From the web site for the 18th ACM conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, CFP: Technology Policy '08:
This election year will be the first to address US technology policy in the information age as part of our national debate. Candidates have put forth positions about technology policy and have recognized that it has its own set of economic, political, and social concerns. In the areas of privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and freedom of speech, an increasing number of issues once confined to experts now penetrate public conversation. Our decisions about technology policy are being made at a time when the architectures of our information and communication technologies are still being built. Debate about these issues needs to be better-informed in order for us to make policy choices in the public interest.
This year, the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference will focus on what constitutes technology policy. CFP: Technology Policy '08 is an opportunity to help shape public debate on those issues being made into laws and regulations and those technological infrastructures being developed. The direction of our technology policy impacts the choices we make about our national defense, our civil liberties during wartime, the future of American education, our national healthcare systems, and many other realms of policy discussed more prominently on the election trail. Policies ranging from data mining and wiretapping, to file-sharing and open access, and e-voting to electronic medical records will be addressed by expert panels of technologists, policymakers, business leaders, and advocates.
CFP2008 is being held in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 20-23. Back in 2000 Elizabeth Weise called it "the most important computer conference you've never heard of"; Lorrie Faith Cranor's Ten Years of Computers, Freedom and Privacy gives the early history, where hackers, lawyers, law enforcement, and goverment representatives fought out "crypto wars" and internet censorship battles (ending with a defiant "we'll be back" from the Clinton adminstration as the Clipper Chip went to its well-deserved fate). Since then the conference has taken a progressively broader and more inclusive focus while moving in a more activist direction. This year's chair, with perfect timing during an U.S. election year, the focus will be on the role of technology in society.
The call for presentations, tutorials, and workshops asks for proposals on panels, tutorials, speaker suggestions, and birds of a feather sessions through the CFP: Technology Policy '08 submission page. The deadline for panels tutorials, and speakers is March 21, 2008, and the birds-of-a-feather deadline is April 21. The submission process can seem a bit intimidating (this is an ACM conference and so it has some academic overtones) but the guidelines are helpful and have links to some examples.
We'll use this blog to give updates, discuss ideas for potential sessions, delve into particular topics, and introduce some of the people involved in CFP. One of the things we're really trying to do this year is to broaden participation, and that includes the people who aren't at the conference in person -- sure, there's nothing like being there, but between the blog, the wiki, and presence on various social network sites, hopefully it can be interesting and entertaining for people joining virtually as well.
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21 comments:
I started working at EFF in January as International Affairs Director, and am working in the near term on European IP and Access to Knowledge (A2K) and the Development Agenda at WIPO. I'm also a lecturer at Yale Law School teaching a research group/clinical course called A2K Practicum. Until January, I was the Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project and am still an ISP fellow for the remainder of this academic year.
My first CFP was in 2002 in San Francisco and I've been to almost every year since. I've always looked forward to it as a key gathering of public interest law and technology advocates, policymakers, and technologists and am honored to chair this year. I think this year is a particularly good opportunity for CFP to contribute to public discussion of these issues because they seem to appear more and more prominently in mainstream political debate.
I want to support Eddan's comment about the importance of CFP - it's been a key conference that brings together some fascinating people, and I'm glad to be on the committee this year.
I'm a visiting professor at Yale this term, teaching internet law and communications law. Last term I was at Michigan, and I may be there again next year.
Most importantly, I want all of you to know about OneWebDay, which is each Sept. 22 (see onewebday.org). It's an Earth Day for the internet, with local events around the world. The Internet Society is working on it with its chapters, and in this third OneWebDay year I'd like to make sure that everyone at CFP hears about it. The idea is to create a global constituency that cares about the future of the internet.
I'm also a member of the board of ICANN.
I'm a freelance writer and sometime musician, based in London, much detail on my Web site.
My first CFP was 1994, and I haven't missed one, and most of the people I remember from then have drifted away, so I'm beginning to feel like one of only a few pieces of institutional memory.
I think of CFP as the happiest place on earth (because for four days you don't want to finish anyone else's sentence).
wg
I am a law professor who focuses primarily on information law; my homepage is here.
I have written some articles on search engines and intellectual property, which you can find here.
I also blog on tech issues; some archived posts on search engines are available here.
Substantively, my primary concern is to inform technology policy with normative concerns about power, inequality, and fairness.
Like Susan, I'm a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School. This coming year, I'll be a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School. My faculty home is in California, at the University of California, Davis.
