Jonathan Zittrain

The Network is a group of high-level digital security experts from across government, the private sector and security research community invited by The Washington Post to vote in surveys on the most pressing issues in the field. Our regular surveys will highlight insights from some of the most influential people in cybersecurity...Camille Francois is the research and analysis director at Graphika, where she leads a data science and analysis team focused on analyzing social media manipulations...Francois is a cybersecurity fellow at the New America Foundation and an affiliate at the Harvard-Klein Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where she pursues her work on mechanisms to establish peace and security in the face of cyber conflict...Matthew Olsen is the president and chief revenue officer at IronNet Cybersecurity. He previously served as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, general counsel for the National Security Agency and in a number of leadership positions at the Justice Department. Olsen teaches at Harvard Law School...Jonathan Zittrain: Harvard law and computer science professor and co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Zittrain’s research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, human computing and the deployment of technology in education.

As recently as 10 years ago, Jeannie Suk Gersen was still telling people that the area of law she specialized in—sexual assault and domestic violence—didn’t hold much interest for the general public. A quiet corner of the profession, she thought. Remembering that now, she laughs. “But, you know,” she adds, “every area of law does end up moving into focus. Because, in the end, law is really about every aspect of our lives.” Which is partly why Gersen, J.D. ’02, has always taken it so seriously. “Words don’t just describe things,” she explains. In the law, “words actually do things.” ... “Jeannie is intellectually fearless,” says Bemis professor of international law Jonathan Zittrain. That’s a common sentiment among her colleagues... “There are a lot of people who are afraid to say things in our business,” says Learned Hand professor of law Jack Goldsmith, “and she’s not afraid to say what she thinks.” ... “Her whole response to Title IX has been very, very striking—and I think completely correct,” says Beneficial professor of law Charles Fried, who was Gersen’s teacher before he was her colleague ... Says her former teacher, Loeb University Professor emeritus Laurence Tribe, “I was always impressed by how both meticulous and yet unconventional her insights were. She would often come at issues in a kind of perpendicular way. Rather than finding a point between A and B, she would say that maybe that axis is the wrong axis.” ... “She has one of those amazing brains,” says Williams professor of law I. Glenn Cohen, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Gersen. “She was a year ahead of me in law school, and we all regarded her more like a faculty member, even back then. She just seemed to know everything.”

With the Senate’s impeachment trial starting oral arguments on Tuesday, Donald Trump now faces the possibility of real consequences for his role in inciting the Capitol siege of Jan. 6. But the apparatus that fed him much of his power — the conservative news media — is facing a test of its own. This might ultimately have a much bigger impact on the future of American politics than anything that happens to Mr. Trump as an individual. In recent weeks, two voting-technology companies have each filed 10-figure lawsuits against Mr. Trump’s lawyers and his allies in the media, claiming they spread falsehoods that did tangible harm. This comes amid an already-raging debate over whether to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which prevents online companies from being held liable for the views expressed on their platforms...Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor who studies digital media, sees a sea change coming. In the early decades of the internet, he said, most legal discussions were guided by a question of “rights,” particularly the right to free speech under the First Amendment. But in recent years, a new interest in what he called “the public health framework” has taken hold. “Misinformation and extremism — particularly extremism that’s tied to violence — can result in harm,” Mr. Zittrain said. “Given that there are compelling things in both the rights framework and the health framework, there’s going to be a balance struck.”

Over the last few years, Section 230 of the 1996 US Communications Decency Act has metamorphosed from a little-known subset of regulations about the internet into a major rallying point for both the right and left. So when Democrats unveiled their attempt to overhaul the law on Friday, the technology world took notice. There have been other suggestions for how to change Section 230, and many threats from President Trump while he was still in office—but the bill, announced on Friday by Senators Mark Warner, Mazie Hirono, and Amy Klobuchar, appears to be the most significant step yet toward genuinely reforming it...The problem of online abuse and misinformation became impossible to ignore over the last year, with harmful online conspiracy theories fueling the pandemic, and political lies threatening the election. That culminated in January, when the violent assault on the US Capitolwas fanned by online groups and by Trump himself...The proposals are a “recipe for a bit of a mess” agrees Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of international law at Harvard Law School. He suggests that it may be more important to come up with common standards “to establish what is or isn’t actionable” to make sure that frivolous cases from ill-intentioned complainants do not get turned into vast, expensive lawsuits.

As we grapple with disinformation driving the recent attack on the U.S. Capitol and hundreds of thousands of deaths from a pandemic whose nature and mitigation is subject to heated dispute, social media companies are weighing how to respond to both the political and public health disinformation, or intentionally false information, that they can spread. These decisions haven’t taken place in a vacuum, says Jonathan Zittrain ’95, Harvard’s George Bemis Professor of International Law and Professor of Computer Science. Rather, he says, they’re part of a years-long trend from viewing digital governance first through a “Rights” framework, then through a “Public Health” framework, and, with them irreconcilable, most immediately through a “Legitimacy” framework. Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, delivered his remarks as part of the first of two editions of the 2020 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Clare Hall, Cambridge, a prestigious lecture series that advances and reflects upon how scholarly and scientific learning relates to human values. According to Zittrain, former President Donald Trump’s deplatforming from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, among others, is one of the most notable recent content moderation policy decisions — one which Facebook just referred for binding assessment by its new external content Oversight Board.

