Media

Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation, was named the Hearst Professional-in-Residence for the Spring 2012 semester by the Columbia School of Journalism. In her role as a Schwartz Fellow, MacKinnon conducts research, writing and advocacy on global Internet policy, free expression and the impact of digital technologies on human rights. Her forthcoming book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, will be published in January 2012 by Basic Books. 

Originally posted on DanBlah.com and cross posted from the Open Technology Initiative.

While I am by no means a seasoned investigative journalist, I have the good fortune to work with some. Looking ten years back I couldn't imagine a media organization considering geek qualifications a core part of an investigative team. In 2011, turning a geek into an investigative journalist is a no-brainer.

Originally posted on DanBlah.com

While I am by no means a seasoned investigative journalist, I have the good fortune to work with some. Looking ten years back I couldn't imagine a media organization considering geek qualifications a core part of an investigative team. In 2011, turning a geek into an investigative journalist is a no-brainer.

Back in the day, when bad guys used telephones, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would listen in with wiretaps. As long as phone companies cooperated—and they had to, by law—it was a relatively straightforward process. The Internet, however, separated providers of communications services—Skype, Facebook, Gmail—from those running the underlying infrastructure. Thus, even if the FBI obtains a suspect's traffic data from their Internet service provider (ISP)—Comcast, Verizon, etc.—it may be difficult to make sense of it, especially if the suspect has been using encrypted services.

Until very recently books about cybercrime came in two forms. Some authors—the majority of whom had a national-security background—thought it their moral obligation to warn civilization of the impending arrival of an "electronic 9/11," a "Digital Pearl Harbor" or a "cyber-Katrina"—a catastrophe that no stock exchange or central bank would survive unscathed. Others—predominantly computer experts and academics—opted for a more humdrum approach, producing dry tomes full of impenetrable jargon.

In the spirit of doing what one does best and linking to the rest, I’ll dispense with a lengthy overview of the controversy that erupted when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Silicon Valley power-broker and TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington announced the launch of what they called “the CrunchFund” — a venture fund that will “invest in start-ups, including some that [Arrington] and his staff write about” on TechCrunch,

Agents of the East German Stasi could only have dreamed of the sophisticated electronic equipment that powered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s extensive spying apparatus, which the Libyan transitional government uncovered earlier this week. The monitoring of text messages, e-mails and online chats — no communications seemed beyond the reach of the eccentric colonel.

If a union falls by the wayside and nobody notices, does it make a difference?

Verizon's union workforce will return to work tomorrow, after a 16-day strike. You may have noticed that you didn't notice.

In 1439, Johannes Gutenberg sparked an information revolution. The invention of movable type lowered barriers for sharing ideas, creating spaces for reformation and revolution. Today's Internet fulfills the same role, a flexible medium for sharing information and democratic communications. It was with this idealized Web in mind that President Obama used his 2011 State of the Union address to call for an expansion of next-generation mobile broadband.

Did the youthful rioters who roamed the streets of London, Manchester and other British cities expect to see their photos scrutinized by angry Internet users, keen to identify the miscreants? In the immediate aftermath of the riots, many cyber-vigilantes turned to Facebook, Flickr and other social networking sites to study pictures of the violence. Some computer-savvy members even volunteered to automate the process by using software to compare rioters' faces with faces pictured elsewhere on the Internet.