Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

What does talk of cyber war mean for our liberties? The United States has a new military command for cyberspace, with the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) as its commander. At the same time, the Secretary of State has announced that the “freedom to connect” is an aspect of fundamental human rights and [...]

In order to secure our future, we need to know how to organize our past. If we want to preserve accessibility to valuable information about legal, political, social, and cultural discourses in an era of information abundance, it becomes vital to design carefully how we distinguish between noise and significant pieces of information. In this [...]

Companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook are thought to provide some of the most envied work environments on the planet. But should employees be worried that their trust in their employer, so purposefully cultivated, has been built on promises that are more illusion than enforceable promise? Some in the labor movement think these employers [...]

SOPA, CISPA, CFAA, DMCA, mobile phone unlocking — how can a complacent Congress address real and systemic problems related to technology and antiquated legislation? In this talk, Derek Khanna — Yale Law Fellow with the Information Society Project and former House Republican Study Committee staffer (where he authored the widely read House Republican Study Committee [...]

How does the Internet affect power? How does power affect the Internet? Factors such as ubiquitous surveillance, the rise of cyberwar, ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, and a feudal model of security collide to create a circumstance in which those in power are using information technology to increase [...]

In the past decade, we’ve seen an unprecedented rise of powerful social networks, connecting millions or even billions of people who can now communicate almost instantaneously. But many of the promises that were made by the creators of the earliest social networking technologies have gone unfulfilled. In this talk, Anil Dash—entrepreneur, technologist, and writer—takes a [...]

Once, personal technology and the Internet meant that we didn’t need permission to compute, communicate and innovate. Now, governments and tech companies are systematically restricting our liberties, and creating an online surveillance state. In many cases, however, we’re letting it happen, by trading freedom for convenience and (often the illusion of) security. In this talk, [...]

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg As high school and college students transition into a knowledge economy they face both advantages and challenges with how they find information and engage with co-workers as teammates. As a recent study of US employers and recent college graduates discovered, some young hires are pretty good at finding [...]

5.9 billion people now use mobile phones, of which 1.1 billion are smartphones. With this kind of penetration smartphones will empower behavioral scientists to collect terabytes of ecologically valid data from vast global samples—easily, quickly, and remotely, transforming the behavioral sciences even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did. Smartphones can record where people [...]

The power of big data—analyzing huge swaths of information to uncover insights and make predictions that were largely impossible in the past—is poised to transform business and society. Yet there is a dark side. Privacy is eroded like never before. And a new harm emerges: predictions about human behavior that may result in penalties prior [...]

The problem of civic engagement is often un­derstood as a lack of participation. People do not show up to meetings, they do not engage in their civic institutions or communicate with decision-makers. The Engagement Game Lab has developed an online game called Community PlanIt—which has been played in six distinct planning processes ranging from urban [...]

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, organizations and researchers have developed and distributed a variety of tools to assist Internet users to both monitor and circumvent such censorship. In this talk, Jon Penney—Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab and Berkman Fellow—examines some of the international law and politics of such censorship resistance [...]

On March 5th, 2012, the American nonprofit, Invisible Children, published a video called “Kony 2012″ on the social video-sharing network, Youtube. Within six days the video was dubbed the “most viral video in history,” beating out pop artists Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Beyonce’s music videos in how quickly it hit 100 million views. In [...]

Ghana, a small country on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, is the size of Oregon. Its entire population is only double that of New York City. Yet what is unfolding there matters to the future of the Internet. In this talk, Jenna Burrell — Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC [...]

In what ways do we reward the authentic learning and work that young people do that is not validated and evaluated by our educational institutions? In this highly connected world that is powered by what we need when we need it, is school really enough? Berkman Fellow and Engagement Game Lab director Eric Gordon leads [...]