The Information Society Project Lunch Speaker Series welcomes:
Harvard Law School
and the
who will be presenting
"Access Denied: Global Internet Filtering”
December 7, 2007
12:10p - 1:30p
Yale Law School
Room 129
Lunch and presentation to be followed by Q&A
Abstract:
Internet filtering by governments has expanded in recent years from a small number of states, including China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to about thirty-five others. The OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a partnership among the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Advanced Network Research Group of the Cambridge Security Programme at Cambridge University, and the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, has been studying this trend. Next spring ONI will release Access Denied, from MIT Press, containing the results of the first global survey of Internet filtering. ONI found government activity in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa that denies citizens access to information deemed sensitive –¬ often about politics, sexuality, culture, or religion. 25 out of 41 countries surveyed engaged in some kind of filtering. Increasingly, governments are also looking to control Internet activity around specific events, such as elections and crises.
ONI Principal Investigators John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain and Research Director Rob Faris will discuss ONI’s past and ongoing research, the evolving trends in the breadth and scope of global content restrictions, and the range of ethical and legal issues with which this work engages
Michael Zimmer, PhD
Microsoft Resident Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School
e: michael.zimmer@yale.edu
w: http://michaelzimmer.org