Annalee Newitz
AlterNet
http://www.techsploitation.com
Thursday, 3 November 2005 at 4:15pm
Room 380-380C
Stanford University
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.