Jonathan Zittrain

Every time Gary Katcher sees the article, he feels that his reputation is being dragged through the mud again. It's an article from Forbes, dated Jan. 13, 2012, touching on a lawsuit between him and an ex-partner in his investment firm over a nasty business divorce. The article was accurate, reporting fairly on the claims of wrongdoing exchanged between the former partners during four years of litigation. It eventually was settled in Katcher's favor, but the magazine never ran a follow-up...Options for an American right to be forgotten are beginning to emerge. Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says focusing on search engines "allows for the information itself to remain public, with a question of how to narrow the indexing of it." He also praised an experiment launched by Google years ago, allowing people quoted or mentioned in a news article to append a clarifying comment next to the article on the Google News service. The function doesn't appear to be available any longer.

Technology companies and the federal government are locked in an escalating legal battle over data surveillance and consumer rights, said Microsoft’s General Counsel Brad Smith at a Law School forum Tuesday...Conversing with Law School Professor Jonathan L. Zittrain, who moderated the forum, Smith argued that the U.S. government must respect both domestic and international privacy laws, instead of unilaterally and opaquely obtaining data.

The conflict between snooping governments seeking to defeat encryption and users demanding ever more robust privacy tools has turned into an arms race -- and it's time for arms control talks, Microsoft's general counsel said on Tuesday. Resolving that conflict requires a new consensus on how to balance public safety and personal privacy, Brad Smith said in a forum at Harvard Law School...In an expansive conversation about privacy and rebuilding trust in technology after revelations of widespread government spying, Smith talked about Microsoft's first "sea-change" moment. It came in the year after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, when Microsoft, among other Internet companies and telcos, was asked to voluntarily share data with U.S. law enforcement. In the heat of the moment, in 2002, "it was easy to do things that we wouldn't otherwise do," Smith told Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who moderated the event.

Open Facebook today and you’ll see a public service announcement of sorts. “It’s Election Day,” proclaims the text. “Share that you’re voting in the U.S. Election and find out where to vote.”...In other words, to paraphrase Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain, the 2000 presidential election—where George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes—could have been altered by a Facebook election button...As Zittrain wrote earlier this year, the company could easily combine that tranche of data with selective deployment of its “I Voted” button and tilt an election. Just make certain populations more likely to see the button, and, ta-da: modification managed.

The Knight Foundation today announced the latest winners of its Knight Prototype Fund. Eighteen projects will receive $35,000 to help them bring their concepts closer to fruition. The fund, launched in 2012, also gives winners a support network and the opportunity to receive human-centered design training in an effort bring early stage media ideas to a formal launch...Meet the winners...Harvard Library Innovation Lab/Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Project lead: Jonathan Zittrain; Cambridge, Mass.): Creating a time-lapse encryption service that will allow archivists, scholars and journalists to securely send a message into the future, so it cannot be read until a certain date or event.

John P. Carlin, U.S. assistant attorney general for national security, spoke and answered questions about cyber threats and the Department of Justice’s continued efforts to fight terrorism Friday at Harvard Law School...The event was moderated by Law School professor Jonathan L. Zittrain, who serves on the board of directors for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the NSA’s advisory board.

If we have kill switches on consumer products, why don't we have them on military weaponry? Jonathan Zittrain is the Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and he argues we should have a way to disable dangerous weapons at a distance.

The Kremlin is worried that the West might try to shut off Russia's access to the global Internet. According to a report by Vedomosti on Sept. 19, the Kremlin might soon deploy a new set of tactics in an effort to defend the country's "digital sovereignty."...More involvement in the web's domain operations would grant the Kremlin some additional capacity to disrupt how the RuNet functions, but the shift would not "surrender control of the Internet to Russia," claims ICANN president Fadi Chehade. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain agrees, saying the Internet works on a "consensus," of which "numbering and naming" is only a "tiny part."

The Kremlin is worried the West might try to shut off Russia’s access to the global Internet. According to a report by Russian newspaper Vedomosti on Sept 19, the Kremlin might soon deploy a new set of tactics in an effort to defend the country’s “digital sovereignty.”...More involvement in the Web’s domain operations would grant the Kremlin some additional capacity to disrupt how the RuNet functions, but the shift would not “surrender control of the Internet to Russia,” claims ICANN President Fadi Chehadé. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain agrees, saying the Internet works on a “consensus,” of which “numbering and naming” is only a “tiny part.”

