From A2K Wiki

Contents 1 Panel description 2 Speaker presentation slides 3 Panel notes 3.1 Julie Cohen, Georgetown University Law Center 3.2 Peter Frohler, UNCTAD 3.3 Sudhir Krishnawamy, Oxford University 3.4 Kate Martin, Center for National Security Study 3.5 Katitza Rodriguez Pereda, CPSR-Peru 3.5.1 Crossroads between personal data protection and copyright law 3.5.2 Conflict b/t privacy and copyright holders straegies to enforce copyright law 3.5.3 International Privacy Framework 3.5.4 Piracy of personal data 3.6 Onno W. Purbo, Indonesia 3.7 Q & A 4 Resources

Panel description

Speakers: Julie Cohen, Kate Martin, Katitza Rodriguez Pereda, Onno Purbo, Peter Frohler, Sudhir Krishnaswamy
Moderator: Nimrod Kozlovski

The A2K Treaty, the Access to Knowledge movement and the broad range of policies resonating with A2K, find their commonality in certain premises about the optimal flows of information. The removal of unjust barriers to the flows of knowledge about culture, health, and education is understood to better facilitate the public interest for the information society. Regulatory interventions that place normative value on elements of information are disfavored. Globalized flows of information are preferred over national and cultural mediation of access to knowledge.

This panel will explore whether or not these ought to be the premises of access to knowledge and the limits of this theoretical framework as applied to discrete policy issues. Discussion will focus on the boundaries of the open information society through an examination of policy areas in which those limits are demonstrated and a consistent theoretical framework is challenged. Privacy and National Security are the most prominent notions of public concern that suggest circumstances where the regulation of information flow and the restriction on access to knowledge may be better for the public interest. But there are also uneasy intersections of A2K with the preservation of culture inspiring the recognition of Traditional Knowledge, the bioethical concerns about Genetically Modified Organisms, and the social order promoted by fighting Cybercrime.

The panel will begin by investigating the communities that make up the networked space of the information society and the social norms that embody them. The discussion will then focus on how the expectations of those communities and the individuals within them take their shape in regards to information privacy, national security, and access to government information. The panel will consider how the boundaries of networked space coincide with existing national boundaries can help guide international policy on access to knowledge. We will aim to identify those policy areas that appear to have conflicts of purpose with A2K and suggest theoretical frameworks that can help reconceptualize those conflicts. This panel seeks to find policy goals of mutual interest to the Access to Knowledge movement and activists working on related issues of Privacy, National Security, Traditional Knowledge, Bioethics, and Cybercrime.

Speaker presentation slides

Panel notes

Julie Cohen, Georgetown University Law Center

Peter Frohler, UNCTAD

Sudhir Krishnawamy, Oxford University

Kate Martin, Center for National Security Study

Security experts today would say the top national security threats are 1) Preventing terrorists (internet seen as a problem); 2) Preventing proliferation of WMD's (knowledge and movement of people seen as a problem); 3) Resolve the conflict in the Middle East (knowledge is at best neutral).

This perspective on freedom of information is different from ours, but we need to understand it. We can get some perspective on this by looking at the issues around freedom of information (FOI). The theory of FOI is that information is necessary for individuals to participate in the public debate for democratic decisionmaking. This irght is recognized in the 1st Amendment and in the major int'l human rights treaties.

It's accepted that there are some useful limitations on information. Nat'l security regulations can be applied to scientific or technical information, or perhaps most tellingly for our discussion, information that would enable individuals to outwit governments.

In the field of FOI there has been extensive work on principles and specific examples of how to balance legitimate security needs and democratic need for openness and government. Principles:

1. There should be a presumption of openness. Government has a burden to show information should be withheld for nat'l security.
2. There is a limited list of subject matters legitimately secret in the name of nat'l security. e.g., details of weapons technology. If the information is relevant to policy decisions made by government, then it should be made available. But if it is more technical (e.g., specifics of war plans, diplomatic negotiations), it could be withheld.
3. Before information can be withheld its disclosure must be likely to cause some specific, identifiable harm to the national security.
4. There should be a public interest balancing test where harm to nat'l security should be measured againsg importance of info to the public.
5. There should be institutions acting as a check and review on decisions to withhold.

Limits on borders...

Limits on the right to communicate freely: There is good evidence that the US government is building a backdoor into most of the communication pipes, for the reason of nat'l security. It has legitimate concerns about the use of the internet to plan terrorist attacks. But we face the question of whether connectivity will be used to empower individuals or whether it will be used to empower the state against individuals. This again raises the question of national borders. In the US we have developed legal principles protecting the privacy of individuals in the US vis a vis the internet. There is not int'l legal regime limiting US government surveillance of foreigners.

