Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

Cultivating New voices, Approaches, and Audiences for national - and international - reporting in an era of global interconnectedness and shrinking news budgets

Monday, July 11, 5:00pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society / Harvard Law School. Location TBA. RSVP Required. This event will be webcast live.

The Berkman Center will host a conversation about the challenges of reporting international stories to US and Global audiences. In an age of shrinking news budgets, American newspapers and broadcasters are producing less original reporting of international stories. And while gripping events like the Arab Spring capture the attention of the public, many important international stories fail to capture widespread attention. The challenges for international reporting are both ones of supply (who reports the news from around the world?) and demand (who pays attention?) This conversation was inspired by the work of Berkman Fellow Persephone Miel, whose work focused on how compelling narrative and context for international stories could make unfamiliar international news more accessible to American and global audiences. Her efforts to support and promote talented local, non-US journalists whose work has the potential for global impact, but need to overcome significant obstacles to succeed, are continued through a fellowship established in her honor by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Journalists Fatima Tlisova (Voice of America) and Pulitzer Prize winner Dele Olojede will join Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center/C4/Global Voices), Colin Maclay (Berkman Center), Ivan Sigal (Global Voices), John Sawyer (Pulitzer Center), and the Miel family for a discussion and reflection on these questions, and on Persephone's work and the journalistic values she championed. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

The Internet and the Commerce Clause through the Prism of the Federal Kidnapping Act

Tuesday, July 12, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Should kidnapping be a federal crime where use of the Internet or other telecommunications facilities is central to the crime's execution, but the physical act itself takes place within the borders of a single state? Through the case study of the harrowing kidnapping and murder of 12-year old Brooke Bennett, this article examines a uniquely 21st century legal question about federalism, technology and criminal law. In 2006, the Federal Kidnapping Act was amended to broaden federal jurisdiction in a clear effort to reach kidnappings committed by Internet sexual predators. The article that is the subject of this talk is the first non-student piece to address this amendment, and the only one to date to defend it. Michele Martinez Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Law at Vermont Law School, where she specializes in criminal law and criminal procedure. Professor Martinez Campbell graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and received her JD with distinction from Stanford Law School. After law school, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Robert F. Peckham, Chief Judge of the Northern District of California, then spent three years as a litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. She spent eight years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York (covering Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Long Island), where she served as Deputy Chief of the Narcotics Unit. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

The Hacker's Aegis - Protecting Hackers From Lawyers

Tuesday, July 19, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

Research on software security vulnerabilities is a valuable example of peer production. However, hackers are often threatened with intellectual property lawsuits by companies who want to keep flaws secret. Oliver Day and Derek Bambauer propose a liability shield for security research to improve cybersecurity in a world dependent on cloud computing and mobile platforms. Come debate whether hackers are whistleblowers, and how legal immunity affects security when cyberweapons like Stuxnet are increasingly available. Derek Bambauer teaches Internet law and intellectual property and publishes articles on intellectual property, information control, and health law. He has also written technical articles on data recovery and fault tolerance, and on deployment of software upgrades. Oliver Day currently works at Akamai as a security researcher. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Hyperlinking Hyper-Public #2: Talks by Paul Dourish & Latanya Sweeney, blogposts, and more

Following last week's post with videos and a visual map from the Hyper-Public symposium, this week, we offer two more talks from the event, and a look at further comments by symposium participants and attendees. find these materials and much more on our site>

Glenn Otis Brown on Bots, Mobs, Geeks: The new separation of powers / Top Secret, XXX, Private, All Rights Reserved

Glenn Otis Brown — Director of Business Development for Twitter in New York, and an alum of Google, YouTube, Creative Commons, and the Berkman Center among others — presents on two topics. 1) Bots, Mobs, Geeks: The new separation of powers Are we be ruled by robots? The mob? Technocrats? Yes, yes, and yes. The question is not if, but how -- and how we should prevent any one of the three from taking over. 2) Top Secret, XXX, Private, All Rights Reserved Confidentiality, content regulation, privacy, and copyright are all asking the same question: Who should have access to what kind of expression, and when? Why, then, do we continue talk about them as separate subjects? And what would happen if we approached them as part of a single, unified set of rules? Should organizations like Creative Commons move into offering "privacy licenses"? What can the music industry teach governments about Wikileaks? What can the CIA learn from YouTube? download the video/audio>