Symbolic Systems Forum - Annalee Newitz, AlterNet

Annalee Newitz, AlterNet

"Free Speech Hackers: How New Laws and Technologies are Creating the Next Generation of Digital Subversives"

ABSTRACT:

Free speech, especially anonymous free speech, is under attack on the

Internet. Government and private industry are using network

surveillance technologies and the legal system to make it difficult

for political dissidents, whistleblowers, and social critics to speak

their minds without fear of sometimes drastic consequences. At the

same time, hackers are creating software tools that allow free

information and ideas to punch through technical barriers. This talk

will focus on the future of free speech online by looking some of

these new technologies, such as anonymizing network Tor,

privacy-enhancing chat application OTR, and speech disseminator

Ping-o-Matic. It will also look at some of the cultural and legal

challenges that these technologies are likely to meet. Along the way,

we'll look at the kinds of free speech that are being enabled (or

disabled) by present and future hacks.

BIO:

Annalee Newitz is a freelance writer and a contributing editor at

Wired magazine. In 2004 and 2005, she was the policy analyst at the

Electronic Frontier Foundation. Based on her doctoral research at

Berkeley, her forthcoming book, Pretend We're Dead: Capitalist

Monsters in American Pop Culture, is about capitalism and monster

movies. Formerly, Newitz was the culture editor at The San Francisco

Bay Guardian. After being named a Knight Science Journalism Fellow,

she spent the 2002-2003 academic year as a research fellow at MIT. Her

work has appeared in magazines and papers such as Wired, Popular

Science, Salon, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, and several academic

journals and anthologies. Newitz's writing focuses on pop culture and

technology, from the politics of open source software to hacker

subcultures. Her weekly syndicated column, Techsploitation

(http://www.techsploitation.com/tech/), is about the ways that media

mutates and reiterates the problems of everyday life. Newitz's next

book will deal with the cultural impact of technology.