Open Networks, Closed Regimes

Open Network, Closed Regimes

Problem to be solved

US-based internet services are used by citizens of every regime in the world. Western-based internet companies operate these services in many countries where governments routinely request or demand sensitive information about their citizens. How should high-level officers respond when their companies receive requests to turn over information which violate privacy and anonymity expectations? How can citizens, NGOs, and government actors influence the way these companies respond?

Precis

The idea of the internet service provider as a border-defying government-regulation-free jurisdiction was already dying in the 1990s, but the large-scale movement of internet services into regimes without free speech protections has raised serious concerns about managing cross-border privacy standards over the last five years. From Yahoo turning over pro-democracy Chinese bloggers to the Chinese government, to Saudi Arabia tracking porn downloaders by pulling ISP records, to South Korea trying to arrest anonymous government critics, the problems are widespread and not restricted only to regimes that Americans are used to thinking of as "repressive." The globalization of internet services raises difficult questions: What requests for information are invasive? What kind of deference is due to local sovereignty? How can the competing demands best be balanced? How can the relevant stakeholders work toward achieving a proper balance?

Existing Proposals to be Discussed

GNI
GOFA
Q6/17

Potential Guests

Caroline Nolan, Colin Maclay, or John Palfrey from Berkman/GNI
Andrew McLaughlin from Google

Brainstorming:

Rebecca MacKinnon (former CNN journalist, former Berkman Fellow, and now Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Center; see fourth and fifth links below)
Rep. Rick Boucher
Chris Smith, Congressman and GOFA co-sponsor
Mary Robertson, former President of Ireland
Mark Allison, or another Amnesty International researcher on East Asian issues
Nicola Wong (Google), Michael Samway (Yahoo) (see second link below), or other representatives of Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo who have dealt with China, S. Korea, Saudi Arabia, or other regimes in this context
Edward J. Markey, House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center
Chris Kelly, Facebook Chief Privacy Officer (candidate for AG of California in 2010)
Peter O’Kelly, Skype President [1]
Representatives of Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo who have helped design GNI
Perhaps a representative of the government of South Korea (see seventh link below) or, ideally, China (hey, we can dream)
Perhaps also a continental civil law (French, German?) free speech scholar to talk about contrasting international ideas of free speech?

Course structure

Class:

First 10-15 minutes: Exposition- background information, state problem, and introduce types of potential solutions: Law (GOFA), Market, Norms (GNI), Code
Next 45 minutes: Q&A with guests, in a panel, on what the terrain looks like now, and what's left to do. (Possibly Using Live Question Tool w/ Projector)
Remainder: Classwide simulation, with students in groups, defending assigned roles as various stakeholder groups.

Simulation

The class will be divided into simulation groups ahead of time (e.g., US Congressional Representatives, Bloggers, Human Rights Groups). Each group will be assigned a role in the simulation, and we will give each group a set of readings specific to their role in the simulation.

A relevant privacy/anonymity problem (that has just recently been introduced on the global stage) will be introduced in the second half of the class. Drawing upon assigned readings and the lessons and principles introduced in the first half of the class, each simulation group will devise and advocate a broad approach to for confronting this problem. Each group's approach should be based on its assigned role in the simulation.

Readings

(Some of these and additional readings will be broken down by simulation group)

Audio:

http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2008/07/on-the-media-in.html (Episode of On The Media w/ Rebecca MacKinnon)

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMorzIBHmrA (Conversation about GNI on CSPAN w/ Michael Samway and Julien Sanchez)

Text

“Just the Facts” Reporting

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7696356.stm

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/technology/internet/28privacy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Critiques

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/ramasastry/20081212.html (Anita Ramasastry, Associate Professor at University of Washington School of Law)

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=29117 (Reporters without Borders, an NGO that was part of the talks but didn’t sign onto the GNI at the end)

http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/gni/signon_letter.txt (Electronic Frontier Foundation, an NGO that was part of the talks and did sign onto the GNI at the end)

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/mackinnon (Rebecca MacKinnon, writing in The Nation before the GNI existed, discusses four companies' culpability and diagnoses a major flaw with GOFA)