An anonymous school-gossip website that saw a sharp rise in popularity over the past year has become a campus cause célèbre since an enterprising journalism student outed the site's top-secret editor..."Anonymity has a storied relationship with American democracy," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law professor who co-founded the school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "It's a way for the powerless and disadvantaged to speak without fear of repercussion. Of course, that same lack of repercussion can make for a license for abusive behavior."

Apple, which built its iconic brand by making cool, shiny electronics, on Tuesday entered the daunting world of consumer finance with a new mobile payment system built to resist the relentless attacks of cybercriminals who have ravaged the nation’s retail industry...“It won’t be too long before we look back on this era and think it’s nuts,” said Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain. He and other technology experts noted that Apple has a history of solving business riddles that have eluded others, as it did with the iPod, which thrived not only because of its stylish hardware but also because big record companies agreed to distribute their music through Apple’s iTunes store.

When Iraq’s American-equipped army fled their posts in Mosul last June, they left that American equipment in the hands Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the attacking violent insurgent group. Since then, the U.S. Air Force destroyed some of the captured vehicles. Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wonders if there’s a better way to stop stolen equipment from working. He proposes “kill switches,” like those found in iPhones, as a means for keeping American arms, given to allies, from working in the hands of enemies...Through email, Popular Science spoke with Zittrain about how these proposed killswitches could work, and what they would mean for arming allies in the future.

Imagine what the Internet would be like if most major websites had imposed controls preventing the naked photos stolen from Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities from being posted online..."The platforms that host that content can't readily police all of it the way that a newspaper can carefully select what should go in as a letter to the editor," says Harvard University Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain, who is also co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. This summer the insurgent group ISIS captured the Iraqi city of Mosul—and along with it, three army divisions’ worth of U.S.-supplied equipment from the Iraqi army, including Humvees, helicopters, antiaircraft cannons and M1 Abrams tanks. ISIS staged a parade with its new weapons and then deployed them to capture the strategic Mosul Dam from outgunned Kurdish defenders. The U.S. began conducting air strikes and rearming the Kurds to even the score against its own weaponry. As a result, even more weapons have been added to the conflict, and local arms bazaars have reportedly seen an influx of supply. It is past time that we consider whether we should build in a way to remotely disable such dangerous tools in an emergency.

A system crash blacking out broadband service for all 11.4 million of Time Warner Cable’s customers for three hours early Wednesday morning raises questions about the stability of U.S. Internet infrastructure and the potential impact of Time Warner’s proposed mega-merger with Comcast, experts say. ...The lack of disclosure about accidental outages is itself a serious issue, says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government. “We ought to have standards for release of data by broadband providers to allow apples-to-apples comparisons and tracking of outages over time so the public, and policymakers, can gauge trends in connectivity,” he says.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. Last week Google created an advisory committee to help it implement the “right to be forgotten” online that has been demanded by the European Court of Justice. It has its work cut out: the search giant has received more than 70,000 requests since May to decouple a claimant’s name from search results that may be true but are deemed “irrelevant” and presumably reputation-damaging. Turning theory into practice has revealed unanswered questions – and some outright flaws – in the court’s decision.

About 700,000 of Facebook’s one billion or so users recently served as test subjects in a psychology experiment. Researchers altered the users’ “news feeds” — the news stories and photos that roll across everyone’s Facebook’s home page…The clearly marked ads we understand — nothing hidden about that agenda. But for everything else, “people really are trusting them to be acting more or less in their interests,” said Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain…The US does not have anywhere near the same attitude toward regulating the Internet as Europe, and even if we were to adopt tougher restrictions here, Zittrain points out those would likely violate the companies’ First Amendment right to publish what they choose. So Zittrain suggests an alternative — Internet gatekeepers would voluntarily agree to abide by ethical standards similar to what doctors, lawyers and financial planners pledge. Those standards would codified in the companies’ terms of service, so they would be legally bound to follow them.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. More than a decade ago, researchers at Boston College interviewed people from both sides of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, promising each contributor to the Belfast Project that his or her interview recording wouldn’t be released until the contributor died. In the meantime, the tapes would be deposited at the college’s rare books library under lock and key. On the basis of those promises, some people spoke for the first time about painful actions that remain murky in the public eye, including unsolved murders that they’d helped commit or cover up. When the British government learned of the Belfast Project about 10 years later, it invoked a mutual legal assistance treaty to demand immediate access to some of the tapes...Are we stuck with either having to destroy our secrets or leave them exposed to near-instant disclosure? It might be possible to split the difference: to develop an ecosystem of contingent cryptography for libraries, companies, governments, and citizens.