Jonathan Zittrain

The Pew Research Center reported this week that 62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media, including 18 percent who do so often – that's up sharply from just four years ago when the figure was 49 percent...Suppose Facebook decided that it would be a good idea to help demographic groups which turn out in numbers that are lower than their share of the population, like, say, Latinos. Such targeted voter motivation, dubbed "digital gerrymandering" by Harvard Law School's Jonathan Zittrain, would have the salutary effect – if you're a Clinton supporter (and in case you're wondering, Facebook officials have given far more money to Clinton than anyone else this cycle) – of turning out more strongly Democratic voters.

...But this week, Facebook’s reputation for neutrality took a major hit...But even if Thune and other Republicans wanted to regulate Facebook, it’s not clear how they would do it. “It’s all tricky, because it’s all speech,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer-science professor at Harvard University and a co-founder of the school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. At the end of the day, Facebook makes an editorial product, and like any editorial product it is protected under the First Amendment. But federal regulators or entrepreneurial legislators would still have several options...But Zittrain said there may be an even more promising way to keep Facebook from acting against its users’ interest. In an unpublished paper that he is writing with Jack Balkin, a Constitutional law professor at Yale Law School, Zittrain recommends that certain massive repositories of user data—like Apple, Facebook, and Google—be offered a chance to declare themselves “information fiduciaries.” An information fiduciary would owe certain protections to its users, closing the “disconnect between the level of trust we place in [online services] and the level of trust in fact owed to us,” according to the paper.

Facebook scrambled on Monday to respond to a new and startling line of attack: accusations of political bias. The outcry was set off by a report on Monday morning by the website Gizmodo, which said that Facebook’s team in charge of the site’s “trending” list had intentionally suppressed articles from conservative news sources. The social network uses the trending feature to indicate the most popular news articles of the day to users...“The agenda-setting power of a handful of companies like Facebook and Twitter should not be underestimated,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of computer science and law at Harvard University. “These services will be at their best when they are explicitly committed to serving the interests of their users rather than simply offering a service whose boundaries for influence are unknown and ever-changing.”

...With the election two days away, younger and urban Americans are terrified. Some are arranging ways for their Muslim friends to leave the country. That’s the atmosphere in which two senior Facebook engineers approach Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, and tell him that this whole mess can be stopped right now.... Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard Universitywho has previously written about Facebook’s electoral power, told me it was good that Facebook was now on the record about not tampering with the vote. He confirmed that no legal mechanism would prevent them from trying it. “Facebook is not an originator of content so much, it is a funnel for it. And because it is a social network, it’s got quite natural market dominance,” he said. With that power came a need for public concern and awareness.

The IMLS grant awards over $700,000 to the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab, in cooperation with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and more than 130 partner libraries, to sustainably scale Perma.cc to combat link rot in all scholarly fields.

Following a very public fight over the unlocking of the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, a gunman in the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting last December, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has found a way to crack the device without help from Apple. Now, will the federal agency have to tell the tech giant how it was done?..."While it is appropriate for law enforcement, with a warrant, to use a security flaw to gain access to which it is legally entitled, the flaw should be patched as soon as possible for everyone else’s sake,” Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard Law School, told the Monitor.

Now that American law enforcement may have a way into the iPhone used by the San Bernardino, Calif., shooter, it faces a new conundrum: Should it inform Apple so it can fix a vulnerability that may affect millions of consumer devices – even if that disclosure could make it harder for law enforcement to unlock iPhones in the future?...“The security of a product used by so many people – including and especially Americans – is part of national security,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard Law School. “While it is appropriate for law enforcement, with a warrant, to use a security flaw to gain access to which it is legally entitled, the flaw should be patched as soon as possible for everyone else’s sake.”

I had expected fireworks—or at least strong disagreements—when Internet privacy advocate Jonathan Zittrain and former CIA director John Deutsch debated the impasse between Apple and the FBI over a locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Instead, the two men offered nuance and a rough if imperfect consensus over how much access we should have to technologies that allow us to encrypt our personal data in ways that place it beyond the government’s reach. “Many other paths to data are available. We are exuding data all over the place,” said Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. “The FBI has chosen this case … in large part, I think, because there is so little privacy interest on the other side.”

Apple is launching a two-pronged attack in its fight against the FBI: It's going to Congress and it is invoking the First Amendment. But in extending its case to lawmakers and the Constitution, it faces a tough sell, legal experts say..."The government has picked its turf carefully" around a narrow issue that gives it the best chance to make its case, says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard Law School. "It's a tough lift for Apple because traditional privacy as we know it is not at stake."