I teach and write about both cyberlaw and international law. This year, I'm teaching the Law of E-commerce and International Finance.
I blog on globalization and digitization at Chander.com site.
I'm honored to be invited to join a committee full of individuals who have shown tremendous leadership in protecting privacy and freedom in cyberspace.
Hi, everyone. I'm Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where my work focuses on government accountability, civil liberties and intellectual property issues. Prior to joining EFF, I was Staff Counsel and Director of the Open Government project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
The first CFP I attended was in Berkeley in 2004, and this conference has been my favorite each year since then. I'm honored to be on this committee and very much looking forward to working with all of you to organize a fantastic program for 2008.
My background's in software engineering and computer security; my static analysis startup Intrinsa was acquired by Microsoft in 1999. I worked there for about eight years: in Microsoft Research, where I wound up focusing on computer science as a social science, and then as GM of Strategy Development for their online systems group before leaving last November. Currently I'm working with Deborah Pierce on Tales from the Net, a book about social networks; blogging at Liminal States on various topics including voting rights; and doing some strategy consulting.
After going to CFP for over a decade, being on a panel, organizing BoFs, and helping out in various ways when Deborah chaired the 2005 conference in Seattle, I was honored and delighted when Eddan asked me to be on the program committee this year. I see CFP as the most important conference — and network of people and organizations — focused on civil rights (and increasingly, human rights in general) in an electronic society. With this year's focus on technology policy and perfect timing in the middle of the US election season, I think there's a chance that we'll have even more impact than in the past.
One area I'm particularly interested in is broadening participation in CFP -- including for people who aren't able to make it to the conference itself. So I signed up to lead the blogging here and the Facebook outreach. Hopefully others will get involved and start up CFP groups and communities on other social network sites as well! We'll have more to say on this front as the program gets finalized and we get closer to the conference ... so stay tuned :-)
Hi all. This is Sherwin Siy. I'm a Staff Attorney at Public Knowledge, where I work on our international portfolio in IP and broadband policy, as well as domestic IP.
Before joining PK, I was a fellow at EPIC, focusing on consumer privacy issues.
I've attended 2 CFPs so far--Berkeley in 2004, when I was a student at the Berkeley Samuelson Clinic; and DC in 2006. I'm looking forward to being involved in CFP this year, especially as privacy issues are becoming more prominent in the copyright debates, among others.
I'm flattered to be in such august company on this committee and hope to be helpful as planning progresses.
Ahrash Bissell -
I am the Executive Director of ccLearn, the education division of Creative Commons (CC). I came to Creative Commons from Duke University (Durham, NC) where I was a Research Associate in Biology and the Assistant Director of the Academic Resource Center. The bulk of my time in recent years has been focused on educational research and technology, pedagogical and curriculum development, assessment (with a focus on critical-thinking skills and metacognition), and facilitating interdisciplinary research, especially via open dissemination, data sharing, and web-based “communities of expertise.”
When ccLearn launched, I leaped at the chance to really get into the trenches in terms of reducing the legal, technical, and cultural barriers to the opening up of educational resources and practices. Within the framework of open education, I am actively negotiating the interface of technology and the law, especially internationally, with special emphasis on methods of simplifying the process of engaging people in this movement.
I am looking forward to seeing the ideas and energies shared at CFP.
-Ahrash
Hello everyone: I'm currently the TRUST and ACCURATE research fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law. (Those acronyms are signs of NSF funding. TRUST = Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology; ACCURATE = A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections). That helps to spell out a bit of what I'm working on right now: information security law and policy, and electronic voting.
I was at CFP 2002 and 2004, and I'm looking forward to being involved in the conference after being away from it for too long.
I write about technology, law, and politics in San Francisco for News.com (part of CNET Networks) and my first CFP was in Cambridge, Mass. in 1996. FYI, my personal homepage is here.
I had been to technology conferences before CFP and policy conferences before CFP '96, but never one that combined both. It was a magical experience -- I remember my first CFP conference better than many of the following ones! It's a privilege to have the chance to share this experience with others.
I think I've been to just about every CFP since then except for one, which probably makes me an old-timer by now. It may also make me a bit curmudgeonly -- CFP seems a bit more insular than it was in the now-distant past; fewer technologists show up; the $750 cost is much less than conferences like RSA but it is still expensive for people who don't have someone else paying the bills. (Then again, the cost of $750 is cheaper in real dollars than CFP's $630 conference-and-tutorials fee in 1994, so my concern may well be misplaced!)
