[Itself] Special STS Seminar: Liberty by Design (fwd)

[anita chan]

Please feel free to pass this announcement on to others who may be
interested in attending.

Liberty by Design: The Internet as a Technology of
Freedom and Control

Emerging Internet Technology and Policy Issues

A 4-session seminar

Offered by Alan Davidson, Associate Director of the Center for Democracy
and Technology, Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT

Tuesdays: March 16 & 30 and April 13 & 27, 2004

4:00 - 6:00PM, Room E51-151, MIT

Old conventional wisdom states that the Internet is an unstoppable force
for freedom. The new conventional wisdom is that the Internet can be a
powerful tool of control. Largely by happenstance, the original design of
the Internet  open, decentralized, and extensible  has supported Western
democratic ideals: free expression, individual privacy, and participation
by a diversity of speakers, creators, and technology developers. Today many
of these values are now threatened by policy choices being debated in
government and technology choices being debated by product developers and
technology standards bodies.

How do we reconcile these competing visions of the Internet’s potential?
This series will explore the ways in which the Internet's potential as a
technology of freedom is being influenced by current technology and policy
debates  and seek to chart a path for developing an Internet designed with
liberty in mind.

Seminar 1  Tuesday, March 16, 2004
·       Free Speech by Design: Next Generation Internet Content Regulation
- The free flow of information online is today threatened as national
governments develop new ways to regulate Internet content and as new
gatekeepers  from ISPs to search engines  emerge as attractive targets for
content regulation. Can policy and technology choices serve to preserve
free speech online?

Seminar 2  Tuesday, March 30
·       Privacy by Design: The Golden Age of Government Surveillance -
Information technology is giving government ever greater capabilities to
observe the private activities of the citizenry. Efforts are underway to
expand legal surveillance authority (like the controversial US Patriot Act)
and create new surveillance technologies (like “guaranteed tap-ability” for
Internet phone calls.) How can new imperatives for national security be
reconciled with growing threats to personal privacy?

Seminar 3  Tuesday, April 13
·       Privacy by Design: Corporate Data Collection in the Digital Age -
Consumers face a rising tide of information collection about their personal
lives, from better corporate database to new technologies like RFID, cell
phone location tracking, and ubiquitous networks of embedded computers. How
can law and product design serve to protect privacy in the face of
marketplace data collection?

Seminar 4  Tuesday, April 27
·       Fair Use by Design: Copyright and Creative Production - The threat
of digital piracy has led copyright owners to seek laws that mandate new
technological locks for their content  threatening to constrain valuable
uses of information and create new gatekeepers over content online. Can the
public interest in access to content and innovation be reconciled with
these efforts to protect content online?



Alan Davidson is Associate Director of the Center for Democracy and
Technology, a Washington, DC public interest organization working to
promote civil liberties and human rights on the Internet.  Mr. Davidson, a
graduate of MIT, received an S.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science and
an S.M. in Technology and Policy. He attended law school at Yale, where he
was Symposium Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Mr. Davidson is also an
Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and a Visiting Scholar this
semester at STS.






Kris Kipp
Project Manager
Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Mass. Ave., E51-185
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-253-9759
Fax: 617-258-8118
Email: kipp at mit.edu