Susan Crawford, telecommunications policy expert and former White House official, will share insights about national technology policy and implications for the library community at the 2013 American Library Association Annual Conference. Crawford will address conference attendees during the Washington Update session from 8:30 – 10 a.m. on Saturday, June 29, 2013, in the McCormick Place convention center.

For more information please visit the following link Susan Crawford to Anchor the Washington Update at ALA Annual Conference.

Boston and the Modern Manhunt – To the Point on KCRW.

The toll from the Boston Marathon bombings is three dead and 48 still hospitalized with the total number of injured now 264. The surviving suspect’s condition is said to be “fair.” The motivation behind the atrocity may never be known but, in the meantime, there are many other unanswered questions. Cell phones, surveillance cameras and crowd sourcing all helped police to identify and locate the bombers by Thursday, but not before social media and professional news organizations had reported false information. Did shutting down all of Boston give amateur “terrorists” extra impact? Was it a preview of what’s to come?

Retired homicide detective Dwayne Stanton and Susan Crawford of the Roosevelt Institute joined Chris Hayes to discuss the Internet proliferation of photos of people who were not suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, despite being distributed by amateur web sleuths.

Who Will Be President Obama’s Next FCC Chairperson?

April 9, 2013 | Author Trish Nelson

Julius Genachowski is resigning as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.  He probably did the best he could during his tenure, considering the shark  environment in Washington, but he just wasn’t up to resisting corporate pressure as much as media reform activists would have liked.    So it is time now for a public interest minded FCC chair in the tradition of Michael Copps or Nicholas Johnson. Some say Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly in the New Guilded Age,  could be that someone.   [There has been speculation about possible replacements. Mignon Clyburn, who will be the senior Democrat on the Commission,  has also been mentioned].   Now is the time to influence the president’s choice.  This is a short video of Susan Crawford’s remarks at the National Conference on Media Reform 2013 held in Denver last weekend.

Date: April 6, 2013
Location: Denver, Colorado

Transcript

It seems that Americans are constantly lamenting the power of the Internet, worrying that it has completely taken over the United States’ economy, markets, and psyche. They embrace the idea of disconnecting and getting outdoors, away from the screens and keyboards. This mentality stems from the luxury of access: Americans take for granted that they have access to the internet, and that they always will. But Susan Crawford, who, according to Cory Doctorow, “should run the FCC,” argues that we, as Americans, are not as privileged as we believe. In her new book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, Crawfordlaments government decisions and resulting monopolies that have caused American to fall behind, abandoning its role as a leader of the Internet revolution.

In a recent New York Times interview Crawford says,

I wrote “Captive Audience” because I saw that years of deregulation and a wave of mergers had left America with neither competition nor adequate oversight when it comes to high-speed Internet access. Based on how people actually use these connections and how much they are required to pay, we are being gouged: We are all paying too much for services that are both uncompetitive and second-class, and not enough Americans are being served adequately by reasonably priced, world-class services.

This problem isn’t just affecting social equality and fairness, although those effects are important; the middle class is tightly squeezed and poor and rural people are relying on public libraries and McDonald’s for free, inferior Wi-Fi access. Because high-speed Internet access is our century’s version of electrification, it’s also likely affecting our nation’s economic growth.

I wrote “Captive Audience” because we cannot afford to put this problem on the too-hard pile. We are slouching toward the past, and failures of government policy have gotten us in this position…

Crawford’s book works to both challenge policy makers and enrage citizens, hopefully to engender change.

All talks at the Media Lab, unless otherwise noted, are open to the public.
This talk will be webcast.
Join us on Twitter: #MLTalks

http://www.media.mit.edu/events/2013/03/28/media-lab-conversations-series-susan-crawford 

Watch Susan Crawford’s interview with Phil Ponce, host of Chicago Tonight.

“Captive Audience” | Chicago Tonight | WTTW.

Shortly after the storm, Verizon announced it would replace copper with fiber-optic cable. But months later, fiber hasn’t reached everyone, and many businesses and residents are still without basic communications services.

Workshop, 10am to 3pm.
As we move from the two-dimensional, text-based “web world” to more interactive and immersive social cyberspaces designed for human interaction, we must address how we will promote and protect the development of robust, persistent on-line identity. Social cooperation in any medium depends on trust. We need signals of commitment to support cooperative behavior. While, previously, cyberspace undermined our ability to create persistent, reliable and coherent measures of identity across a distance, the technology of virtual worlds holds out the promise for creating meaningful identity on-line. This workshop asks how we can use the interfaces and tools of virtual worlds to strengthen on-line identity and thereby produce social trust in cyberspace. We can create vivid, visual representations of personal identity independent of our off-line attributes and, at the same time we can create reputations independent of social identity in real space. The aim of this session is to develop a dynamic, player-managed social reputation system(s) for the metaverse.

