Cyberlaw

This year, as they prepared to graduate, five members of the Class of 2016 took time to reflect on their interests and share experiences they will take from their time at Harvard Law.

For more than seven years, John Carlin ’99 has been at the center of the most sensitive counterterrorism cases, which have often involved tricky technological questions—first as an adviser to FBI Director Robert Mueller and then at the National Security Division.

The Internet of Things may be about to change our lives as radically as the Internet itself did 20 years ago. The implications for privacy, national security, human rights, cyberespionage and the economy are staggering.

For more than half a century, Phil Heymann has served the nation— and Harvard Law School—with distinction.

Last fall, the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, produced a report for Amnesty International on the legal issues surrounding encryption. While the encryption debate is most often painted as a two-sided battle between law enforcement and technology companies, there are many other stakeholders around the world that are deeply concerned about the widespread implications of regulating encryption in iPhones and other telecommunications devices.

On April 12, students in Professor of Practice Urs Gasser’s Spring 2016 Comparative Online Privacy Seminar at Harvard Law School hosted a student-led mini-symposium on data privacy in the U.S. and the EU with experts from private companies, law firms, and academia.

On April 20, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society released "WiredWest: a Cooperative of Municipalities Forms to Build a Fiber Optic Network," a report written by Berkman Center Co-director and Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford; Waide Warner, Harvard Law lecturer and senior advisor at Berkman's Cyberlaw Clinic; and Berkman fellow David Talbot.

'The Transparency Reporting Toolkit: Survey and Best Practice Memos,' a new report from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Open Technology Initiative, is a compilation of eight memos that look at the major challenges that U.S. Internet and telecommunications companies face when reporting on U.S. law enforcement and government requests for user information, and identify industry best practices for this transparency reporting.

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.

This week, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University announced the release of Amber, a free software tool for websites and blogs that preserves content and prevents broken links.

John P. Carlin ’99, assistant attorney general for National Security, spoke last week at Harvard Law School on the National Security Cyber Threat, at an event hosted by the Harvard National Security Journal.

Yochai Benkler, who has written extensively on the “networked public sphere,” including his influential book “The Wealth of Networks,” recently spoke about his proposal for a defense of whistleblowers, his testimony in a trial of a well-known leaker of military documents, and a problem he calls a growing crisis in the country.

When students walk across Harvard Yard with earbuds in, they could be listening to music or talking on the phone. But nowadays, there’s a good chance they’re listening to a podcast. What listeners may not know is that podcasts started right here at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in 2003.

At a talk hosted by the Berkman Center in August, Jonathan Zittrain and members of the ACLU discussed problems raised by the 2014 European Court of Justice ruling – which gave EU citizens the 'Right to be Forgotten' by Google – and laid out potential alternatives.

The latest episode of the Radio Berkman podcast looks into the payment structure of streaming music services in light of the release of a Rethink Music Initiative report on "Transparency and Money Flows in the Music Industry".

A new report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, "Holyoke: A Massachusetts Municipal Light Plant Seizes Internet Access Business Opportunities," documents the success of a municipally-owned electric utility in providing Internet access services.

At a talk hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet Society on June 23, Mitali Thakor, a PhD student in MIT’s HASTS program and a Berkman affiliate, discussed her findings on techniques and strategies for preventing and prosecuting child exploitation and human trafficking, and how new digital approaches to addressing these issues effect young people online.

On June 22 at Harvard Law School, John Palfrey '01, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, spoke about his new book, "BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever In An Age of Google." Palfrey, who previously served as vice dean for Libraries and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, made the case that libraries are more relevant than ever in

In a lecture marking his appointment as George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School, Jonathan Zittrain ’95 addressed the impact of algorithms on our lives—both on and offline—in a lecture titled “Love the Processor, Hate the Process: The Temptations of Clever Algorithms and When to Resist Them.”

The Harvard Law School CopyrightX course is part of a culture of experimentation in online learning that has marked HarvardX — the University’s portion of the collaborative MOOC provider platform known as edX — from the beginning: The course pioneered a parallel teaching model for online and on-campus students and, more recently, an additional hybrid model that combines online and in-person learning far from Harvard’s campus.