Rebecca MacKinnon: Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, censorship, civil society, commons, democracy, facebook, freedom, google, internet, internet activism, liberation technologies, net neutrality, technology
Google has a history of censoring at the behest of Communist China. Research in Motion happily opens up the BlackBerry to such stalwarts of liberty as Saudi Arabia. Yahoo has betrayed the email accounts of dissidents to the PRC. Facebook’s obsession with personal transparency has revealed the identities of protestors to governments. For all the overheated rhetoric of liberty and cyber-utopia, it is clear that the corporations that rule cyberspace are making decisions that show little or no concern for their impact on political freedom. In Consent of the Networked, internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it’s time for us to demand that our rights and freedoms are respected and protected before they’re sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away. The challenge is that building accountability into the fabric of cyberspace demands radical thinking in a completely new dimension. The corporations that build and operate the technologies that create and shape our digital world are fundamentally different from the Chevrons, Nikes, and Nabiscos whose behavior and standards can be regulated quite effectively by laws, courts, and bureaucracies answerable to voters.The public revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace will be useless if it focuses downstream at the point of law and regulation, long after the software code has already been written, shipped, and embedded itself into the lives of millions of people. The revolution must be focused upstream at the source of the problem. Political innovation—the negotiated relationship between people with power and people whose interests and rights are affected by that power—needs to center around the point of technological conception, experimentation, and early implementation.The purpose of technology—and of the corporations that make it—is to serve humanity, not the other way around. It’s time to wake up and act before the reversal becomes permanent.
Publisher Basic Books, 2012
ISBN 0465024424, 9780465024421
352 pages
review (Adam Thierer, Technology Liberation Front)
review (John Kampfner, The Guardian)
Let’s take back the Internet! (author’s TED talk)
author
publisher
google books
PDF (EPUB)
Afterword to the Paperback Edition (HTML, added on 2013-4-19)
Eric Gordon, Adriana de Souza e Silva: Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · facebook, gps, locative media, mobile technology, privacy, social networks, sousveillance
Provides an introduction to the new theory of Net Locality and the profound effect on individuals and societies when everything is located or locatable.
– Describes net locality as an emerging form of location awareness central to all aspects of digital media, from mobile phones, to Google Maps, to location-based social networks and games, such as Foursquare and facebook.
– Warns of the threats these technologies, such as data surveillance, present to our sense of privacy, while also outlining the opportunities for pro-social developments.
– Provides a theory of the web in the context of the history of emerging technologies, from GeoCities to GPS, Wi-Fi, Wiki Me, and Google Android.
Publisher John Wiley & Sons, 2011
ISBN 1405180609, 9781405180603
200 pages
PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)
Comment (0)Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, Zittrain (eds.): Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · asia, blogging, botnet, censorship, china, cyberwar, facebook, freedom of expression, internet, journalism, politics, surveillance
A daily battle for rights and freedoms in cyberspace is being waged in Asia. At the epicenter of this contest is China–home to the world’s largest Internet population and what is perhaps the world’s most advanced Internet censorship and surveillance regime in cyberspace. Resistance to China’s Internet controls comes from both grassroots activists and corporate giants such as Google. Meanwhile, similar struggles play out across the rest of the region, from India and Singapore to Thailand and Burma, although each national dynamic is unique. Access Contested, the third volume from the OpenNet Initiative (a collaborative partnership of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the SecDev Group in Ottawa), examines the interplay of national security, social and ethnic identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace, offering in-depth accounts of national struggles against Internet controls as well as updated country reports by ONI researchers.
The contributors examine such topics as Internet censorship in Thailand, the Malaysian blogosphere, surveillance and censorship around gender and sexuality in Malaysia, Internet governance in China, corporate social responsibility and freedom of expression in South Korea and India, cyber attacks on independent Burmese media, and distributed-denial-of-service attacks and other digital control measures across Asia.
Edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Jonathan Zittrain
Publisher MIT Press, 2011
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 0262516802, 9780262516808
414 pages