Beth Noveck on Open Government April 23
by Laura DeNardis | April 20, 2010 | ISP speaker series, events, first amendment | Comments Off
You are cordially invited to a special Information Society Project lunch speaker series featuring Beth Noveck discussing “Open Government and the First Amendment: Strengthening our Democracy through Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration” on Friday, April 23 at 12:15 p.m. in Room 128 of Yale Law School. This event is part of the Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium, sponsored by the Liberty Tree Initiative, the McCormick Foundation, and the First Amendment Center.
Beth Noveck is a Founding Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for open government and head of the United States Open Government Initiative, and a Professor of Law (on leave) and Director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and a 1997 graduate of Yale Law School.
Please don’t miss this opportunity to attend a special event and ISP Reunion with Beth Noveck.
Panel on States, Markets, and Inequality in Reprogenetics
by Laura DeNardis | April 18, 2010 | ISP speaker series, events | Comments Off
Please join us on April 23 at 3:00 p.m. for a special Information Society Project panel exploring some of the challenges to traditional reproductive rights arguments that are posed by the availability of new reproductive technologies. Entitled, Power Plays: States, Markets, and Inequality in Reprogenetics, the panel will be moderated by ISP Senior Fellow Priscilla Smith and will feature presentations by:
Democracy Now! Host Amy Goodman Discusses Independent and Citizen Journalism April 15
by Perry Fetterman | April 12, 2010 | ISP speaker series, events, first amendment, journalism | Comments Off
Amy Goodman, the founder of Democracy Now! will discuss her latest book, Breaking the Sound Barrier on Thursday, April 15, at 4:00 p.m. in room 127 at Yale Law School. The theme of her talk will be the power of independent journalism in the struggle for a better world. The talk is part of Yale Law School’s Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium, a series of discussions organized by the Yale Information Society Project and the Knight Law and Media Program.
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Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist and syndicated columnist, author and the host of Democracy Now! airing on more than 800 public television/radio stations worldwide. Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” The Independent of London named Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! “an inspiration”; pulsemedia.org placed Goodman at the top of their 20 Top Global Media Figures.
Goodman is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. Her latest book is Breaking the Sound Barrier; she co-authored the first three bestsellers, Standing Up to the Madness, Static, and The Exception to the Rulers, with her brother, journalist David Goodman.
Breaking the Sound Barrier
Award-winning investigative journalist Amy Goodman breaks through corporate media lies, sound-bites and silence with passionate reporting as host of Democracy Now! Her latest bestseller, Breaking the Sound Barrier, proves the power of independent journalism in the struggle for a better world. From community organizers in New Orleans, to the victims of torture and police violence, to those struggling to survive in Haiti, we are given the extraordinary opportunity to hear ordinary people standing up and speaking out.
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The series is sponsored by the Liberty Tree Initiative, McCormick Foundation, and the First Amendment Center.
The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School is an intellectual center studying the impact of the Internet and new information technologies on law and society. The Knight Law and Media Program examines the intersection of First Amendment law, media, and journalism.
David Post April 9 in Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium
by Laura DeNardis | April 6, 2010 | ISP speaker series, events | 2 Comments
David Post will discuss “Can We Defend Free Speech on the Net?” on Friday, April 9 at 12:10 p.m. in Room 128 of Yale Law School. This event is part of the Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium, sponsored by the Liberty Tree Initiative, the McCormick Foundation, and the First Amendment Center.
Can We Defend Free Speech on the Net?
If it is true, as John Gilmore reportedly said several decades ago, that “the First Amendment is just a local ordinance on the Net,”should we defend the principle of free speech across the Internet, and, if so, how do we do that? Is that merely an exercise in cultural imperialism, exporting U.S. law and U.S.-centric principles outside of our borders? Is the “bordered Internet” — an Internet carved up into separate domains within which the law of each of the 180 or so
sovereign states around the globe prevails — the best that we can hope for? I will argue that it is not, and that the freedom of speech is worth defending across the globe-spanning Internet, not because it is enshrined in the US Constitution but because it is a higher-order principle applicable to all. As to the “how,” I will sketch out an argument about a new politics for the Internet, and the new conception of “civic virtue” and citizenship that I believe are called for if we are to collectively realize the freedom-enhancing potential of this new place.