An op-ed by Jonathan Zittrain: The majority staff of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives has issued a report to accompany the resolution for today’s second impeachment of President Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection. Earlier this week, my former colleague Alan Dershowitz argued in Newsweek that First Amendment protections against a criminal conviction for incitement to riot make impeachment over the president’s role in last week’s events at the Capitol unconstitutional. I want to explain why this claim carries no weight. Dershowitz wrote that Trump’s speech last week, “disturbing as it may have been—is within the core protection of political speech.” He pointed to Brandenburg v. Ohio, where the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot prohibit speech unless it is specifically “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “is likely to incite or produce such action.” (In Brandenburg, the Court found that a short speech by a Ku Klux Klan leader at an Ohio farm saying that there might have to be “some revengeance taken” and referencing a march to take place later in Washington, D.C. was protected by the First Amendment from a state charge of “criminal syndicalism” because any lawless action incited was not imminent.) There are a number of ways that the president’s speech, in which he told his supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore” and to march to Congress at that very moment in the hopes of disrupting the Electoral Vote count, differs from the facts of Brandenburg. But more importantly, the question at the moment isn’t whether the president could be charged with incitement to violence in criminal court. It’s whether the president can be impeached for his actions, both arising from the speech and from his actions (and inactions) as the crowd stormed the Capitol and he was implored to help.

Yesterday, January 13, the House of Representatives impeached President Trump a second time for encouraging the violent riot in the Capitol Building on January 6. And yet, the impeachment is probably less of a crushing blow to the president than something else that’s happened in recent days: the loss of his Twitter account. After a few very eventful weeks, Lawfare's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation is back. Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Jonathan Zittrain, the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, about the decision by Twitter, Facebook and a whole host of other platforms to ban the president in the wake of the Capitol riot. Jonathan, Evelyn and Quinta take a step back and situate what’s happening within the broader story of internet governance. They talked about how to understand the bans in the context of the internet’s now not-so-brief history, how platforms make these decisions and, of course, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Listeners might also be interested in Zittrain's February 2020 Tanner Lecture, "Between Suffocation and Abdication: Three Eras of Governing Digital Platforms," which touches on some of the same ideas discussed in the podcast.

Imagine a robot trained to think, respond, and behave using you as a model. Now imagine it assuming one of your roles in life, at home or perhaps at work. Would you trust it to do the right thing in a morally fraught situation? That’s a question worth pondering as artificial intelligence increasingly becomes part of our everyday lives, from helping us navigate city streets to selecting a movie or song we might enjoy — services that have gotten more use in this era of social distancing. It’s playing an even larger cultural role with its use in systems for elections, policing, and health care...Jonathan Zittrain, Berkman Klein Center director and Harvard Law School’s George Bemis Professor of International Law, said it’s important that we think hard about whether and where AI’s adoption might be a good thing and, if so, how best to proceed. Zittrain said that AI’s spread is different from prior waves of technology because AI shifts the decision-making away from humans and toward machines and their programmers. And, where technologies like the internet were developed largely in the open by government and academia, the frontiers of AI are being pushed forward largely by private corporations, which shield the business secrets of how their technologies operate. The effort to understand AI’s place in society and its impact on all of our lives — not to mention whether and how it should be regulated — will take input from all areas of society, Zittrain said. “It’s almost a social-cultural question, and we have to recognize that, with the issues involved, it’s everybody’s responsibility to think it through,” Zittrain said.

A group of prominent media veterans are advising a team of millennials who are launching a new company called "Column," which modernizes the placement of public notices. Why it matters: Public notices have been one of the biggest and most reliable revenue streams​ for local newspapers for centuries. Amid the pandemic, they are becoming more important to local papers that are seeing regular local advertising dry up. Catch up quick: Public notices are legally required updates from the government to citizens about different types of legal or regulatory proceedings, like ordinances, foreclosures, municipal budgets, adoptions, and public meetings. Like obituaries, the exact amount of revenue they deliver to the newspaper industry is debated, but they've long been considered a critical part of local newspaper businesses, due to a longstanding legal requirement for local governments to place them in newspapers...Details: The company has a full-time team of nine, and is supported and advised by many notable media experts, including David Chavern, CEO of the News Media Alliance and Nancy Gibbs, the faculty director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, and the former editor in chief of Time Magazine. It receives occasional informal advice from Marty Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post. The company is advised by several Harvard professors and entrepreneurs, including Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and Henry Ward, founder and CEO of Carta.

