Category: conferences

ncmr2011: wikileaks panel

mtadros

At national conference on media reform, Boston – April 8th

Micah Sifry @Mlsif  talking. Thanks to resilience of 1000s of ppl – it is a transnational journalism [when wikileaks was taken down many put it up and mirrored it]. Ppl who were audiences are now actors, and ppl of authority now know we are watching them. They have to know that it is a question of trust by being transparent and truthful not by your degree. Wikileaks itself is broken. Assange is a flawed figure – I don’t like the way he runs the org. Hardly an eg of transparency in action: what is it releasing and why? How they get info and why the portal is now not secure? NYT is clearly broken: it has an entire set of cables. How they handled the database inside the building was not good. They did keyword searches. How did they not find kleptocracy? Bec now we know Libya was like that. This is an incredibly valuable archive sitting there but maybe they should open it up in some fashion for us. Two last points: clearly Obama’s commitment to transparency is broken. Wikileaks made it clear we had two govs in US: one that elects and one that makes decisions. We have to dismantle that if we are ever going to live in a truly open society. Wikileaks showed us how valuable the internet is, it can be a source for democracy but it is incredibly fragile. When Sen. Lieberman made Amazon go offline, it showed us how we are similar to McCarthyism. This goes beyond net neutrality – what’s at stake is ability to access info that we need and we have to make sure we continue to do that.

ncmr2011: wikileaks panel

mtadros

At national conference on media reform – Boston April 8th

Panel: Wikileaks, Journalism and Modern-Day Muckraking
Moderator Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.

Greg Mitchell @GregMitch: [author of Bradley Manning book http://j.mp/i5Anga] Collatoral murder video came out a year ago. There was more before cablegate.

 

Yesterday Washington post talks abt cables released a year ago abt Yemen’s Saleh. Media has to decide what to cover and what to ignore. Wikileaks has threatened that from beginning that it will circumvent gatekeepers of media bec media self-censors. Wikileaks itself in the collateral murder video, since then they formed partnerships with newspapers for different releases. They began working with mainstream media and led to good coverage. Al Jazeera [ @AJEnglish ] #Transparency Unit mentioned by @GregMitch: http://j.mp/gn86aY NYT had to admit finally that they showed all cables to CIA and so they got the raw documents but did discretional censorship and exerted their gatekeeper function. By December they stopped coverage and gone to other issues. Times and Guardian conflict with Assange and perhaps that’s why he moved on to Washington post. Several whistleblowing sites came up but now the message re manning is ‘see what happens if you leak anything’.

a2k4: freedom to innovate

mtadros

Moderator: Nahla Rizk, AUC

Edward Felten, Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy

Information technologies: how do we use technology and provide active engagement with the technology to help people know how to engage. How did people build their technology? by ripping it apart and learning it – tinkering with technology. Then have a community with whom they can talk and work on the product. It is a social activity that engages people in the technology.

How can public policy encourage that? success of open source technology. Is OS technology an alternative business model to proprietary software? yes. It is a space that provides ability to tinker.

As for mobile phones which is the primary mode of access to ICT in much of the developing world. There is tension bet open and closed models and that is seen everywhere. Open source provides tech playground but offers also opportunity in becoming collaborative and engaged. But there is a tension over this kind of tinkering in the intellectual properties movement.

It is possible to reconcile open source and intellectual property. Some sort of protection for tinkering is important. We can foster competition. When you make technology accessible then it makes sense to the setting it is in.

Read More …

freedom to innovate: knowledge, tech and culture

mtadros

Some of the questions to be pursued by this panel include:

** What policy areas (e.g. spectrum policies, open access) are the critical topics of study to address the freedom to innovate? To what extent is a human rights framing for these issues helpful or desirable?

** What are the technological and legal architectures that are necessary to give individuals the space and the opportunity to innovate? How do these structures rely on, enhance or inhibit the enjoyment of rights?  Whose rights are counted in this story?

** Where will new content and information technologies come from and how we can empower as many different individuals as possible to maximize innovation? What is the role of civil and political liberties themselves in creating the conditions that facilitate innovation?

source: http://yaleisp.org/2010/02/ak4f2i/

technologies of dissent – a2k4 – human rigths usa and EFF

mtadros

Theresa Harris, Human Rights USA

Filtering is the best example of censorship. Eg. in Saudi Arabia or taking down videos of police brutality in Egypt. This software is provided by US companies.  How can you provide facebook to Iranians without it being used to arrest protestsors? should we provide this software or shouldn’t we?

Many have been dealing with this dilemma and the comapnies have not been held accountable. Comapnies claim that it is ‘business as usual’, and that they are not responsible for what those countries do with them.

We tend to focus on the technology and not the govt abuse of it. That is why the human rights framework is important. How is it different? It is a using a universal standard and not putting one country’s interest over another. Tying technology to progressive issues – eg. freedom of speech etc..

What are the steps to implement that? There could be voluntary codes of conduct for corporations. We could have domestic regulations. Putting this on an international treaty.

Eddan Katz, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Hilary Clinton’s speech was important bec it was well articulated. The freedom to connect helps transform society and that is described in Clinton’s speech. The US engages in practices of surveillance and the echelon system is also maintained. How do we then talk of the disruption of networks?

Censorship: gvt. providing money to develop technologies to express themselves.

Reservations about the speech: absence of freedom of speech framework and anonymity because of terrorism issues. EFF stands firm on the side of anonymity.

The issue of the protection of IP: technologies of surveillance are in place and being developed to apply copyright infringements.

Many companies are building the surveillance infra-structure. EFF proposes an instrumental approach: a direct action with the person causing harm; the capabilities approach; the ethics approach is not enough but we need the socio-technical impact. We can create an interesting balance between the human rights discourse and the technological infrastructure.

Read white paper called Surveillance Self-Defense International.