About David Post
David Post is the I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University, where he teaches intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace. Professor Post is also a Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, Senior Fellow of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to the influential Volokh Conspiracy blog.
Professor Post is the author of Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age (3d Edition, West, 2007) (co-authored with Paul Schiff Berman and Patricia Bellia), and In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford
U. Press 2008)
LAW ON DISPLAY: The Digital Transformation of Legal Persuasion and Judgment
by Perry Fetterman | March 30, 2010 | events | Comments Off
The Yale Information Society Project is pleased to announce a book talk with Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel on April 13 at 4:00 p.m. The event will take place at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale located at 80 Wall Street. The event is being sponsored by Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, Yale Law School and the Yale Information Society Project.
LAW ON DISPLAY:
The Digital Transformation of Legal Persuasion and Judgment
The law, like the rest of culture, is awash in pictures of all kinds, mostly produced and circulated using digital technologies. LAW ON DISPLAY explores how this proliferation of digital pictures changes the nature of legal argument and decision making and, ultimately, our notions of justice. The authors, Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel, will speak at the Slifka Center at 4:00 on April 13, 2010, pursuing one of the central themes in their book: naïve realism about both pictures and the technologies that make them possible. They will show and discuss materials from two case studies from the book (one involving surveillance video; the other, video and computer animation). They will also discuss law’s possible near future: Law’s increasing mediation by computers and its presence online offer benefits to dispute resolution but also presents risks to justice should naïve realism in response to pictures be joined with naïve realism about the technology behind the computer screen.
Christina Spiesel is senior research scholar at Yale Law School and adjunct professor at Quinnipiac University School of Law and New York Law School.
Neal Feigenson is Carmen Tortora Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University School of Law and author of Legal Blame: How Jurors Think and Talk About Accidents.
Nicholas Bramble on “Should the FCC Let AT&T Be? Standing on the Shoulders of Weary Giants of Flesh and Steel”
by Perry Fetterman | March 29, 2010 | ISP speaker series, events | 1 Comment
You are cordially invited to a special Information Society Project lunch speaker series featuring Nicholas Bramble discussing “Should the FCC Let AT&T Be? Standing on the Shoulders of Weary Giants of Flesh and Steel” on Friday, April 2 at noon in Room 128 of Yale Law School.
Should the FCC Let AT&T Be? Standing on the Shoulders of Weary Giants of Flesh and Steel
The Federal Communications Commission is in the midst of two rulemakings that will shape the future of the Internet. The National Broadband Plan rulemaking, recently completed, includes a series of recommendations for building out fast, competitive, and nation-wide broadband access. The Open Internet rulemaking, currently underway, has more to do with the “neutrality” of that infrastructure and whether or not it will continue to be open to the construction of reliable application and content platforms by innovators unaffiliated with the owners of the underlying infrastructure.
Skeptics of these rulemakings—and skeptics of governmental regulation of the Internet more broadly—have raised institutional, constitutional, and jurisdictional objections to the FCC’s authority. This talk has three parts. First, I will offer a rough map of the political economies of Internet regulation (and deregulation), and discuss whether regulation is an appropriate metaphor for what’s going on here. Second, focusing on a case study in broadband and education, I’ll examine some ways in which the two rulemakings might promote the progress of science and useful arts more effectively than full deregulation or other statutory mechanisms. Finally, we’ll talk about the First Amendment objections to proposed Internet nondiscrimination and transparency rules, with an eye on how common carrier status might ground the FCC’s rulemaking authority and balance competing assertions of free speech rights by network providers and by users.
Nicholas Bramble is a Postdoctoral Associate in Law and Kauffman Fellow in Law at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where he conducts research on the problems of collective action and the promises of civic engagement relating to open access in the university setting. Prior to his appointment at Yale, Mr. Bramble was a judicial clerk for the Honorable Charles F. Lettow of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where he was the online managing editor of the Journal of Law & Technology.
