""The End of the Internet Dream," cyberlawyer Jennifer Granick's keynote at Black Hat, was all anyone could talk about at this year's Defcon -- Black Hat being the grown-up, buttoned-down, military-industrial cousin to Defcon's wild and exuberant anarchy.
The text of Granick's speech is now online, and I can see what they were all raving about. Granick tells the true story of "Internet Utopians" -- not people who believed the Internet would deliver a better, freer world; rather, people who believed that itcould, if the rest of us fought for it.
She also tells the tale of how that dream was dashed by giving in to cybersecurity scaremongering, copyright bullying, easy answers to difficult speech, unexamined racism and sexism, and the global war on terror. How governments, companies and our complacency all but killed the dream of the Internet as a force for improving the world.
But she also provides a prescription for changing that -- hope that we can avert that future, and that therefore, we must."
- Date Published:08/18/2015
- Original Publication:Boing Boing