was a quack, was a medical quack that a great book written about him called Charlie, who was out this year, preaches fundamentalism, practices goat land science. I mean, give it to your imagination what goat land science is, but it has to do with impotence cures and organ transplants. That's Billy, who was the first goat planned baby. And this woman, who was instrumental in a later development in the technology that has rendered much of this property rather than more anachronistic, that's Hedy Lamar, better known as the most beautiful woman in the world and the star of the stage and scream from the 1940s and her patented invention, there she is, Hedy Kiesler Markey along with George N. who was an avant-garde physician, which actually was a precursor, not maybe a direct ancestor of a great spectrum technology that is kind of rendered the property metaphor of a great spectrum development. So that's a whole story that we tell at the end of the day. Okay, I think we exhausted our jabbing time unless you wanna say something, Ken. Okay, I just wanted to make sure to introduce Ken because he's the third author and he did not get proper introduction. Ken is CEO of Nebo Technologies, a fine, upstanding and highly ethical and also very skilled software development company in Hartford Square. So thanks very much and I guess we can do some questions. How, why don't you come back and you can help answer the question.