National Broadband Plan: Access, Education, & Copyright (Part II)
by Nicholas Bramble | March 24, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Back in December, when the national broadband plan was still being developed, some of us at the Information Society Project submitted a filing (pdf) to the FCC on the topic of copyright and education. In our filing, we suggested that increased broadband access would transform how education takes place both inside and outside the traditional school environment. We advocated for the creation of a broadly accessible repository of creative works that could be used in the course of education without fear of copyright infringement liability, and we suggested broadening the definition of what activities fall within “the course of education” for purposes of this repository and for the TEACH Act.
On Tuesday of last week, when the FCC released its national broadband plan, I was happy to see a significant amount of space devoted to education. Additionally, the Director of Education for the broadband plan noted that “the work of the team at the Information Society Project at Yale was a critical piece of input for us while developing the plan, on issues of copyright and digital education.” We are proud to have played a role in the development of these national broadband strategies.
Here’s what the National Broadband Plan says on the topic of education and copyright: Read more
National Broadband Plan: Overview (Part I)
by Nicholas Bramble | March 24, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
The FCC’s National Broadband Plan, released on Tuesday of last week, does a number of interesting things in its 376 pages. This post gives a very brief overview of the plan’s framework for promoting fast, competitive, and nation-wide broadband access. In a later post, I will explore the plan’s specific recommendations in the areas of broadband, education, and copyright.
Many commentators have focused on the Broadband Plan’s 100-squared initiative, which states that by 2020, “[a]t least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second.” The plan outlines three primary mechanisms for achieving this core goal. First, the plan recommends that the government “should make more spectrum available for existing and new wireless broadband providers in order to foster additional wireless-wireline competition at higher speed tiers.” Specifically, the plan states that the FCC “should make 500 megahertz newly available for broadband use within the next 10 years, of which 300 megahertz between 225 MHz and 3.7 GHz should be made newly available for mobile use within five years,” and 120 megahertz of which should be “reallocate[d] … from the broadcast television (TV) bands.” Second, to ensure that both consumers and administrative agencies have sufficient access to data on broadband quality and competition, the FCC’s broadband plan advocates for the collection of “more detailed and accurate data on actual availability, penetration, prices, churn and bundles offered by broadband service providers to consumers and businesses.” Finally, the plan develops numerous recommendations for the modernization of broadband infrastructure, including a suggestion that federal financing of highway and bridge projects should be “contingent on states and localities allowing joint deployment of conduits by qualified parties” and that Congress “should consider enacting ‘dig once’ legislation applying to all future federally funded projects along rights-of-way.” To fund rural access to broadband services, the plan proposes reforming the $9 billion Universal Service Fund through a transition in focus “from yesterday’s analog technologies to tomorrow’s digital infrastructure.”
Yochai Benkler and others have criticized the plan for not focusing sufficiently on how the government might employ more specific pro-competitive interventions such as open access rules in order to achieve these goals, and for setting speed goals that are too low. While acknowledging the importance of these criticisms and the centrality of the question of how to promote faster and more reliable broadband access, I would like to use this post to focus on a few other of the plan’s hundreds of recommendations.
First, besides spectrum allocation and data collection, the plan makes use of a variety of corollary mechanisms for increasing competition and innovation in the broadband ecosystem. To promote the development of a robust market in set-top devices for accessing video and broadband, the Plan seeks to initiate a proceeding requiring broadcasters to install in subscribers’ homes a simple gateway device whose “sole function should be to bridge the proprietary or unique elements of the Multichannel Video Programming Distributors network (e.g., conditional access, tuning and reception functions) to widely used and accessible, open networking and communications standards.” Standardizing consumer access devices in this manner may be crucial to ensuring that users can transport subscription content and applications across all of the many devices they use to access the Internet, and in guarding against the rise of network-particular devices and a balkanized or splintered broadband ecosystem. The implementation of open standards and protocols also helps address the public choice problem at the heart of broadband video access by ensuring that it’s not just a small number of existing device makers and network providers who can articulate a stake in the future of the interface between television and the Internet.
