Jonathan Zittrain

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain. On November 2, 2010, Facebook’s American users were subject to an ambitious experiment in civic-engineering: Could a social network get otherwise-indolent people to cast a ballot in that day’s congressional midterm elections? The answer was yes.

Europe’s highest court said on Tuesday that people had the right to influence what the world could learn about them through online searches, a ruling that rejected long-established notions about the free flow of information on the Internet… Jonathan Zittrain, a law and computer science professor at Harvard, said those who were determined to shape their online personas could in essence have veto power over what they wanted people to know. “Some will see this as corrupting,” he said. “Others will see it as purifying. I think it’s a bad solution to a very real problem, which is that everything is now on our permanent records.”

Canaries can be useful creatures. Coal miners used to bring them into the mines as a warning sign of methane or carbon monoxide. A dead canary meant the miners needed to get out of there pronto. Now a clever loophole in the rules regarding NSA requests for information is letting companies warn their customers in the same way a little yellow bird might signal trouble. It's called a "warrant canary", and several major companies like Apple have already used it in their "transparency reports."…According to Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, it's not only a clever way to let customers know if their information may have been acquired by the NSA, but also a way for the private sector to agitate Government agencies on the issues involved in privacy.

When Turkey’s dictator blocked Twitter and YouTube earlier this year, many citizens quickly found other ways to access the sites, proving further support for the adage that “the net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.” The saying, and the tools that make such rerouting possible, are a testament to the flexible technical protocols that make the internet so accessible to so many people. Yet the ability of Turkish citizens to see blocked websites is also a triumph for the internet’s political protocols, which time and again lead unaffiliated people to unite in an effort to overcome censorship…The most level-headed response to the outcry came from Jonathan Zittrain, a computer science and law professor at Harvard, who pointed out that it would be hard for the U.N. or anyone else to exert control over the internet for the simple reason that it’s not really something that can be owned in the first place.

Russia has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said Tuesday would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online...The level of challenge is rising, but “we also see the amount of resources going into censorship increasing greatly,” Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in Internet law, said in a telephone interview.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has announced a significant leadership transition as Professor William (Terry) Fisher steps down after 12 years as Chair of the Board of Directors and Professor Jonathan Zittrain, the co-founder of the Berkman Center and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, assumes the role. The change will be effective as of July 1, 2014.

The Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries (SPIRL) has recognized two Harvard Law School Library Programs, Stacklife and Library Cloud, for their innovation and functionality on campus and in the community.

In a week of many developments in the world of law, Harvard Law School faculty were online, in print, and on-the-air offering analyses and opinions.

In a week of many developments in the world of law, Harvard Law School faculty were online, in print, and on-the-air offering analyses and opinions.

Over the past week, a number of HLS faculty members shared their viewpoints on events in the news. Here are some excerpts.

On Wednesday, Feb. 6, scholars from across Harvard University joined social media experts from Facebook, Twitter, Socialflow and Microsoft Research for a conference on social media, theory and practice, and their potential effects on voting behavior, electricity consumption, pro-social behavior and privacy. The event, “Social Media and Behavioral Economics Conference,” sponsored by Harvard Law School’s new Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy, was held at Harvard Law School.