The legal showdown between Apple Inc and U.S. law enforcement over encryption, no matter the outcome, will likely accelerate tech company efforts to engineer safeguards against government intrusion, tech industry executives say. Already, an emerging industry is marketing super-secure phones and mobile applications...But even a government victory could have unintended consequences for law enforcement, potentially prompting a wave of investment by U.S. tech companies in security systems that even their own engineers can't access, said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "A success for the government in this case may further spur Apple and others to develop devices that the makers aren't privileged to crack," he said.

In today’s world, a computer can easily become a weapon and cyberspace a battlefield as cyber security becomes a growing national concern...“One immediately noticeable change [that took place at Harvard] is that there are multiple cybersecurity projects, both within Harvard and beyond,” Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, told the HPR. Currently, both Belfer and Berkman hold cyber security projects, in which scholars develop case studies and present research papers in workshops and publications.

Apple Inc.’s refusal to help the FBI retrieve information from an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., has thrust the tug-of-war on the issue of privacy vs. security back into the spotlight. As the legal wrangling to untangle the case widens, the Gazette spoke separately with George Bemis Professor of Law Jonathan Zittrain and cyber-security expert Michael Sulmeyer about the inherent tensions in the case, in which two important principles of American life are at odds.  ... ZITTRAIN: There are surely instances where a company should weigh the ethics of its decisions, and taken only on its own terms, this would appear to be such a case — especially because there’s no legal barrier to Apple helping out. But the circumstances here give rise to additional ethical and policy considerations. What are the second-order effects of Apple’s actively writing software to defeat its own security, and what might such practices do to the overall technology ecosystem? In other words, we need to stay focused on not just the urgent, but the important.

The FBI wants Apple to help unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Farook. A federal judge has ordered Apple to comply. But, Apple says it will not comply. Now, we have the world’s most famous tech company pushing back against the government as it tries to investigate the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. Once again, we’re at that complex nexus between privacy and security.  Guests: Jonathan Zittrain, George Bemis professor of international law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, vice dean for library and information resources at the Harvard Law School Library, and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Apple prides itself on being a standard-bearer on security and encryption and on protecting customers' privacy. That position has put it on a collision course with law enforcement. Last night, a federal judge in California ordered Apple to help the Justice Department break into an iPhone that was used by a suspect in a mass shooting. Apple is fighting the order. ...And there's also the reality that Apple sells most of its phones outside the U.S. Jonathan Zittrain says if Apple says yes to the U.S. government, it will make it harder to say no in countries with very different values. Zittrain is a cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. JONATHAN ZITTRAIN: Oh, I would imagine that other countries are watching this dispute with great interest.

James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, told lawmakers Tuesday that governments across the globe are likely to employ the Internet of Things as a spy tool, which will add to global instability already being caused by infectious disease, hunger, climate change, and artificial intelligence. ...Clapper's remarks on the Internet of Things are remarkable because they come from the nation's top spy chief, and they likely mean that US spy agencies are trying to exploit it. Two weeks ago, a Berkman Center for Internet & Society report from Harvard University concluded that "If the Internet of Things has as much impact as is predicted, the future will be even more laden with sensors that can be commandeered for law enforcement surveillance; and this is a world far apart from one in which opportunities for surveillance have gone dark. It is vital to appreciate these trends and to make thoughtful decisions about how pervasively open to surveillance we think our built environments should be—by home and foreign governments, and by the companies who offer the products that are transforming our personal spaces."

For the better part of a year, Facebook Inc’s global ambitions have bumped up against this question: Is some Internet better than none? This week, India delivered a bruising answer. India’s telecommunications regulator on Monday banned programs that offer access to a limited set of websites and apps, including Facebook’s Free Basics service...That approach has defenders. Facebook’s service “may be a worthy experiment” in a world where Internet access can be too expensive for some people, said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School.

A new report by The Berklett Cybersecurity Project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University,“Don’t Panic: Making Progress on the ‘Going Dark’ Debate,” examines the high-profile debate around government access to encryption, and offers a new perspective.

Tech companies and privacy advocates have been in a stalemate with government officials over how encrypted communication affects the ability of federal investigators to monitor terrorists and other criminals. A new study by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society convened experts from all sides to put the issue in context...Some of the ways the data used to be accessed will undoubtedly become unavailable to investigators, says Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor who was one of the authors. "But the overall landscape is getting brighter and brighter as there are so many more paths by which to achieve surveillance," he says. "If you have data flowing or at rest somewhere and it's held by somebody that can be under the jurisdiction of not just one but multiple governments, those governments at some point or another are going to get around to asking for the data," he says.