AGENDA

Section 1: Categorizing Worlds

A. Suggest thought-experiment of different kinds of worlds (ludic, social, civic). Acknowledge that there is blurriness and evolution.

B. Broad-brush re different packages of identity-treatment in each of the three worlds. Note question of how worlds get to be “in a category” in the first place.

C. Get more specific in each world re different axes/sliding scales/elements of identity. Emerge with lists of identity attributes for each world.

D. Emerge with “goals” for each world – shorthand designations that will help us in the sections that follow.

Section 2: Tools

A. Suggest question of what tools exist in worlds that will help/stifle goals and lists created in Section 1.

B. Case studies – from ToonTowns to SecondLife (and MMO in between).

C. Acknowledge difficulties with reputation systems, eg eBay.

D. Emerge with some sense of the relationship of the Section 1 goals/attributes to Section 2 design questions.

Section 3: Law

A. Suggest that legal regimes defer to private ordering relationships all the time. Religion, social clubs, families, sports – all get left alone.

B. Note that law does enter in when private relationships are abusive in some way.

C. Case studies
i. Speech
ii. Defamation
iii. Privacy (eg, revealing real-life identity inside world)

[may not get to all, may only cover speech]

D. Emerge with notion of what coherence/cohesiveness world would have to have in order to be deferred to. Note question of scale.

.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES

To get the most out of this workshop we strongly suggest that attendees sample the metaverse for themselves:
Anarchy Online (Free)
www.anarchy-online.com/
Second Life (free 7 day trial) and/or There (free 3 day trial)
http://secondlife.com/

www.there.com/index.html

Achaea (Free)
www.ironrealms.com/achaea.html

Readings

Gender, Identity, and (the limits of) play on the Internet, Susanna Paasonen; Trouble in River City – The Social Life of Video Games, D. Williams [and] Playing, D. Winnicott [two articles in the same file]; Cyberspace, or, the unbearable closure of being, S. Zisek; Who Am We, Sherry Turkle.

This seminar will explore the interaction between new technologies and current internet policy issues. Using case studies from today’s live policy debates, we will examine the policy and technology development processes, and the impact of new technologies and new decisionmakers on public policy, individual rights, and the marketplace — and the complex relationships among technology, policy, and law.

SYLLABUS

Here. Readings for Feb. 16; Readings for Mar. 22.

REQUIREMENTS

Class participation (10%); short response papers (30%); 15-20 pp papers (60%).

LINKS

Patel on “distribution”; Nuvio challenge to FCC E911 order; Patel on “distribution”; Induce draft (Sept 2004); Shortness of Vision (Feb. 2005); Internet gambling bill (May 2003); Congressional Research Service Report on Economic Impacts of Cyber Attacks; CSI/FBI 2004 Computer Crime and Security Survey; DC Circuit opinion re standing in flag case; Family Movie Act; DC Circuit flag ruling; CDT/ACLU Utah complaint. Fourth Circuit Falwell decision. USIIA principles. Barton-Dingell Sept. 15. Authors_Guild_complaint. FCC_Policy_Statement. FCC_VoIP_CALEA_Order. FCC_DSL_Order. House_20_Member_Letter. Martin_letter_to_Frist. FCC statement re mergers. Copps statement re mergers. Lukasik-Rutkowski_letter. VeriSign CALEA comments. CDT stay request. DOJ CALEA expansion. Analog Hole bill. E911_Order. Gore_speech. Life of the Law. FT_article_for_Golodner_visit. WSJ_article_for_Golodner_visit. Petitioners’-opening-CALEA-brief. Tim_Wu-One-Rule. Skype_article. Reidenberg_article. Bates_Decision. Barrett_amicus_brief. CDT v. Pappert decision. Picture. Picture. DOJ proposal. Stevens_floor statement. CALEA D.C. Circuit opinion. CALEA_rehearing_petition. Stevens_August_draft. 18 Sept. Naples article. 22 Sept. Naples article. “GE OWD. craigslist_case. Barrett. The_Radio_and_the_Internet.Fox_v._FCC