Events

August 30th, 5:30pm: Habeas Data Panel Discussion

Location: South Hall Rm 202

Time: 5:30-7pm (followed by light refreshments)

CTSP’s first event of the semester!

Co-Sponsored with the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity

Please join us for a panel discussion featuring award-winning tech reporter Cyrus Farivar, whose new book, Habeas Data, explores how the explosive growth of surveillance technology has outpaced our understanding of the ethics, mores, and laws of privacy. Habeas Data explores ten historic court decisions that defined our privacy rights and matches them against the capabilities of modern technology. Mitch Kapor, co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the book was “Essential reading for anyone concerned with how technology has overrun privacy.”

The panel will be moderated by 2017 and 2018 CTSP Fellow Steve Trush, a MIMS 2018 graduate and now a Research Fellow at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC). He was on a CTSP project starting in 2017 that provided a report to the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission—read an East Bay Express write-up on their work here.

The panelists will discuss what public governance models can help local governments protect the privacy of citizens—and what role citizen technologists can play in shaping these models. The discussion will showcase the ongoing collaboration between the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission (OPAC). Attendees will learn how they can get involved in addressing issues of governance, privacy, fairness, and justice related to state surveillance.

Panel:

  • Cyrus Farivar, Author, Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech
  • Deirdre Mulligan, Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, Faculty Director, UC Berkeley Center for Law & Technology
  • Catherine Crump, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, UC Berkeley; Director, Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic.
  • Camille Ochoa, Coordinator, Grassroots Advocacy; Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • Moderated by Steve Trush, Research Fellow, UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity

The panel will be followed by a reception with light refreshments. Building is wheelchair accessible – wheelchair users can enter through the ground floor level and take the elevator to the second floor.

This event will not be taped or live-streamed.

RSVP here to attend.

 

Panelist Bios:

Cyrus [“suh-ROOS”] Farivar is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also an author and radio producer. His second book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. His first book, The Internet of Elsewhere—about the history and effects of the Internet on different countries around the world, including Senegal, Iran, Estonia and South Korea—was published in April 2011. He previously was the Sci-Tech Editor, and host of “Spectrum” at Deutsche Welle English, Germany’s international broadcaster. He has also reported for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, Public Radio International, The Economist, Wired, The New York Times and many others. His PGP key and other secure channels are available here.

Deirdre K. Mulligan is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, a faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, and an affiliated faculty on the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.  Mulligan’s research explores legal and technical means of protecting values such as privacy, freedom of expression, and fairness in emerging technical systems.  Her book, Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe, a study of privacy practices in large corporations in five countries, conducted with UC Berkeley Law Prof. Kenneth Bamberger was recently published by MIT Press. Mulligan and  Bamberger received the 2016 International Association of Privacy Professionals Leadership Award for their research contributions to the field of privacy protection.

Catherine Crump: Catherine Crump is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. An experienced litigator specializing in constitutional matters, she has represented a broad range of clients seeking to vindicate their First and Fourth Amendment rights. She also has extensive experience litigating to compel the disclosure of government records under the Freedom of Information Act. Professor Crump’s primary interest is the impact of new technologies on civil liberties. Representative matters include serving as counsel in the ACLU’s challenge to the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ call records; representing artists, media outlets and others challenging a federal internet censorship law, and representing a variety of clients seeking to invalidate the government’s policy of conducting suspicionless searches of laptops and other electronic devices at the international border.

Prior to coming to Berkeley, Professor Crump served as a staff attorney at the ACLU for nearly nine years. Before that, she was a law clerk for Judge M. Margaret McKeown at the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Camille Ochoa: Camille promotes the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s grassroots advocacy initiative (the Electronic Frontier Alliance) and coordinates outreach to student groups, community groups, and hacker spaces throughout the country. She has very strong opinions about food deserts, the school-to-prison pipeline, educational apartheid in America, the takeover of our food system by chemical companies, the general takeover of everything in American life by large conglomerates, and the right to not be spied on by governments or corporations.

Join CTSP for social impact Un-Pitch Day on October 27th

Are you a local nonprofit or community organization that has a pressing challenge that you think technology might be able to address, but you don’t know where to start?

