Wirelessing the revolution -- providing educational content and commentary on issues concerning Community Broadband Networking, spectrum policy, & open-source and open-architecture development.
You should be very afraid of a pair of bills that threaten Internet freedom.
The United States of America was forged in resistance to collective reprisals—the punishment of many for the acts of few. In 1774, following the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passed a series of laws—including the mandated closure of the port of Boston—meant to penalize the people of Massachusetts. These abuses of power, labeled the “Intolerable Acts,” catalyzed the American Revolution by making plain the oppression of the British crown.
More than 300 years later, the U.S. Congress is considering bills that would lead to collective reprisals against online communities. The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are supposed to address copyright infringement and counterfeiting. In reality, they are so technically impractical that they do little to address these problems. They would, however, undermine participatory democracy and human rights, which is why these bills have garnered near-universal condemnation from both human rights groups and technologists.
The interconnected nature of the Internet fostered the growth of online communities such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. These sites host our humdrum daily interactions and serve as a public soapbox for our political voice. Both the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA would create a national firewall by censoring the domain names of websites accused of hosting infringing copyrighted materials. This legislation would enable law enforcement to take down the entire tumblr.com domain due to something posted on a single blog. Yes, an entire, largely innocent online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority.
If you think this scenario is unlikely, consider what happened to Mooo.com earlier this year. Back in February, the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security seized 10 domains during a child-p**n crackdown called “Operation Protect Our Children.” Along with this group of offenders, 84,000 more entirely innocent sites were tagged with the following accusatory splash page: “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child p**nography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution." Their only crime was guilt by association: They were all using the Mooo.com domain.
SOPA would go even further, creating a system of private regulation to shut down websites that are accused of not doing enough to prevent infringement. Keep in mind that these shutdowns would happen before a site owner could defend himself in court—SOPA could punish sites without even establishing whether they are guilty of the charges brought against them.
In January 2010, Hillary Clinton launched the State Department’s Internet Freedom initiative, stumping for open access to information worldwide. Though Secretary Clinton has said that “there is no contradiction between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement of expression on the Internet,” PROTECT IP and SOPA create mutually exclusive trajectories for these two priorities. These bills are driven by technologically naive thinking that it’s possible to censor information without affecting freedom of speech. SOPA even goes so far as to make the key circumvention tools used by human rights advocates and democracy organizers throughout the Middle East illegal. While we’re certain that SOPA’s authors did not mean to craft a bill tailor-made to support the future Qaddafis and Mubaraks of the world, that is precisely what they’ve done.
Rather than blocking online copyright infringement, legislation like SOPA and Protect IP would instigate a data obfuscation arms race, making legitimate law enforcement efforts all the more difficult. If the United States decides that copyright infringement must be stopped at any cost, therequired censorship regime will depend on evermore invasive practices, such as monitoring users’ personal Web traffic. This counterproductive cat-and-mouse game of censorship and circumvention would drive savvy scofflaws to darknets while increasing surveillance of less technically proficient Internet users.
Given that the Intolerable Acts sparked a revolution, it should be no surprise that this proposed legislation has generated a massive outcry in the United States. However, this attempt to unilaterally censor the Internet has spurred worldwide opposition, with several dozen international organizations signing a letter stating that “[t]hrough SOPA, the United States is attempting to dominate a shared global resource.” Last month, the European Parliament adopted a resolution underscoring “the need to protect the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication by refraining from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names.”
As participants in the Internet community, we must defend against collective reprisals that undermine our rights to access, privacy, and freedom of expression online. SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act are fundamentally incompatible with a free society and with the founding principles of the United States. This truth should be self-evident: Human rights should never be subjugated to copyright.
The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative (OTI) formulates policy and regulatory reforms to support open architectures and open source innovations and facilitates the development and implementation of open technologies and communications networks. OTI promotes affordable, universal, and ubiquitous communications networks through partnerships with communities, researchers, industry, and public interest groups and is committed to maximizing the potentials of innovative open technologies by studying their social and economic impactsparticularly for poor, rural, and other underserved constituencies. OTI provides in-depth, objective research, analysis, and findings for decision-makers and the general public. For additional information on the program, please visit http://oti.newamerica.net.
