Jonathan Zittrain
Encyclopedia
Jonathan L. Zittrain is a US
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

 and the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science , a school within Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences , serves as the connector and integrator of Harvard's teaching and research efforts in engineering, applied sciences, and technology.Engineering and applied sciences at Harvard...

, and a faculty co-director of Harvard's
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the Center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of...

. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute
Oxford Internet Institute
The Oxford Internet Institute is a multi-disciplinary institute based at the University of Oxford, England, and housed in buildings owned by Balliol College, Oxford. It is devoted to the study of the societal implications of the Internet, with the aim of shaping research, policy and practice in...

 of the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

 and visiting professor at the New York University School of Law
New York University School of Law
The New York University School of Law is the law school of New York University. Established in 1835, the school offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in law, and is located in Greenwich Village, in the New York City borough of Manhattan....

 and Stanford Law School
Stanford Law School
Stanford Law School is a graduate school at Stanford University located in the area known as the Silicon Valley, near Palo Alto, California in the United States. The Law School was established in 1893 when former President Benjamin Harrison joined the faculty as the first professor of law...

. He is the author, most recently, of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
The Future Of The Internet
The Future Of The Internet is a book published in 2008 by Yale University Press and authored by Jonathan Zittrain. The book discusses several legal issues regarding the Internet.The book is made available under a Creative Commons license.-External links:...

; and co-editor of the books Access Denied (MIT Press, 2008) and Access Controlled (MIT Press, 2010).

Zittrain works in several intersections of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 with law and policy including intellectual property
Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

, censorship
Internet censorship
Internet censorship is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations either at the behest of government or on their own initiative...

 and filtering for content control
Content-control software
Content-control software, also known as censorware or web filtering software, is a term for software designed and optimized for controlling what content is permitted to a reader, especially when it is used to restrict material delivered over the Web...

 and computer security
Computer security
Computer security is a branch of computer technology known as information security as applied to computers and networks. The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to...

. He founded a project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society that develops classroom tools.

Family and education

Zittrain is the son of two attorneys, Ruth A. Zittrain and Lester E. Zittrain, who was the personal attorney of professional football
American football
American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 star Joe Greene
Joe Greene (American football)
Charles Edward Greene, known as “Mean Joe” Greene, is a former all-pro American football defensive tackle who played for the Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL. Throughout the early 1970s he was the one of most dominant defensive players in the National Football League...

. In 2004 with Jennifer K. Harrison, Zittrain published The Torts Game: Defending Mean Joe Greene, a book the authors dedicated to their parents. His brother Jeff is an established Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

 musician. His sister, Laurie Zittrain Eisenberg, is a scholar of the Arab/Israeli conflict and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 in Pittsburgh. He is unmarried and has no children.

Zittrain, who grew up in the suburb of Churchill outside of Pittsburgh, graduated in 1987 from Shady Side Academy
Shady Side Academy
Shady Side Academy is a private, secular coeducational PK-12 preparatory school located on three campuses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, established in 1883.- Campuses :Shady Side Academy has three campuses in Pittsburgh....

, a private school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...

. He holds a bachelor's summa cum laude in cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

 and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

 from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, 1991, where he was a member of the Yale Political Union
Yale Political Union
The Yale Political Union , a debate society now the largest student organization at Yale University, was founded in 1934 by Professor Alfred Whitney Griswold , to enliven the university's political culture of the time. It was modelled on the Cambridge Union Society and Oxford Union...

 and Davenport College
Davenport College
Davenport College is one of the twelve residential colleges of Yale University. Its buildings were completed in 1933 mainly in the Georgian style but with a gothic façade. The college was named for John Davenport, who founded Yale's home city of New Haven, Connecticut...

, a J.D.
Juris Doctor
Juris Doctor is a professional doctorate and first professional graduate degree in law.The degree was first awarded by Harvard University in the United States in the late 19th century and was created as a modern version of the old European doctor of law degree Juris Doctor (see etymology and...

 magna cum laude from Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

, 1995, where he was the winner of the Williston Negotiation Competition
Williston Negotiation Competition
The Williston Negotiation Competition is an annual negotiation and contract drafting competition at Harvard Law School.Students work in paired teams of two, with each team representing a side in a complex business deal...

, and a master of public administration
Master of Public Administration
The Master of Public Administration is a professional post-graduate degree in Public Administration. The MPA program prepares individuals to serve as managers in the executive arm of local, state/provincial, and federal/national government, and increasingly in nongovernmental organization and...

 from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government
John F. Kennedy School of Government
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a public policy and public administration school, and one of Harvard's graduate and professional schools...

, 1995.