For the most part, fictional characters rarely recognize when they’re trapped in a dystopia...To them, that dystopia is just life. Which suggests that—were we, at this moment, living in a dystopia ourselves—we might not even notice it...Is this, right here, the tech-dystopia we were worried about? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts with differing opinions...Jonathan Zittrain: "Yes, in the sense that so many of us feel rightly that instead of empowering us, technology is used against us—most especially when it presents itself as merely here to help. I’ve started thinking of some of our most promising tech, including machine learning, as like asbestos: it’s baked wholesale into other products and services so we don’t even know we’re using it; it becomes pervasive because it seems to work so well, and without any overlay of public interest on its installation; it’s really hard to account for, much less remove, once it’s in place; and it carries with it the possibility of deep injury both now and down the line. I’m not anti-tech. But I worry greatly about the deployment of such power with so little thought given to, and so few boundaries against, its misuse, whether now or later. More care and public-minded oversight goes into someone’s plans for an addition to a house than to what can be or become a multi-billion dollar, multi-billion-user online platform. And while thanks to their power, and the trust placed in them by their clients, we recognize structural engineers, architects, lawyers, and doctors as members of learned professions—with duties to their clients and to the public that transcend a mere business agreement—we have yet to see that applied to people in data science, software engineering, and related fields who might be in a position to recognize and prevent harm as it coalesces. There are ways out of this. But it first requires abandoning the resignation that so many have come to about business as usual."

An article by Margaret Bourdeaux, Beth Cameron and Jonathan Zittrain: As Covid-19 cases surge to their highest levels in dozens of states, the nation’s testing effort is on the brink of paralysis because of widespread delays in getting back results. And that is very bad news, because even if testing is robust, the pandemic cannot be controlled without rapid results. This is the latest failure in our national response to the worst pandemic in a century. Since the Trump administration has abdicated responsibility, governors must join forces to meet this threat before the cataclysm that Florida is experiencing becomes the reality across the country. Testing should be the governors’ first order of business. Despite President Trump’s boast early this month that testing “is so massive and so good,” the United States’ two largest commercial testing companies, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, have found themselves overwhelmed and unable to return results promptly. Delays averaging a week or longer for all but top-priority hospital patients and symptomatic health care workers are disastrous for efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Without rapid results, it is impossible to isolate new infections quickly enough to douse flare-ups before they grow. Slow diagnosis incapacitates contact tracing, which entails not only isolating those who test positive but also alerting the infected person’s contacts quickly so they can quarantine, too, and avoid exposing others to the virus unwittingly. Among those who waited an absurdly long time for her results was the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms. “We FINALLY received our test results taken 8 days before,” she tweeted last week. “One person in my house was positive then. By the time we tested again, 1 week later, 3 of us had COVID. If we had known sooner, we would have immediately quarantined.”

An article by Jonathan Zittrain: On Tuesday, President Donald Trump began his day as he usually does—by tweeting. In this case, Trump fired off a threat of using “serious force” against hypothetical protesters setting up an “autonomous zone” in Washington, D.C. Twitter, in response, hid the tweet but did not delete it, requiring readers to click through a notice that says the tweet violated the platform’s policy “against abusive behavior, specifically, the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group.” Twitter’s placement of such a “public interest notice” on a tweet from the president of the United States was just the latest salvo in the company’s struggle to contend with Trump’s gleefully out-of-bounds behavior. But any response from Twitter is going to be the least bad option rather than a genuinely good one. This is because Trump himself has demolished the norms that would make a genuinely good response possible in the first place. The truth is that every plausible configuration of social media in 2020 is unpalatable. Although we don’t have consensus about what we want, no one would ask for what we currently have: a world in which two unelected entrepreneurs are in a position to monitor billions of expressions a day, serve as arbiters of truth, and decide what messages are amplified or demoted. This is the power that Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have, and they may well experience their own discomfort with it. Nor, though, would many of us wish for such powerful people to stand idly by when, at no risk to themselves, they could intervene to prevent misery and violence in the physical world, by, say, helping to counter dangerous misinformation or preventing the incitement of violence.

An article by Jonathan Zittrain: Last month I wrote a short essay covering some of the issues around standing up contact tracing across the U.S., as part of a test/trace/quarantine regime that would accompany the ending of a general lockdown to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic...In the intervening month, some things have remained the same. As before, tech companies and startups continue to develop exposure notification apps and frameworks. And there remains no Federally-coordinated effort to test, trace, and isolate — it’s up to states and respective municipalities to handle anything that will happen. Some localities continue to spin up ambitious contact tracing programs, while others remain greatly constrained. As Margaret Bourdeaux explains, for example: “In Massachusetts, many of the 351 local boards of health are unaccredited, and most have only the most rudimentary digital access to accomplish the most basic public health goals of testing and contact tracing in their communities.” She cites Georgetown’s Alexandra Phelan: “Truly the amount of US COVID19 response activities that rely solely on the fax machine would horrify you.” There remain any number of well-considered plans that depend on a staged, deliberate reopening based on on testing, tracing, and supported isolation, such as ones from Harvard’s Safra Center (“We need to massively scale-up testing, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine — together with providing the resources to make these possible for all individuals”), the Center for American Progress (calling for “instantaneous contact tracing and isolation of individuals who were in close proximity to a positive case”), and the American Enterprise Institute (“We need to harness the power of technology and drive additional resources to our state and local public-health departments, which are on the front lines of case identification and contact tracing”).