Panelists:
Rob Atkinson, President, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Katherine Albrecht, Founder & Director, CASPIAN

Organizer:
Linda Ackerma, Privacy Activism

As head of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, Director Parnes leads the agency’s work to protect consumers from spam, phishing, and spyware. Director Parnes will discuss the Commission’s agenda on these and other issues.

Two storms of the century made landfall on the continental United States within a 24 day period: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The devastation following these hurricanes was overwhelming in scope. Post disaster evacuees and residents are struggling with means to get access to information, information privacy, and how to engage the political process. This plenary session will focus on the establishment of cyber communities of gulf coast residents, efforts to reconnect displaced voters to the political process, and what have we learned that may assist in the post event phase of future catastrophic events to ensure continuity, privacy, and democracy of communities. The application of technology in establishing cyber communities for those displaced by the storm is already underway. There are also plans underway to facilitate civic participation. Post Katrina an emergency e-health information database was established to provide assistance to those who were in need of specialized health care, and prescription medication. Additional databases were used to connect evacuees with relatives and assistance, however these systems also raised privacy and safety issues for many citizens, including victims of domestic violence. This panel will focus on lessons learned and technology, freedom, and privacy implications for future disasters.

Panelists:
Lillie Coney, Associate Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center
Cindy Southworth, Safety Net: the National Safe & Strategic Technology Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence
Deborah Peel, Chair and Founder of Patient Privacy Rights
Vincent Sylvain, President, Policamp and a New Orleans resident and editor of a newsletter connecting displaced residents of the city
Hilary 0. Shelton, Director, NAACP’s Washington Bureau

Organizers:
Lillie Coney, EPIC's Project: National Committee for Voting Integrity
Cindy Southworth, Safety Net: The National Safe & Strategic Technology Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence(NNEDV)

Blogs make it possible for individuals to reach a greater audience than perhaps any other medium. While a pseudonym offers a person the protection to publish thoughts he otherwise wouldn't, the consequences of blogging through an alter ego can be devastating when his true identity is revealed. Panel participants will discuss the impact pseudonymous blogging has on one's life, the benefits and drawbacks of using a second persona to communicate with the world, and whether it is truly possible to blog anonymously.

Panelists:
David Lat, co-editor of wonkette.com and author of underneaththeirrobes.blogs.com
Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law, & Technology
Juan Non-Volokh, pseudonymous contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy (http://volokh.com)
Kurt Opsahl, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Organizer:
Marcia Hofmann, EPIC

By facilitating blogging and online discourse, the Internet has recreated the Town Commons of 200 years ago, where citizens could exchange political views and debate the day's issues. In the 2004 election cycle, bloggers injected a dramatic new element into the political debate. Over the first few months of 2006, however, a debate raged on Capitol Hill, at the Federal Election Commission, and in blogs across the political spectrum, about whether and how campaign finance laws should be applied to the Internet. In March, the FEC issued new rules to apply to political speech online, but it sought to exclude bloggers and individual speakers from those rules.

This plenary session will hear from some of the leading advocates in the debate, who will give their perspectives on what the FEC got right or wrong, what Congress should have done, and what impact the new rules will have on the 2006 election and beyond. The panel also includes a leading conservative blogger and a respected grassroot political consultant, who will present their perspective on how they see online political speech evolving.

Panelists:
John Morris, The Center for Democracy & Technology
Bob Bauer, Partner, Perkins Coie, LLP
Don Simon, Partner, Sonsosky, Chambers, Sachse, Endreson & Perry, LLP
Mike Krempasky, Co-founder, The Online Coalition
Jonah Seiger, Consultant

Moderator:
John Morris, CDT

At the heart of the net neutrality debate is whether the Internet, the Web, and associated technologies will continue to thrive as an open platform for innovation and free expression and what policies, if any, are necessary to ensure that they will. Our panelists will focus their discussion on several key scenarios of Internet usage in order to understand the most critical features that allow the Internet to remain open today and how the evolution of networks, technologies, and business models will impact the openness of the Internet tomorrow. The panelists will use scenarios involving web-based commerce, cached news delivery, voice over IP, and fully decentralized multimedia services to frame the discussion. The format for the plenary session is described below, but due to the ever-changing nature and uncertain future of the net neutrality issue, the precise plan for the program may be amended over the coming months.

Organizer:
Leslie Harris, CDT

There are many social networks on the scene today – Friendster, MySpace, FaceBook, Tribe; and all of them wish to be “for profit” entities. Monitoring and tracking of members can lead to more advertising dollars, but this level of tracking threatens privacy as well as free speech rights. Is there a place for an open source, more privacy-protective, free speech friendly social network? We think there is, and have some issues and proposals to share.

Social networks provide spaces on the Internet where people can have discussions about every topic under the sun, can share photos with their friends, and create communities of like-minded people. They can be adapted to include other information sharing applications such as blogging, shared bookmarks (like del.icio.us), and photo management and photo sharing applications (like Flickr). Unfortunately, the most popular social networks are “owned” by corporate entities, or supported in part by corporate interests, which often translates into less freedom of expression for the social network members.

Panelists:
Lenny Foner, MIT
Sonya Hipper, Tajima Creative
Deborah Pierce, PrivacyActivism
Alessandro Acquisti, John Heinz III School of Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon

 

Stewart Baker is a well-known expert on technology issues related to computing and security. Now at DHS, Stewart is in a unique position to provide insight into the Department.