He was law clerk for Stephen F. Williams
Stephen F. Williams
Stephen Fain Williams is a Senior Circuit Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was appointed to the court in June 1986 by President Ronald Reagan, and took senior status in September 2001....

 of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit known informally as the D.C. Circuit, is the federal appellate court for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Appeals from the D.C. Circuit, as with all the U.S. Courts of Appeals, are heard on a...

 and served with the U.S. Department of Justice
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...

 and in 1991 with the Department of State
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...

 and at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is dedicated to overseeing the United States Intelligence Community—the agencies and bureaus of the federal government of the United States who provide information and analysis for leaders of the executive and legislative branches. The...

 in 1992 and 1994. He was a longtime forum administrator, or sysop
SysOp
A sysop is an administrator of a multi-user computer system, such as a bulletin board system or an online service virtual community. It may also be used to refer to administrators of other Internet-based network services....

, for the online service CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...

, serving for many years as the chief administrator for its private forum for all of its forum administrators.

Later career

Zittrain joined the staff of the University of Oxford in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

 in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 as of September 2005. He held the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation, was a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute
Oxford Internet Institute
The Oxford Internet Institute is a multi-disciplinary institute based at the University of Oxford, England, and housed in buildings owned by Balliol College, Oxford. It is devoted to the study of the societal implications of the Internet, with the aim of shaping research, policy and practice in...

, and was a Professorial Fellow of Keble College
Keble College, Oxford
Keble College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its main buildings are on Parks Road, opposite the University Museum and the University Parks. The college is bordered to the north by Keble Road, to the south by Museum Road, and to the west by Blackhall...

, which has developed a particular interest in computer science and public policy. In the U.S., he was also the Jack N. & Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

 and director and founder with Charles Nesson
Charles Nesson
Charles Rothwell Nesson is the William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society. He is author of Evidence, with Murray and Green, and has participated in several cases before the...

 of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the Center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of...

. Zittrain was a visiting professor at the Stanford Law School
Stanford Law School
Stanford Law School is a graduate school at Stanford University located in the area known as the Silicon Valley, near Palo Alto, California in the United States. The Law School was established in 1893 when former President Benjamin Harrison joined the faculty as the first professor of law...

 in 2007 and was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law
New York University School of Law
The New York University School of Law is the law school of New York University. Established in 1835, the school offers the J.D., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees in law, and is located in Greenwich Village, in the New York City borough of Manhattan....

 in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 for the spring 2008 semester.

Zittrain taught or taught with others Harvard's courses on Cyberlaw: Internet Points of Control, The Exploding Internet: Building A Global Commons in Cyberspace, Torts, Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control, The Law of Cyberspace, The Law of Cyberspace: Social Protocols, Privacy Policy, The Microsoft Case and The High Tech Entrepreneur. He searched for novel ways to use technology unobtrusively in the classroom, founded H2O at Harvard and used the system to teach his classes. Students are polled, assigned opposing arguments and use H2O to develop their writing skills. Students enrolled in his The Internet and Society class could participate both orally and via the Internet. A teaching fellow seated in the classroom supplied him with the comments received from students in real time via email as well as through "chat" or "instant message" from students participating in the class while logged into Second Life. (www.secondlife.com)

He has been critical of the process used by ICANN
ICANN
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly...

, the International Telecommunication Union
International Telecommunication Union
The International Telecommunication Union is the specialized agency of the United Nations which is responsible for information and communication technologies...

 and the World Summit on the Information Society
World Summit on the Information Society
The World Summit on the Information Society was a pair of United Nations-sponsored conferences about information, communication and, in broad terms, the information society that took place in 2003 in Geneva and in 2005 in Tunis...

. Although he describes their approach as in some ways simple and naïve, Zittrain sees more hope in the open Internet Engineering Task Force
Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...

 model and in the ethical code and assumption of good faith that govern Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

. He wrote in 2008, "Wikipedia—with the cooperation of many Wikipedians—has developed a system of self-governance that has many indicia of the rule of law without heavy reliance on outside authority or boundary."

In 2009 Zittrain was elected to the Internet Society
Internet Society
The Internet Society or ISOC is an international, nonprofit organization founded during 1992 to provide direction in Internet related standards, education, and policy...

's Board of Trustees for a 4 year term. In February 2011 he joined the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Internet filtering

The OpenNet Initiative
OpenNet Initiative
The OpenNet Initiative is a joint project whose goal is to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. The project employs a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run...

 (ONI) monitors Internet censorship
Internet censorship
Internet censorship is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations either at the behest of government or on their own initiative...

 by national governments. Between 2001 and 2003 at Harvard's Berkman Center, Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman studied Internet filtering. In their tests during 2002, when Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 had indexed almost 2.5 billion pages, they found sites blocked, from approximately 100 in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 and Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 to 2,000 in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...

 and 20,000 in the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

. The authors published a statement of issues and a call for data that year.