I want to answer Professor Yu's question yesterday on what I would like to see from academia as an activist. It would be helpful to have more work done on how we deal with access to knowledge and legit national security concerns.

Katitza Rodriguez Pereda, CPSR-Peru

(missed)

Crossroads between personal data protection and copyright law

(missed)

Conflict b/t privacy and copyright holders straegies to enforce copyright law

a) The collection and process of personal data by TPM's w/o the informed consent of the user or consumer.

• European Data Protection Principles, a kind of informal standard adopted by some Latin American Countries

• Habeas Data Remedies

b) The extent of investigative powers granted or used by copyright holders in order to prosecute those suspected of copyright infringements are too broad and illegitimate.

• The Whois Database, a public database that compiles contact information of domain name holders

• Copyright holders need the support of ISPs to collect more personal data.

• Investigative Powers in the hands of the judicial authority, not in the hands of the copyright holder: Processing of personal data through legal means.

International Privacy Framework

Latin American countries used to follow the European model, but recently we've adopted the APEC Privacy Framework.

Piracy of personal data

Onno W. Purbo, Indonesia

Title: "Unlegal Access to Knowledge"

I am subversive and underground.

Limits to A2K in Indonesia: English is not Indonesian language. Infrastructure is costly. People are poor. Highly regulated and corrupt environment.

It would be nice ... to see a knowledge based Indonesian society.

The recipe to win a war: power, money, mass.

Two barriers to knowledge access (diagram)

Self-financed infrastructure: build people's infrastructure (wifi, VoIP, SIP Based); share access (neighborhood network, school network); our dream (connect all 200,000+ schools, connect all 38m Indonesian students).

Local knowledge is lacking We need to go the traditional way: publish in magazines, books, workshops.

Self-financing the infrastructure: create demand NOT create supply, generate knowledge in local language, share the knowledge ...

We need to capacity build locally. Foret about technology transfer.

(Awesome photos of workshops on how to build your own wifi antenna)

International recognition creates a lot of pressure on the Indonesian government and the rebel forces.

In Jan 2005, 2.4GHz liberated.

Next missions... liberate many other frequencies, connect everyone.

MASSIVE APPLAUSE!!!

Q & A

?: To Kate Martin, are you aware that the US government is supporting repressive government.

Martin: Yes, this is a longstanding problem, going back to before Sept. 11.

?: Julie, did you share some of my concerns about Bill Drake's talk about int'l organizations? For example, the rise of technocracy or a technocratic mindset in terms of knowledge structures which reinforce limits to knowledge. If you share those concerns, do you have thoughts on how we might avoid those problems?

Cohen: It's a really difficult problem. On the measuring A2K panel there was discussion of the evils of NGO technocracy vs. local control and corruption. It strikes me that the solution is not any one thing, but that you have a variety of processes at any given time that are disruptive. That's not concrete. It's good to disrupt the formal structures, like Onno is doing.

?: Can anyone comment on the search engines and China? And I wanted to point out to the rep from UNCTAD, you can't put all developing countries in the same basket. e.g., India has improved capacity to negotiate international agreements. It's not so much technical knowledge as negotiation ability and ability to put these issues in the media so the public in the countries misusing the process are aware of the potential security issues brought about by these processes. Onno, don't we have to get governments to buy into liberating the spectrum?

Frohler: I accept there is no one-sized fits all solutions. India, Korea, Brazil, China, do have a vast capacity to negotiate and understand. But most developing countries do not.

Cohen: One thing that emerged from Onno's presentation was the limit on the conventional framework for developing and financing projects. The Google question is about the same thing. As an MNC it's subject to some of the same processes. So it may not be realistic to expect Google to behave differently, but it would be nice to have other portocols and ways of finding useful knowledge. That goes to having a say and agency in designing tools.

Onno: Why did Indonesia finally see the light? One problem is that when you liberate a frequency you need to reprogram equipment to move to other frequencies. 2.4 was used by the telcos. We stole the frequencies, you acknowledged our work, and that put pressure on the Indonesian government.

?: Julie, is your concern about access or the construction of knowledge?

Cohen: I don't think we're saying different things. If the concern is avoiding the closing off of options to people, then we may need taboos on the degree of precision with which that is permitted to be measured. That doesn't bother me, but probably bothers some of you.

?: This was a good panel, and maybe we should have started with it. [missed]

Martin: I agree, but we have to recognize there are conflicting interests. Interests of Islamic jihadists are in fact in conflict with interests of others. To talk about human flourishing doesn't answer this question, because there are two ideas about what that means.

Pereda: It's not just nat'l security, it's also privacy.

Resources