Jonathan Zittrain

The University of Oklahoma expelled two fraternity members this week after video of them leading a racist chant went viral. Now, a Google search of the young men’s names shows the incident right at the top of the results. But should this still be the case in 30 years?...On Wednesday night at the Kaufman Center in New York City, the Oklahoma frat brothers were discussed as part of a larger debate over whether it’s time for the U.S. to adopt a “right to be forgotten” law to help people hide their past...McLaughlin and Harvard Law’s [Jonathan] Zittrain saved special scorn for the process by which Europe arranges for the “right to be forgotten” to occur, saying it forces Google to choose between an easy path of simply granting the request, or else risking an expensive legal headache. ..Zittrain also took issue with Nemitz’s claim that Europe’s “right to be forgotten” law is not censorship because it merely deletes information from Google, not from the entire Internet. “It’s like saying the book can stay in the library, we just have to set fire to the catalog,” he said.

In 2014, the European Union’s Court of Justice determined that individuals have a right to be forgotten, “the right—under certain conditions—to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them.” It is not absolute, but meant to be balanced against other fundamental rights, like freedom of expression. In a half year following the Court’s decision, Google received over 180,000 removal requests. Of those reviewed and processed, 40.5% were granted. Largely seen as a victory in Europe, in the U.S., the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. Was this ruling a blow to free speech and public information, or a win for privacy and human dignity? Debaters include: Jonathan Zittrain.

When Islamic State militants overran northern Iraq late last year they captured enough weapons and equipment from fleeing Iraqi forces to supply three combat divisions. Could remotely operated kill switch technology on weapons stop the same thing happening in future? Antony Funnell investigates.... Watching such developments from his office in Boston, Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain began thinking about the need for smarter weapons: weapons that could be disabled remotely if and when required. His inspiration was right in front of him.‘I was reflecting on the fact that companies like Apple have implemented kill switches for iPhones,’ says Zittrain, the director of the prestigious Berkman Center for Internet and Society. ‘If somebody boosts the phone from you, all is not lost. You can remotely disable it using your own Apple credentials to make it a much less enticing target to steal.

Remember when UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that he wanted to pass a law that would compel messaging apps to provide a backdoor for security agencies? That would, in effect, ban encrypted software that has no key. President Barack Obama agreed with him. In response to that proposal, Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Harvard University, wrote an open letter to Cameron, explaining why he thinks it’s a “very bad idea.” It’s one thing to try and regulate WhastApp, says Zittrain, because the government knows where Facebook “lives,” and the Silicon Valley company has assets that could be seized. But what happens when someone produces the next wildly popular messaging app? What if that someone happens to be, as Zittrain wrote in his letter, “two caffeine-fueled university sophomores?” They would be pretty hard to regulate, or even find, according to him. “You’re kind of stuck, which means you have to go double or nothing,” says Zittrain. “You now have to try to regulate the entire app ecosystem.”

Intimate, often painful allegations in lawsuits — intended for the scrutiny of judges and juries — are increasingly drawing in mass online audiences far from the courthouses where they are filed...“It’s not clear that lighting a match and dropping it in the public sphere is going to be a reliable way to bring closure,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor of Internet law who compared the practice to the old campus tactic of scrawling the names of alleged rapists on women’s bathroom walls.

When Google’s venture capital arm poured more than $250 million into Uber in 2013, it looked like a match made in tech heaven. Google, with billions of dollars in the bank and house-by-house maps of most of the planet, seemed like the perfect partner for Uber, the hugely popular ride-hailing service...Certainly, one day they could both be leaders in the self-driving car business. But for now, they are not only stuck with each other — they also need each other. “It’s a good example of ‘co-opetition,’ ” said Jonathan Zittrain, law professor and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

An open letter by Jonathan Zittrain. Dear Prime Minister Cameron, You recently proposed that all internet apps – and their users' communications – be compelled to make themselves accessible to state authorities. I want to explain why this is a very bad idea even though it might seem like a no-brainer...First, the landscape of internet communications services is profoundly different from telephony, where lawful intercept’s habits were honed.

This week, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to propose reclassifying how Internet service providers are regulated, treating them treated like utilities. The idea is to foster net neutrality, so all data flowing across the Internet is treated equally. What would the new regulation mean for consumers? ...Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, says: “Everybody can keep powder dry. I don’t think there are any immediate changes." FCC officials seem to be just focusing on net neutrality, Zittrain says. “These are not wild-eyed radicals somehow wanting to blow up the system,” he says. Zittrain says these are all things the FCC could do, if it wanted to – and that’s a big if.

Executives from Target and Home Depot were not present at the World Economic Forum, where world leaders and corporate titans are rubbing shoulders and debating weighty issues. Yet the names of those two companies are being invoked several times a day here, held up as examples of early victims in the growing battle against cybercrime...Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University professor of law and computer science who will also be on the panel, said he hoped industry professionals could begin to make gradual fixes to the Internet that would make all companies more secure. Small improvements, like software that detected unusual patterns in Internet traffic or suspicious attempts to access data, could help stop hackers before they caused too much damage. Such small, incremental steps could make the web gradually safer for individuals and companies, and less friendly to hackers, Mr. Zittrain said. “This is a moon shot going one step at a time, rather than fling a missile and hoping it hits,” Mr. Zittrain said.

The proposals by David Cameron, the UK prime minister, to make illegal forms of encryption that would block intelligence services from reading messages from terrorist suspects were criticised yesterday in by a group of Harvard professors....Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science, said that the proposals, which Mr Cameron has pledged to implement if he is re-elected as prime minister this year, would have a huge impact on the way that the digital economy worked. “This is not just about hardware but software. You would have to find a way for a phone not to be able to download any app that could defeat [the breaking of] encryption,” he said. “That would be a referendum on our entire ecosystem.”

