Featured Fellow: Derek Bambauer

This is the first of a series of posts on Berkman's fellows.  The Berkman Center is home to approximately thirty fellows, all of whom focus their time and energy on issues concerning the Internet, including Internet governance, privacy concerns, intellectual property rights, antitrust issues, electronic commerce, the role of new media and journalism proper, and digital media. 


Derek Bambauer is a resident fellow at the Berkman Center where he spends most of his time as an OpenNet Initiative researcher on Internet filtering.  A graduate of Harvard College, Derek spent five years prior to law school with Lotus Development Corporation (now a division of IBM) as a consultant, system engineer, and web developer.  He splits his time between research for ONI and his diverse other interests, which include information control through technical and legal methods and the intersection of health law and information technology.  He currently is jointly authoring a paper with his wife, a public health researcher, on California's campaign to reduce prescription drug prices, and has just accepted a position on the faculty of Wayne State University's Law School.

Below is a Q&A with Derek on his life here at the Berkman Center.  To get a complete list of Derek's recent publications, please reference Derek's publication playlist.  To find out more about the OpenNet Initative, go to www.theopennetinitiative.org.


Question: What is the immediate focus of your work here at the Berkman Center?
Derek: I really lead two lives at the Berkman Center.  In one life, I'm a researcher and quasi-project manager for the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership of Berkman, U. of Toronto, Cambridge U., and Oxford U., that studies how various countries censor the Internet using "filtering" - computer methods that prevent citizens from accessing certain material on-line.  In my other life, I'm an IP and cyberlaw geek who researches and writes about topics such as spam, patent law, the legal and ethical responsibilities of corporations selling tech to repressive regimes, and the effects of cognitive biases on communications regulation (with a sideline of health law thrown in for good measure).  I try to keep up with projects such as Digital Media, Net Dialogue, and Stopbadware.org - it's tremendously exciting, but I always feel behind.

Q: What projects are you working on?
Derek: I spend most of my time on the Internet Filtering work through ONI, which gives me a chance to work with students from many of the Harvard schools and MIT.  In the other realm of my Berkman life, I'm finishing a paper that explores the economic justifications for the derivative works right that is one of copyright's entitlements -- for example, the right to produce the movie version of a novel -- and that probes how a copyright system without that right would function.  Phil Malone and I are writing a paper on how law affects research into software security vulnerabilities (bugs, to be plain), and I'm working on a paper with my wife, who's a public health researcher, on California's campaign to reduce prescription drug prices.  Plus, I've just re-built my server at home, so I'm wrestling with hardware de-bugging and figuring out Linux.

Q: Your interests sound very diverse – ONI, software security vulnerabilities, prescription drug prices. What inspired you to write these papers on the software security vulnerabilities and prescription drug prices, in particular?
Derek: The research into software security vulnerabilities came out of a combination of work I'd done at Lotus (worrying about security of networks, applications, etc., in corporate environments) and a shared interest that Phil Malone and I had in this topic generally. 

 (The Mike Lynn - Cisco imbroglio had us mesmerized last year.)  As for prescription drug price discount programs, it emerged out of a series of conversations with my wife (who's taking a faculty position at U. Michigan to be a health services researcher) about how law does, and should, intervene in this area...

Q: You spend a great deal of your time as an OpenNet Initiative Researcher. Describe ONI's work over the last year and the focus of your ONI research.
Derek: Over the past year, ONI has written a series of country studies - on places such as Burma, China, Iran, Tunisia, Yemen, and Singapore - that do empirical analysis of what these countries filter on the Net and how effectively they do it.  When I was in IT consulting at Lotus, we used to say that if you can't measure something, it doesn't really exist.  That's true for ONI's research as well: what makes our work powerful and relevant is that we're the only group doing methodologically rigorous empirical testing of this type of censorship.  We've got a few more surprises to release in the next month or two, and we've already launched our project (generously funded by the MacArthur Foundation) to do a world-wide analysis and comparison of filtering.  For all the work we've done to date, the best is yet to come.

Q: What projects are you working on? Why did you get involved with the OpenNet Initiative? Why do you find its focus so compelling?
Derek: Even before I joined Berkman, I had read and knew about its work on filtering, and it struck me that this was tremendously important, meaningful, and largely overlooked work.  It should terrify us that so many governments seek to alter and distort the information environment in which their citizens live.  Filtering is the dog that didn't bark: if you don't know what you're missing -- if you can't get access to different, dissenting points of view -- you live in a black-and-white world without knowing your state has stripped out its color.  These questions of information control are at the heart of my own research as well, and as everything becomes an application that rides on the Internet, these issues will become increasingly important and difficult.


Q: If you weren't at the Berkman Center, where do you think you may be?
Derek: If I wasn't at Berkman, I'd probably be earning a marginal living as a SCUBA instructor somewhere in the Caribbean.  I love being underwater, and the tech involved in SCUBA is almost as much fun as what we use at Berkman. But I'll settle for the occasional vacation trip to warm water locations.

Q: What is your favorite Berkman moment?
Derek: My favorite Berkman moment?  Probably last April, when I sat with John Palfrey and U. Toronto's Nart Villeneuve in front of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in the Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., to testify about China's Internet filtering.  It hit me that I was so proud of the work we'd done, and so confident in its accuracy, and finally we could share these results with the policymakers who confront the tough questions about our relations with this dynamic, exciting, challenging place.

If you share Derek's interests, check out his "current reading" playlist.