OTI Priorities and Goals:
Gather top technologists and tech-savvy policy analysts to inform current policy debates.
Build collaborations among community developers, entrepreneurs, academia, and industry.
Study the social and economic impacts of open technologies and architectures.
Implement real-world open technology pilot projects and proofs-of-concept prototypes.
Expand the use of open source software, open APIs, and increased access of Free and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) technologies.
Position Description
The Executive Assistant provides critical support to OTIs Director in all of his day to day activities, including: correspondence and general administration, proposal writing, editing and proofreading, preparing speeches and presentations, drafting memos, scheduling and travel arrangements, media relations, advisory committee relations, and fundraising. This fast-paced job also involves a considerable amount of inter-office coordination as well as occasional research projects.
Primary Responsibilities
Handle a diverse array of administrative support duties including managing the Directors calendar and schedule, arrange meetings, and travel
Assist in various facets of the Open Technology Initiatives day-to-day operations.
Liaise with the Vice President of Finance and Operations and the Grants Manger to coordinate grant submission, reporting, tracking processes for the Open Technology Initiative, and notify the Director and relevant staff of all deadlines and requirements.
Supervise the preparation of materials for meetings, as appropriate.
Coordinate steering committee and advisory council meetings and assist in maintaining strong relations with key funders and advisors.
Assist the Director in maintaining an effective working relationship with the staff and allied organizations.
Assist the Director in the timely management of all communications.
Handle the Directors correspondences, including drafting, proofing, and prioritizing written material.
Provide research support for the Directors long and short term projects.
Ideal candidates will have the following qualifications:
A bachelors degree with 12 years of administrative work experience.
Outstanding writing, editing, and verbal communication skills.
Excellent planning, organizational, and time management skills, as well as attention to detail.
Proficiency in Open Office suite of applications and web-based research tools.
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, team-oriented work environment.
Knowledge of, and/or interest in, technology and public policy issues is preferred.
Talent for taking initiative and working independently when needed.
Application Process
Mail or e-mail resume and cover letter to: Human Resources, New America Foundation, 1899 L Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20036. Fax: 202-986-3696. E-mail: jobs@newamerica.net. Please state Executive Assistant, Open Technology Initiative in the e-mail subject line. No phone calls, please.
Generous salary package commensurate with experience; excellent benefits. The New America Foundation is an equal opportunity employer.
The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States. With an emphasis on big ideas, impartial analysis and pragmatic solutions, New America invests in outstanding individuals whose ability to communicate to wide and influential audiences can change the countrys policy discourse in critical areas, bringing promising new ideas and debates to the fore. Through its fellowships and issue-specific programs, New America sponsors a wide range of research, writing, conferences, and public outreach on the most important global and domestic issues of our time. Based in our nations capital, the New America Foundation currently has over 120 staff members and fellows. For more information, please visit www.newamerica.net.
Do the Internet and social media empower Big Brother or individuals in autocratic regimes, or do they offer a rare level playing field?
This years Arab Spring resurrected exuberant claims for the role of new technologies in spreading democracy. At the same time self-proclaimed cyber-realists were quick to point out that President Mubaraks problems seemed to grow after he unplugged the Internet. Now, summers deadly stalemate in Syria has given pause to anyone peddling absolute theories about the interplay between new information technologies and revolution.
If not a panacea, how can social media and the Internet be deployed to maximize civic engagement in autocratic societies? Does the U.S. policy of supporting Internet freedom amount to a policy of regime change in some countries? When Big Brother does unplug the Internet, what can, or should, the rest of us do about it?
Please join us at a Future Tense event on July 13 to grapple with these issues.
A really great front page New York Times article on the work we've been doing at the Open Technology Initiative. The full article is available here:
U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”
Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.
The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.
Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.
The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.
In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.
Do the Internet and social media empower Big Brother or individuals in autocratic regimes, or do they offer a rare level playing field?