Governments Pwn the Web: A Constitutional Right to IT-Security? (3/18); Troll Wrastling for Beginners (3/25)

Governments Pwn the Web: A Constitutional Right to IT-Security?

Tuesday, March 18, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Governments around the world are hacking into IT-systems, with deep implications for privacy, IT-security, the legal process and geopolitics. The talk will explore three real-life cases to unpack those implications: the German Constitutional Court ruling on the 'Bundestrojaner' malware, the Dutch 'Bredolab' botnet mitigation and the hacking law proposed in its aftermath, and recent Snowden revelations on making 100.000 routers around the world 'wiretap ready' for ubiquitous surveillance by intelligence agencies. Should governments actually have the ability and the right to hack, and to weaken global communications networks? And do conventional concepts such as privacy and communications secrecy sufficiently capture the status quo, or do we need a new constitutional right for IT-security as proposed by the German court? Addressing these questions sets the stage for an interactive discussion with the audience to formulate an agenda for technical, legal and ethical research, policy and activism.

Axel Arnbak is a cybersecurity and information law researcher at the Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam. At Berkman, Axel will analyze U.S. and E.U. cybersecurity governance models and their interplay with communications freedoms. In particular, Axel seeks to develop new approaches to communications security governance that apprises constitutional values. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Troll Wrastling for Beginners: Data-Driven Methods to Decrease Hatred Online

Tuesday, March 25, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor. This event will be webcast live.

Hateful and even violent speech are familiar online; what’s unusual are data-driven efforts to diminish them. Experiments so far have produced intriguing results including: some ‘trolls’ recant or apologize in response to counterspeech, and small changes in platform architecture can improve online discourse norms. Benesch will describe these findings and propose further experiments, especially in climates where online speech may be tied to offline violence.

Susan Benesch founded the Dangerous Speech Project, to find ways of diminishing inflammatory speech – and its capacity to inspire violence - while protecting freedom of expression. Her framework to gauge the dangerousness of speech in context has been used in work to prevent violence in Kenya among other countries. Building on data from Kenya, she is now conducting new research to test the effectiveness of counterspeech on social media platforms. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Karim R. Lakhani on How Disclosure Policies Impact Search in Open Innovation

Most of society’s innovation systems –- academic science, the patent system, open source, etc. -– are “open” in the sense that they are designed to facilitate knowledge disclosures amongst innovators. An essential difference across innovation systems, however, is whether disclosures take place only after final innovations are completed, or whether disclosures relate to intermediate solutions and advances. Karim R. Lakhani -- Harvard Business School professor and Berkman Faculty Associate -- presents experimental evidence showing that implementing intermediate versus final disclosures qualitatively transforms the very nature of the innovation search process, and presents comparative advantages of intermediate disclosure systems. video/audio on our website>