Berkman Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

Timothy H. Edgar on Addressing Cyber Conflict While Protecting Privacy and Internet Freedom [AUDIO]

Tue, 14 May 2013 18:31:47 +0000

What does talk of cyber war mean for our liberties? The United States has a new military command for cyberspace, with the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) as its commander. At the same time, the Secretary of State has announced that the “freedom to connect” is an aspect of fundamental human rights and [...]

Daniel J. Caron & Eric Mechoulan on How to Archive for the Future [AUDIO]

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:26:31 +0000

In order to secure our future, we need to know how to organize our past. If we want to preserve accessibility to valuable information about legal, political, social, and cultural discourses in an era of information abundance, it becomes vital to design carefully how we distinguish between noise and significant pieces of information. In this [...]

Work Here: Heather Whitney on Having a Voice in the Modern Workplace and Changing the World [AUDIO]

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:55:25 +0000

Companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook are thought to provide some of the most envied work environments on the planet. But should employees be worried that their trust in their employer, so purposefully cultivated, has been built on promises that are more illusion than enforceable promise? Some in the labor movement think these employers [...]

Derek Khanna on Disruptive Innovation in Washington, DC [AUDIO]

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:00:59 +0000

SOPA, CISPA, CFAA, DMCA, mobile phone unlocking — how can a complacent Congress address real and systemic problems related to technology and antiquated legislation? In this talk, Derek Khanna — Yale Law Fellow with the Information Society Project and former House Republican Study Committee staffer (where he authored the widely read House Republican Study Committee [...]

Bruce Schneier & Jonathan Zittrain on IT, Security, and Power [AUDIO]

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:30:35 +0000

How does the Internet affect power? How does power affect the Internet? Factors such as ubiquitous surveillance, the rise of cyberwar, ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, and a feudal model of security collide to create a circumstance in which those in power are using information technology to increase [...]

Anil Dash on The Web We Lost [AUDIO]

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:16:49 +0000

In the past decade, we’ve seen an unprecedented rise of powerful social networks, connecting millions or even billions of people who can now communicate almost instantaneously. But many of the promises that were made by the creators of the earliest social networking technologies have gone unfulfilled. In this talk, Anil Dash—entrepreneur, technologist, and writer—takes a [...]

Dan Gillmor on Permission Taken [AUDIO]

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:46:19 +0000

Once, personal technology and the Internet meant that we didn’t need permission to compute, communicate and innovate. Now, governments and tech companies are systematically restricting our liberties, and creating an online surveillance state. In many cases, however, we’re letting it happen, by trading freedom for convenience and (often the illusion of) security. In this talk, [...]

RB210: The New Knowledge Worker

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:18:44 +0000

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg As high school and college students transition into a knowledge economy they face both advantages and challenges with how they find information and engage with co-workers as teammates. As a recent study of US employers and recent college graduates discovered, some young hires are pretty good at finding [...]

Geoffrey Miller on the Smartphone Revolution in the Behavioral Sciences [AUDIO]

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:58:29 +0000

5.9 billion people now use mobile phones, of which 1.1 billion are smartphones. With this kind of penetration smartphones will empower behavioral scientists to collect terabytes of ecologically valid data from vast global samples—easily, quickly, and remotely, transforming the behavioral sciences even more profoundly than PCs and brain imaging did. Smartphones can record where people [...]

Book Talk: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Neil Cukier on Big Data – and its Dark Side [AUDIO]

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:30:17 +0000

The power of big data—analyzing huge swaths of information to uncover insights and make predictions that were largely impossible in the past—is poised to transform business and society. Yet there is a dark side. Privacy is eroded like never before. And a new harm emerges: predictions about human behavior that may result in penalties prior [...]

Eric Gordon on Transforming Local Civic Engagement Through an Online Game [AUDIO]

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 19:05:53 +0000

The problem of civic engagement is often understood as a lack of participation. People do not show up to meetings, they do not engage in their civic institutions or communicate with decision-makers. The Engagement Game Lab has developed an online game called Community PlanIt—which has been played in six distinct planning processes ranging from urban [...]

Jon Penney on Internet Censorship and the Remembrance of Infowars Past [AUDIO]

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:51:18 +0000

With Internet censorship on the rise around the world, organizations and researchers have developed and distributed a variety of tools to assist Internet users to both monitor and circumvent such censorship. In this talk, Jon Penney—Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab and Berkman Fellow—examines some of the international law and politics of such censorship resistance [...]

Ruha Devanesan on Thoughts On The Fallout from Kony 2012 [AUDIO]

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:07:54 +0000

On March 5th, 2012, the American nonprofit, Invisible Children, published a video called “Kony 2012″ on the social video-sharing network, Youtube. Within six days the video was dubbed the “most viral video in history,” beating out pop artists Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Beyonce’s music videos in how quickly it hit 100 million views. In [...]

Jenna Burrell on Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana [AUDIO]

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 19:36:10 +0000

Ghana, a small country on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, is the size of Oregon. Its entire population is only double that of New York City. Yet what is unfolding there matters to the future of the Internet. In this talk, Jenna Burrell — Assistant Professor in the School of Information at UC [...]