The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It » navigate08 http://futureoftheinternet.org Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School Mon, 07 May 2012 16:36:10 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 From privacy to accountability at IAPP http://futureoftheinternet.org/from-privacy-to-accountability-at-iapp http://futureoftheinternet.org/from-privacy-to-accountability-at-iapp#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:08:53 +0000 jz http://futureoftheinternet.org/?p=68 I’m co-moderating a retreat with John Palfrey about the future of privacy, and one of the morning provocateurs was Hal Abelson.  He mused back on the days of SAFE — a campaign against a U.S. government proposal for a “Clipper Chip” that would permit, with a warrant, the government to gain access to encrypted data without the permission of the keyholder(s).  Hal supported SAFE, but today said that the best ways to implement the values of privacy aren’t so much in worrying about who has access to what data, but how the data is used.  If that’s the case, I asked, have you rethought your support of SAFE?  To my surprise, Hal said yes: at least in a place under the rule of law, the ways to protect privacy are through process rather than through technology that cannot be broken, even if the process is followed.  That’s a very interesting shift from the days when Hal and I were among five people teaching a course on the legal and technical architectures of cyberspace.

In that 1998 class half the students were from Harvard Law and the other half undergraduates from MIT.  The proto-lawyers all supported technologies to facilitate government access to otherwise-encrypted secrets; the engineers all wanted the tech to rule.  I wonder how the polling would go today.

…JZ

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