I'm Susy Struble. I work at Sun Microsystems in both the office of the CTO and our government strategy team. My job is to promote social and economic progress through interoperable IT systems. Technology standardization is a key tool of my job, as it forms the intersection of competitive strategy, economic growth, law, industry requirements, innovation, public policy and - increasingly - a notion of the common good. My educational background is in economics and government. I'm still working on getting those phD letters. I love Joan Didion and backcountry skiing.
I'm also embarrassed to admit that I've never attended at CFP, although not for lack of interest. I'm honored to be a part of this august program committee and hope my input is provocative and useful.
I am currently the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. I have a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, and my research interests focus on values in technology, privacy and surveillance theory, Web search engines and Web 2.0.
My blog is here.
This will be my first CFP, and I'm very much looking forward to the discussions and debates.
I am Robert Guerra one of the founding directors of Privaterra - we provide training and technical assistance to NGOs in the area of data privacy, secure communications and information security.
My areas of interest are Internet Governance, surveillance, censorship and privacy as they apply to social justice NGOs.
I am a long time board member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), and advise several non-profits and/or their related projects , including Taking IT Global, DiploFoundation's Internet Governance and Policy Capacity Building Programme, The Open Net Initiative and The Internet Corporations for Assigned Names and Numbers's At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) and its Security and Stability Advisory Committee - to name a few
HI All-
I'm a fellow at the Information Society Project with Nathaniel and a student at YLS. In my non-student life I work as the Director for Global Strategy and Product Development at Noank Media (www.noankmedia.com), the private sector implementation of Terry Fisher's blanket licensing model for digital media.
Most of my research focuses on collaborative communities, new media business models and social networks. This is my first CFP and I'm thrilled to be working with you and meeting what Eddan describes as "the best in tech policy of his generation." (where this generation ends and begins is as of yet unclear ;) )
Leah
I lead the Safety Net Project which focuses on all things tech, privacy, and victim safety at the National Network to End Domestic Violence in Washington, DC. Our Safety Net Team has 5 staff members and we're hoping that at least 3 of us will be able to attend this year.
My first CFP was in San Francisco in 2002 and this May will be my 7th CFP - it is an amazing event and I am honored to be part of the planning process.
Hello everyone. My name is Laura DeNardis, the Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. I'm following in the footsteps of Eddan Katz in this position and am excited to be part of the CFP program committee. I am an interdisciplinary scholar in technology, law, and society with a research focus on Internet governance and technical standards. Everyone at the Yale ISP is thrilled that CFP is being held in New Haven this year.
Apparently, control of the program of the CFP conference has fallen into the hands of ideologues who seek to promote their selfish agendas (rather than the public good) via the conference. A good example is the session titled, "Network Neutrality: Beyond the Slogans." The title of the session creates the initial impression that perhaps one would see an unbiased presentation of the issues. However, the description, at http://www.cfp2008.org/wiki/index.php/Network_Neutrality:_Beyond_the_Slogans, contains one-sided and highly biased statements, such as "we have seen major violations of network neutrality" (as if this assertion and any definition of the term were not open to debate) and "debates over network neutrality are often not only contentious, but also unhelpful, if not dishonest" (as if it were a foregone conclusion that those who did not agree with the unnamed author of the description were necessarily dishonest). What's more, while the panelists are not listed, I have not been able to identify a single person who is actually in the business of providing Internet service who is on the panel; rather, all of the panelists I've identified appear to be lobbyists and/or people who take an extreme viewpoint on the topic. This obvious bias does harm to the credibility and reputation of the conference and its organizers. Clearly, the conference's program committee consists of far too many ideologues and few or no people with actual "boots on the ground" in the world of technology -- a recipe for bad policy recommendations.
Clarification: Brett is not actually on the program committee. More context here.
I don't have anything to do with organizing the Network Neutrality panel Brett is so incensed about but since he left the same post on my personal blog, I'm going to respond to this -- speaking for myself, and not the program committee as a whole.
CFP has always tried to present multiple sides of the issues, and some of the best moments had been the highly contentious ones. That doesn't mean that all panels present all sides of each subject. The net neutrality panel does include a high-profile skeptic and I'm confident that the panelists will be good choices. Hopefully you'll be able to attend the conference and take part in the discussions.
It's certainly true that the vast majority of program and steering committee members for an online civil liberties conference called "Computers, Freedom, and Privacy" have values in common. To the extent that makes us a cabal of ideologues ... sign me up!
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