Second, the plan also explores demand-side barriers to greater broadband adoption. For instance, to ensure that people have the skills to use broadband services, the Plan suggests the launch of “a National Digital Literacy Program that creates a Digital Literacy Corps, increases the capacity of digital literacy partners and creates an Online Digital Literacy Portal.” And the plan admirably develops detailed plans for maximizing the ability of persons with disabilities to take part in the broadband ecosystem.
This exploration of demand-side barriers is related to the final of the Plan’s three major sections, which (in response to the request made by Congress in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) seeks to explore how the implementation of broadband access will affect the development of and access to health care, education, energy and the environment, economic opportunity, government performance, civic engagement, and public safety services. It’s these “national purposes”—and particularly on the question of how broadband relates to education—that I’d like to explore in a second post.
Can Your Facebook Friend List Out You?
by betsycooper | March 23, 2010 | lamp | Comments Off
A new study suggests a computer program can predict your sexual orientation based on that of your friends. Does this mean we should be concerned about what inferences can be drawn about the information put online, in addition to the information we put online itself?
MFIA Amicus in Illinois First Amendment case- with EFF
by Margot | March 23, 2010 | Newspapers, Privacy, first amendment, lamp, news | Comments Off
The Media Freedom and Information Practicum is proud to announce that, along with EFF, it has filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Illinois Court of Appeals to block the unmasking of an anonymous online critic of a local political candidate in the comments section of a local newspaper’s website.
Battle Over Message Board Flame War Must Not Circumvent the First Amendment
The First Amendment provides qualified protection for anonymous speakers. MFIA and EFF encourage the court to recognize such protection by instituting the same process established by other courts across the country (see, eg, Dendrite).
The viability of newspaper websites as forums for such political discussion and whistleblowing is at stake, along with fundamental First Amendment values inherent in the protection of political speech.
For the full brief, click here.
In honor of sunshine week
by Jeremy | March 22, 2010 | lamp | Comments Off
Yesterday marked the end of Sunshine Week, which hoped to, well, shine some light on efforts around the country to encourage open access to government records. I wanted to flag a unique, if bland, interview of Miriam Nisbet, who directs the Office of Government Information Services, a body that helps deal with Freedom of Information Act concerns.
Nisbet says that talking about FOIA and its limitations – funding issues, the inordinate lenght of time it takes those requesting information to actually get a response – misses the larger and more essential point of trying to change the government’s general “culture” of openness: “You have to have people at the very top, people in leadership positions who not only are believing it and saying it and doing it but who are themselves accountable and who are willing to be accountable if it doesn’t work.”
While this may seem obvious, it is certainly worth thinking about as an organization as we bang our head against the judicial wall trying to pry out information from agencies that see no upside in disclosure. How do you go about convincing the higher ups that greater personal vulnerability from more open records is actually good for their business and job prospects? Nisbet suggests, perhaps naively, that a lot of the barrier results from the fact that agencies and the general public really don’t understand each other very well. People call their Congressman all the time demanding action, but who has had a friendly conversation with a staffer at HUD? “If people can really interact with government personnel just like they have no hesitation, it seems, to going to their members of Congress. Why? Because they think that when they go to their member of Congress they are going to get an answer. Somebody’s going to help them get the answer they want, the information they want, the service they want. They need to be doing the same thing with any agency that affects what they do.”
Maybe Nisbet’s right. We’ll be there to litigate when the time comes, but in honor of the end of Sunshine Week, take a few moments to get to know your friendly neighborhood bureaucrat. It might just save you a FOIA administrative appeal.
Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group March 23
by Laura DeNardis | March 15, 2010 | Uncategorized, announcements, events | Comments Off
The next Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholars Working Group will take place on Tuesday, March 23 at 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm in Room B48 of the Hall of Graduate Studies, located just across York Street from Yale Law School in New Haven, CT. The session theme is “Infrastructures, ICTs, Imagination.” RSVP to Ben Peters at bjp2108@columbia.edu.