If so, join us and the UC Berkeley School of Information’s IMSA (Information Management Student Association) for Un-Pitch Day on October 27th from 4 – 7pm, where graduate students will offer their technical expertise to help address your organization’s pressing technology challenges. During the event, we’ll have you introduce your challenge(s) and desired impact and partner you with grad students with activities to explore your challenge(s) and develop refined questions to push the conversation forward.

You’d then have the opportunity to pitch your challenge(s) with the goal of potentially matching with a student project group to adopt your project. By attending Un-Pitch day, you would gain a more defined sense of how to address your technology challenge, and, potentially, a team of students interested in working with your org to develop a prototype or a research project to address it.

Our goal is to both help School of Information grad students (and other UCB grad students) identify potential projects they can adopt for the 2017-2018 academic year (ending in May). Working in collaboration with your organization, our students can help develop a technology-focused project or conduct technology-related research to aid your organization.

There is also the possibility of qualifying for funding ($2000 per project team member) for technology projects with distinct public interest/public policy goals through the Center for Technology, Society & Policy (funding requires submitting an application to the Center, due in late November). Please note that we cannot guarantee that each project presented at Un-Pitch Day will match with an interested team.

Event Agenda

Friday, October 27th from 4 – 7pm at South Hall on the UC Berkeley campus

Light food & drinks will be provided for registered attendees.

Registration is required for this event; click here to register.

4:00 – 4:45pm Social impact organization introductions and un-pitches of challenges

4:45 – 5:00pm CTSP will present details about public interest project funding opportunities and deadlines.

5:00 – 6:00pm Team up with grad students through “speed dating” activities to break the ice and explore challenge definitions and develop fruitful questions from a range of diverse perspectives.

6:00 – 7:00pm Open house for students and organizations to mingle and connect over potential projects. Appetizers and refreshments provided by CTSP.

Join CTSP for social impact Un-Pitch Day on October 21st

This post is for the 2016 Un-Pitch Day, click here for the 2017 event.

Are you a local non-profit or community organization that has a pressing challenge that you think technology might be able to solve, but you don’t know where to start? Or, are you a Berkeley graduate or undergraduate student seeking an opportunity to put your technical skills to use for the public good?

If so, join us for Un-Pitch Day on October 21st from 3 – 7pm, where Berkeley graduate students will offer their technical expertise to help solve your organization’s pressing technology challenges. During the event, non-profits and community organizations will workshop their challenge(s) and desired impact. Organizations will then be partnered with graduate student technology mentors to define and scope potential solutions.

All attending non-profits and community organizations will have the opportunity to pitch their pressing challenge(s) to student attendees with the goal of potentially matching with a student project group to adopt their project. By attending Un-Pitch day, organizations will gain a more defined sense of how to solve their technology challenges, and potentially, a team of students interested in working with your organization to develop a prototype or project to solve it.

The goal of this event is to both help School of Information master’s students (and other UCB grad students) identify potential projects they can adopt for the 2016-2017 academic year (ending in May). Working in collaboration with your organization, our students can help develop a technology-focused project or conduct research to aid your organization.

There is also the possibility of qualifying for funding ($2000 per project team member) for technology projects with distinct public interest/public policy goals through the Center for Technology, Society & Policy (funding requires submitting an application to the Center, due in late November). Please note that we cannot guarantee that each project presented at Un-Pitch Day will match with an interested team.

Event Agenda

Friday, October 21st from 3 – 7pm at South Hall on the UC Berkeley campus

Light food & drinks will be provided for registered attendees.

Registration is required for this event; click here to register.

3:00 – 4:00pm: Non-profit/Community Organization Attendees

Workshop with Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup, to frame your problem definition and impact goals.

4:00 – 5:00pm: Non-profit/Community Organization Attendees & I-School students

Team up with student technology mentors to define and scope potential solutions and create a simple visual artifact outlining the idea.

5:00 – 5:30pm: Open to the public

CTSP will present details about public interest project funding opportunities and deadlines.

5:30 – 6:00pm: Open to the public

Attendee organizations present short project pitches (2-3 mins) to the room.

6:00 – 7:00pm: Open to the public

Open house for students and organizations to mingle and connect over potential projects. Appetizers and refreshments provided by CTSP.

The Vision Archive: An online library of aspirational, open source social justice imagery

By Gracen Brilmyer & Una Lee, CTSP Fellows | Permalink

Collection of Vision Archive graphicsOur movements need more images! Social justice organizers have a wide visual vocabulary of protest — raised fists, barbed wire, marchers holding placards — but should we not also depict the world we are building in addition to the forces we’re resisting? How can we communicate concepts we hold dear; concepts like beloved community, allyship, and consent?

