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Technology and Society Policy Director
Joined on April 9, 2004
Total Post Views: 56,138
| About |
Daniel Weitzner is Co-Director of the MIT CSAIL Decentralized Information Group, teaches Internet public policy in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, and is Policy Director of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Technology and Society activities. At DIG he leads research on the development of new technology and public policy models for addressing legal challenges raised by the Web, including privacy, intellectual property, identity management and new regulatory models for the Web. At W3C he is responsible for Web standards needed to address public policy requirements, including the Platform for Privacy Preference (P3P) and XML Security technologies. He was the first to advocate user control technologies such as content filtering to protect children and avoid government censorship. These arguments played a critical role in the landmark Internet freedom of expression case in the United States Supreme Court, Reno v. ACLU (1997). In 1994, his advocacy work won legal protections for email and web logs in the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Weitzner was co-founder and Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Deputy Policy Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Software Freedom Law Center, the Web Science Research Initiative. and the Internet Education Foundation.
Weitzner has law degree from Buffalo Law School, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College. His writings have appeared in Science magazine, the Yale Law Review, Communications of the ACM, Computerworld, Wired Magazine, Social Research, Electronic Networking: Research, Applications & Policy, and The Whole Earth Review.
Except where otherwise noted, all postings by Daniel J. Weitzner on CircleID are licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Steve Lohr has a nice piece in the New York Times ('Technology Gets a Piece of Stimulus,' 26 Jan 2009, p. C1) this morning about the role that technology and innovation will play in the economic recovery (aka stimulus) bill supported by the Obama Administration. In the past, health IT deployment has been approached as an engineering problem: what computers have to be part of which networks exchanging which types of data? This loses sight of the purpose of electronic medical records... more
Today a senior McCain advisor, Doug Holtz-Eakin, proudly held up a Blackberry and declared: "You're looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create." Bloggers on all sides of the partisan divide are having a field day with this -- suggest that the McCain campaign is out of touch, desperate, or trying to top the trouble VP Al Gore got into, when he was falsely accused of claiming to have invented the Internet... more
In all the recent uproar (New York Times, "Google Told to Turn Over User Data of YouTube," Michael Helft, 4 July 2008) about the fact that Google has been forced to turn over a large pile of personally-identifiable information to Viacom as part of a copyright dispute (Opinion), there is a really interesting angle pointed out by Dan Brickley (co-creator of FOAF and general Semantic Web troublemaker)... more
The New Jersey Supreme Court has issued an important decision on Internet users' right to privacy. The case involves a dispute about whether an ISP violated a user's privacy rights by turning over subscriber information (name, address, billing details) associated with a particular IP address. It ends up that the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid for a variety of reasons. As the user had a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' in her Internet activities and identifying information, and because the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid, the New Jersey court determined that the ISP should not have turned over the personal data... more
A United Nations task force recently held a two-day workshop on the question of who governs the Internet. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan challenged those of us present to ensure that the Internet and the World Wide Web support "the cause of human development."
Following in the long-standing tradition of skepticism about governments in the Internet community, some in the technical community and the Internet's chattering classes view the concerns expressed by the United Nations and countries such as Brazil, India and others, as a threat to the operation of the Internet itself. This article was originally published at CNET News.Com on April 6, 2004. more
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