Alien Infrastructures: Learning from Unusual Arrangements of Information and Communication Technology
Christian Sandvig
Pragmatically minded researchers often use “best practices” comparisons to study the design and organization of technological systems such as telephone networks, broadband providers, and platforms for computer-supported cooperative work. While best practices are often useful, in complex interdependent systems that depend heavily on their context, dramatic and inspirational differences may be just as valuable as the imitation of commonalities. This argues for research on best practices and also on strange practices. In this research project we compile a literature of cases that are recognizable as information and communication systems, but due to one (or more) severe constraint they have evolved in a way that is noticeably strange. By focusing on these constraints we develop a database of difference that includes shoe computers, pigeon networks, modern long-distance atmospheric optical networks, and Internet services optimized for semi-nomadic reindeer herders. We use this corpus to assess our own expectations for technological systems of information and communication, and reflect on what a standpoint theory of infrastructure might look like.
Infrastructures of Imageability
Susanne Seitinger
Increasingly, urban environments are brightly illuminated by a combination of display and lighting technologies at nighttime. These systems fulfill different functions and are rarely designed together to enable a holistic lighting environment. Meanwhile, advances in LED technology and the miniaturization of embedded electronics are converging towards new types of addressable infrastructures that both provide light and convey content. Rather than understanding these systems separately, I suggest blurring the boundary between various “infrastructures of imageability” to rethink their social and aesthetic role in the city. I revisit the socio-technical origins of lighting and display to suggest some possible directions for alternative narratives of urban illumination.
Rural Development through Village Knowledge Centers in India
Ramesh Subramanian
For the past several years, India has experimented with extending the reach of ICTs to rural areas with a view to bringing development to these areas. This paper examines the implementation of Village knowledge Centers in rural Southern India. I first describe the developmental disparity that exists between urban and rural areas in India, and justify the implementation of rural projects that extend ICTs to rural areas. I examine prior work and then describe in detail the Village knowledge Center Project conceived, developed and implemented by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, a NGO located in Chennai, India. I then describe my field visits and observations and conclude with an analysis of the role and benefits of such projects, unresolved questions and issues, and possible directions for future work.
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Christian Sandvig (Ph.D Stanford) is an Academic Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University as well as an Associate Professor in Communication, Media, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Susanne Seitinger (MCP MIT, BA Princeton) is a Ph.D. student with the Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab. Her dissertation –Liberated Pixels: Alternative Narratives for Lighting Future Cities– explores the aesthetic and interactive potentials for future lighting and display infrastructures.
Ramesh Subramanian (PhD, MBA Rutgers) is a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project, Yale Law School as well as the Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Information Systems at Quinnipiac University. His research interests focus on the intersection of IT and technology policy in developing countries, Security, Law, & Cross-cultural issues.
The Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group features ongoing research concerning the digital age. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, and Yale, the group aims to share and enrich knowledge among rising scholars. Sessions are designed to advance research through cross-disciplinary conversation.
New 10th Circuit Amici Brief on Access and FOIA
by betsycooper | March 9, 2010 | lamp | Comments Off
As you know, the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum is all about access. So perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that we had a hand in a big-name amici brief to the 10th Circuit in support of Prison Legal News’ effort to obtain the release of audio and video documents showing the behavior of two convicted killers. The District Court had declined to release the documents, requested under FOIA by PLN, even though they had already been shown in open court during the killers’ criminal trials.
The case is particularly interesting because the documents only became subject to FOIA because the prosecutor in the criminal trials held onto the documents. So the brief argues that because they were trial exhibits aired in open court, the audiovisual materials are judicial records. If the government wanted to prevent them from being disclosed publicly, they should have applied to seal the documents. To do otherwise allows the government to obtain a de facto sealing of the documents without meeting the burden for sealing.
The brief also argues that, regardless of the custody of the documents, the press and public’s right of access should apply to the court exhibits in question. It notes a strong, presumptive common law right of access to judicial documents which can only be overriden in extraordinary circumstances not present in this case. It also argues that a qualified first amendment right to court documents also favors their release.
Supervised by Scott Schuchart of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law, Adri, Nabiha and myself worked on a very tight timeline to produce the raw materials for this brief. And it was a great success: Amici include 60 Minutes, the Associated Press, Westword, The American Society of News Editors, The Association of Capitol Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the ACLU of Colorado.
The case is Prison Legal News v. Executive Office of United States Attorneys (cases 09-1511 and 09-1531), and the amici brief will be made available soon, so watch this space!
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