Harvard Law: National Security, Privacy, and the Rule of Law

Really fun session at the Harvard Law bicentennial celebration:

Moderated by Jonathan Zittrain, with fellow panelists Alex Abdo ‘06, senior staff attorney, Knight First Amendment Institute; Cindy Cohn, executive director, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Alexander MacGillivray ‘00, general counsel, Twitter; Matt Olsen ‘88, former director, National Counterterrorism Center; HLS Assistant Professor of Law Daphna Renan; David Sanger, national security correspondent for The New York Times; and Bruce Schneier, security technologist at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

NYU: Tyranny of the Algorithm? Predictive Analytics & Human Rights

With Michael Posner (Professor, NYU Stern School of Business, Co-Director, Stern Center for Business and Human Rights) and Sarah Labowitz (Co-Director, NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights).

Fight for the Future: Libraries, Tech Policy, and the Fate of Human Knowledge

Librarians + technology = a personal nirvana.  There is no more awesome set of people doing more important work than the librarians and their nerd allies at the bleeding edge of library tech -- they are engaged in an underappreciated struggle to work out how mankind is going to preserve, extend, share, and democratize the sum of human knowledge in our increasingly digital age.  So I was really psyched to go a do a talk at the 2012 Library Technology Conference about the technological forces driving the great policy issues of our age, along with an argument about why and where the library community should be engaged.  Bonus for me: The event was at Macalester College, where I spent my high school summers taking Russian while trying to look like something other than the huge dork I was.

Here's my keynote, "Fight for the Future: Libraries, Tech Policy, and the Fate of Human Knowledge."

Andrew McLaughlin @ Library Technology Conference 2012 from Library Technology Conference on Vimeo.

 The Prezi is here.

Beyond Conventions: A Ford Foundation Forum on Human Rights

The Ford Foundation has posted the video of a panel I recently joined on "[t]he possibilities and pitfalls of technology in the pursuit of human freedom."  The other panelists were (the legendary and eloquent) Sir Tim Berners-Lee, (the brilliant and soon-to-be-book-launching) Rebecca MacKinnon, (the worldly and effective) Elisa Massimino, and (the multi-disciplinary and polymathical) Danny O’Brien.  The moderator was (the charming and prolific) Sewell Chan, deputy editor for The New York Times. For me, the most interesting part of the panel was an exchange primarily with Elisa about the pressing need for mainstream/mainline human rights advocates and organizations to view seemingly-specialized tech issues like net neutrality, competition policy, intermediary liability, encryption policy, and user data control as core human rights issues.

Let's go to the tape.