The Vision Archive brings together designers, artists, advocates, and community organizers to co-create images for the world we want to build. Visionarchive.io is a Github for visionary social justice images, allowing users to upload images so other users can download and remix them and upload their new creations.

READ MORE

A User-Centered Perspective on Algorithmic Personalization

By Rena Coen, Emily Paul, Pavel Vanegas, and G.S. Hans, CTSP Fellows | Permalink

We conducted a survey using experimentally controlled vignettes to measure user attitudes about online personalization and develop an understanding of the factors that contribute to personalization being seen as unfair or discriminatory. Come learn more about these findings and hear from the Center for Democracy & Technology on the policy implications of this work at our event tonight!

What is online personalization?

Some of you may be familiar with a recent story, in which United Artists presented Facebook users with different movie trailers for the film Straight Outta Compton based on their race, or “ethnic affinity group,” which was determined based on users’ activity on the site.

This is just one example of online personalization, where content is tailored to users based on some user attribute. Such personalization can be beneficial to consumers but it can also have negative and discriminatory effects, as in the targeted trailers for Straight Outta Compton or Staples’ differential retail pricing based on zip code. Of course, not all personalization is discriminatory; there are examples of online personalization that many of us see as useful and have even come to expect. One example of this is providing location-based results for generic search terms like “coffee” or “movie showtimes.”

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Exciting Upcoming Events from CTSP Fellows

By Galen Panger, CTSP Director | Permalink

Five of CTSP’s eleven collaborative teams will present progress and reflections from their work in two exciting Bay Area events happening this month, and there’s a common theme: How can we better involve the communities and stakeholders impacted by technology’s advance? On May 17, three teams sketch preliminary answers to questions about racial and socioeconomic inclusion in technology using findings from their research right here in local Bay Area communities. Then, on May 18, join two teams as they discuss the importance of including critical stakeholders in the development of policies on algorithms and drones.

Please join us on May 17 and 18, and help us spread the word by sharing this post with friends or retweeting the tweet below. All the details below the jump.

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Developing Strategies to Counter Online Abuse

By Nick Doty, CTSP | Permalink

We are excited to host a panel of experts this Wednesday, talking about strategies for making the Internet more gender-inclusive and countering online harassment and abuse.

Toward a Gender-Inclusive Internet: Strategies to Counter Harassment, Revenge Porn, Threats, and Online Abuse
Wednesday, April 27; 4:10-5:30 pm
202 South Hall, Berkeley, CA
Open to the public; Livestream available

These are experts and practitioners in law, journalism and technology with an interest in the problem of online harassment. And more importantly, they’re all involved with ongoing concrete approaches to push back against this problem (see, for example, Activate Your Squad and Block Together). While raising awareness about online harassment and understanding the causes and implications remains important, we have reached the point where we can work on direct countermeasures.

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The need for interdisciplinary tech policy training

By Nick Doty, CTSP, with Richmond Wong, Anna Lauren Hoffman and Deirdre K. Mulligan | Permalink

Conversations about substantive tech policy issues — privacy-by-design, net neutrality, encryption policy, online consumer protection — frequently evoke questions of education and people. “How can we encourage privacy earlier in the design process?” becomes “How can we train and hire engineers and lawyers who understand both technical and legal aspects of privacy?” Or: “What can the Federal Trade Commission do to protect consumers from online fraud scams?” becomes “Who could we hire into an FTC bureau of technologists?” Over the past month, members of the I School community have participated in several events where these tech policy conversations have occurred:

  • Catalyzing Privacy by Design: fourth in a series of NSF-sponsored workshops, organized with the Computing Community Consortium, to develop a privacy by design research agenda
  • Workshop on Problems in the Public Interest: hosted by the Technology Science Research Collaboration Network at Harvard to generate new research questions
  • PrivacyCon: an event to bridge academic research and policymaking at the Federal Trade Commission

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Participants from 26 departments and organizations attend #CTSPhackathon

By Galen Panger, CTSP | Permalink

On Saturday, we welcomed 42 participants from 26 departments and organizations to the CTSP Proposal Hackathon, the Center’s first official event and the kick-off for our annual request for proposals, which opened today for applications.

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