Mutual Aid

Overview

Thursday, 5:00-6:00pm
Lead: Jonathan Zittrain

Building upon key themes related to cybersecurity and the role of the private sector in ensuring persistent, secure, and consistently available content on the web, this session will focus on possible responses to the current state of computer and network security. Drawing conceptually from mutual aid treaties among states in the real world, Jonathan Zittrain will outline a defense scheme that would seek to make the current decentralized Web a more robust one. His" mirror as you link" system of assistance reimagines the technological relationships between sites and services on the Web, and envisions a new socially- and technologically-based system of redundancy and security. "Today, if one clicks on a link to an external site and that site is unavailable – perhaps attacked with a classic denial-of-service – there is no alternative to accessing it. Mirror-as-you-link would change that. Participating Web server administrators could make it so that for some or all of the links to external sites that they offer on their pages, the contents of the faraway sites would be saved (“cached”). They would do this only for sites that wish it to be done, and then only for sites that also perform such mirroring themselves. Then, when one site goes down, a Web surfer clicking on a link to get there can return to the referring site and ask for a copy of whatever he or she is missing since the destination site is down."

Required Readings

• The Harvard International Law Journal, "Jonathan Zittrain responds to Duncan Hollis", July 2011.
• Jonathan Zittrain, "Consider This: A Mutual Aid Treaty for the Internet", January 2010.
• Jonathan Zittrain, "The Fourth Quadrant", 78 Fordham L. Rev. 2767, January, 2010.

Recommended Readings

• Jonathan Zittrain, "A Mutual Aid Treaty for the Net", 8 The Future of the Constitution Series, The Brookings Institution, January 27, 2011. (also available in PDF)