The annual Word Economic Forum in Davos is a renowned event that engages political, business, academic and other leaders of society in shaping a collaborative global agenda. This year's program appears even more stimulating than usual, covering a variety of technology topics and featuring a whole section devoted at exploring tomorrow's online issues...Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder at Harvard's Berkman Center has spent many years researching the future of the Internet, and his 2009 book (under the same title) provides an important and still current overview of the Net evolution and its most urgent problems -- such as privacy, copyright, security and related regulations. In June 2013, Jonathan Zittrain co-authored also a pivotal report produced by the Council on Foreign Relations, directed by Adam Segal and involving also Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter (New America Foundation) -- "Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet". The report proves still very relevant, especially for its detailed analysis about the many reasons preventing US and Europe in establishing a shared approach to address and draft common regulations about the Internet.

There are two things about 2015 of which one can be reasonably certain: there will be a general election in May and it’s unlikely to produce an overall majority for either of the two big parties...Which brings us to social media and the question of whether the 2015 general election could be the first one in which the outcome is affected by what goes on there....The Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain summarised the findings thus: “Overall, users notified of their friends’ voting were 0.39% more likely to vote than those in the control group, and any resulting decisions to cast a ballot also appeared to ripple to the behaviour of close Facebook friends, even if those people hadn’t received the original message. That small increase in turnout rates amounted to a lot of new votes.

Federal investigators have now connected the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. to North Korea, a U.S. official said Wednesday, though it remained unclear how the federal government would respond to a break-in that exposed sensitive documents and ultimately led to terrorist threats against moviegoers....Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, said Sony was unquestionably facing anger over the breach and the resulting disclosure of thousands of sensitive documents. But the movie studio may be able to mitigate that reaction and potential legal exposure if it's established that North Korea was behind the attack." If Sony can characterize this as direct interference by or at the behest of a nation-state, might that somehow earn them the kind of immunity from liability that you might see other companies getting when there's physical terrorism involved, sponsored by a state?" Zittrain said.

Though it may not feel like it when you see the latest identity-affirming listicle shared by a friend on Facebook, we are a society moving toward evidence. Our world is ever more quantified, and with such data, flawed or not, the tools of science are more widely applied to our decisions...It’s also quaint to think that users would click through the multiple dialogue boxes necessary to mimic informed consent, said Jonathan L. Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Would you? Instead, he said, there ought to be independent proxies who represent the users and can perform that checking function. "I worry about leaning too hard on choice," he said, "when the real thing is just treat your users with dignity."

First up, Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School talks about the implications behind Google News shutting down operations in Spain. And Tony Gallippi, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of BitPay, explains why Bitcoin may become more mainstream … especially now that Microsoft has started accepting it. Plus, how well have you kept up with the week in tech news? It's time for Silicon Tally. This week, host Ben Johnson takes on Paul Kedrosky, partner at SK Ventures.

Want to take a popular Harvard course? Go to Yale. Next fall, Yale University in New Haven, Conn., will offer a computer-science class in which its students will watch live-streamed lectures from Harvard University, and students on both campuses will take uniform tests, visit one another and collaborate in other ways both digital and physical...“A shared course allows for interactions not possible within a single physical classroom…cultivating a healthy diversity of viewpoints,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor who co-founded the school’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

A decade ago, dozens of former fighters from both sides of Northern Ireland's Troubles sat down to talk about their roles for the oral history the Belfast Project. They were assured that the recordings would not be made public until after their deaths. But in July 2013, Boston College, which had been storing the recordings, was forced to release several tapes to Northern Ireland's police service as part of an investigation into the 1972 murder of Jean McConville. Such transgressions have got Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, thinking about how to ensure that data are protected for the promised time period. Among other concerns, he worries for philanthropic donations of papers or personal effects to libraries and the like. Often, such donations are made with a proviso that they not be revealed for a fixed period of time. “That type of donation will not happen if their stuff is only one subpoena away from disclosure,” he says. Mr Zittrain has just received a $35,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, an organisation dedicated to "informed and engaged communities", to create an encrypted "time-capsule" service. Its aim is to enable scholars and journalists to securely send a message, in effect, into the future—encrypted in such a way that it cannot be read by anyone until a certain date or event.

“Net neutrality” — you hear those two words a lot these days....To understand the concept of net neutrality you first have to understand the backdrop of the Internet itself, says Jonathan Zittrain who heads the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “The Internet is kind of a collective hallucination. It is only a set of protocols that say if somebody joining this network, connecting however it can, speaks those protocols, it’s a full-fledged member of the network. That’s one reason why the Internet has no main menu, it has no CEO, it has no business plan,” says Zittrain.

Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Peter K. Bol, who authorized a now-controversial lecture attendance study that involved photographing students without their knowledge last spring, notified the students who took the affected courses by email on Wednesday...Kyros Law in Hingham, Mass. is actively seeking faculty and students to take part in a potential class action lawsuit against the University for allegedly violating privacy and breaking state and federal laws through the attendance study....“A lawsuit is an awful way to sort out a situation like this one,” Computer Science and Law Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain wrote in an email Monday to The Crimson, adding that “there may be reasons to rethink how studies of this sort are done—who approves them, and who's informed about it before, during, and after —but I don't see any useful role for a lawsuit here, and I suspect the plaintiff's firm is rather hoping to simply settle, banking on the University not wishing ongoing bad publicity.”