Blown to Bits

Hal Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, and an IEEE Fellow. He has helped drive innovative educational technology initiatives such MIT OpenCourseWare, co-founded Creative Commons and Public Knowledge, and was founding director of the Free Software Foundation. Ken Ledeen, Chairman/CEO of Nevo Technologies, is a serial entrepreneur who has served on the boards of numerous technology companies. Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College and of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is author of Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future? and editor of Ideas that Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science. Wendy Seltzer is Counsel and Strategy Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based at MIT. She founded Lumen Database, the pioneering transparency report for online content removals.

Preface     xvii
Chapter 1  Digital Explosion
Why Is It Happening, and What Is at Stake?     1
The Explosion of Bits, and Everything Else     4
The Koans of Bits     7
Good and Ill, Promise and Peril     17
Endnotes     19
Chapter 2  Naked in the Sunlight
Privacy Lost, Privacy Abandoned     21
1984 Is Here, and We Like It     21
Location, Location, Location     27
Big Brother, Abroad and in the United States     32
The Internet of Things     42
Endnotes     48
Chapter 3  Who Owns Your Privacy?
The Commercialization of Personal Data     51
What Kind of Vegetable Are You?     51
Footprints and Fingerprints     57
Fair Information Practice Principles     64
Always On     70
Endnotes     71
Chapter 4  Gatekeepers
Who's in Charge Here?     75
Who Controls the Flow of Bits?     75
The Open Internet?     76
Connecting the Dots: Designed for Sharing and Survival     79
The Internet Has No Gatekeepers?     85
Links Gatekeepers: Getting Connected     86
Search Gatekeepers: If You Can't Find It, Does It Exist?     94
Social Gatekeepers: Known by the Company You Keep     104
Endnotes     112
Chapter 5  Secret Bits
How Codes Became Unbreakable     117
Going Dark     117
Historical Cryptography     122
Lessons for the Internet Age     131
Secrecy Changes Forever     135
Cryptography Unsettled     147
Endnotes     148
Chapter 6  Balance Toppled
Who Owns the Bits?     153
Stealing Music     153
Automated Crimes, Automated Justice     155
The Peer-to-Peer Upheaval     160
No Commercial Skipping     167
Authorized Use Only     168
Forbidden Technology     172
Copyright Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance     177
The Limits of Property     183
Endnotes     187
Chapter 7  You Can't Say That on the Internet
Guarding the Frontiers of Digital Expression     193
Child Sex Trafficking Goes Digital     193
Publisher or Distributor?     198
Protecting Good Samaritans—and a Few Bad Ones     205
Digital Protection, Digital Censorship, and Self-Censorship     215
What About Social Media?     219
Takedowns     221
Endnotes     222
Chapter 8  Bits in the Air
Old Metaphors, New Technologies, and Free Speech     227
Censoring the Candidate     227
How Broadcasting Became Regulated     228
The Path to Spectrum Deregulation     241
The Most Beautiful Inventor in the World     245
What Does the Future Hold for Radio?     255
Endnotes     261
Chapter 9  The Next Frontier
AI and the Bits World of the Future     265
Thrown Under a Jaywalking Bus     266
What's Intelligent About Artificial Intelligence?     267
Machine Learning: I'll Figure It Out     268
Algorithmic Decisions: I Thought Only People Could Do That     273
What's Next     277
Bits Lighting Up the World     282
A Few Bits in Conclusion     287
Endnotes     288
Index     293