Building on the work done at the Berkman Center, ONI published special reports, case studies and bulletins beginning in 2004, and as of 2008, offered research on filtering in 40 countries as well as by region of the world. Today at ONI, with Ronald Deibert
Ronald Deibert
Ronald J. Deibert is professor of Political Science, and Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary research and development "hothouse" working at the...

 of the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

, John Palfrey
John Palfrey
John Palfrey is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, vice dean for library and information resources, and the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He led a reorganization of the Harvard Law School Library in 2009...

 who was previously the executive director of the Berkman Center (now a professor of law and vice-dean at Harvard Law School), and Rafal Rohozinski of the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, Zittrain is a principal investigator.

In 2001, Zittrain cofounded Chilling Effects with his students and former students, including Wendy Seltzer
Wendy Seltzer
Wendy Seltzer is an American lawyer and currently a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She was previously with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy...

, who had conceived of the site that monitors cease and desist letters. When its search results have been altered at the request of a national government, Google directs its users to Chilling Effects.

Copyright

On October 9, 2002, Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...

 argued a landmark case known as Eldred v. Ashcroft
Eldred v. Ashcroft
Eldred v. Ashcroft, was a court case in the United States challenging the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act...

before the United States Supreme Court. As co-counsel for the plaintiff, they argued the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) was unconstitutional. The court ruled 7–2 on January 15, 2003 to uphold the CTEA which extended existing copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...

s 20 years, from the life of the author plus 50 years to plus 70 years. In the words of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Ginsburg was appointed by President Bill Clinton and took the oath of office on August 10, 1993. She is the second female justice and the first Jewish female justice.She is generally viewed as belonging to...

, the petitioners did "not challenge the CTEA's 'life-plus-70-years' time span itself. They maintain that Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....

 went awry not with respect to newly created works, but in enlarging the term for published works with existing copyrights." The court found that the act did "not exceed Congress' power" and that "CTEA's extension of existing and future copyrights does not violate the First Amendment
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...

". Zittrain said in 2003 he was concerned that Congress will hear the same arguments after the 20-year extension passes, and that the Internet is causing a "cultural reassessment of the meaning of copyright".

Security

After Zittrain joined the staff at Oxford, Zittrain and John Palfrey
John Palfrey
John Palfrey is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, vice dean for library and information resources, and the Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He led a reorganization of the Harvard Law School Library in 2009...

 at the Berkman Center founded StopBadware.org in 2006 to function as a clearinghouse for what has become proliferation of malware
Malware
Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...

. Borrowing Wikipedia's "ethical code that encourages users to do the right thing rather than the required thing", the organization wished to assign the task of data collection—and not analysis—about malware to Internet users at large. When its scans find dangerous code, Google places StopBadware alerts in its search results and rescans later to determine whether a site had been cleaned.

One of StopBadware's goals is to "preempt" the stifling of the Internet. The founders think that centralized regulation could follow a serious Internet security breach, and that consumers might then choose to purchase closed, centrally managed solutions like tethered appliances that are modified by their vendor rather than owner, or might flee to services in walled gardens. In Zittrain's word, "generative" devices and platforms, including the Internet itself, offer an opening forward. In 2007, he said, "...we're moving to software-as-service, which can be yanked or transformed at any moment. The ability of your PC to run independent code is an important safety valve."

Reactions in the Boston Review
Boston Review
Boston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. The magazine covers, specifically, political debates, literature, and poetry...

accompanied the publication of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It in 2008. Support came from David D. Clark
David D. Clark
David Dana Clark is an American computer scientist. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1966. In 1968, he received his Master's and Engineer's degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on the I/O architecture of Multics under Jerry...

 and Susan P. Crawford
Susan P. Crawford
Susan P. Crawford was until December 2009 President Barack Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy...

. Criticism ranged from Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...

's finding no evidence of a flight to closed systems and his message that software developers need control and software patents must end, to a request for cost-benefit analysis to the belief that netizenship won't scale to the business world to faith that consumers will buy only open, non-proprietary systems.

Directed by Palfrey and Zittrain, StopBadware receives high-level guidance from its advisory board: Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf
Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf is an American computer scientist, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with American computer scientist Bob Kahn...

 of Google, Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space...

, George He of Lenovo, Greg Papadopoulos
Greg Papadopoulos
Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D. was Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Sun Microsystems from September 1994 until February 2010. He is the creator and lead proponent for Redshift, a theory on whether technology markets are over or under-served by Moore's Law.Papadopoulos achieved a...

 of Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 and Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology. The working group, which has included Ben Adida, Scott Bradner, Beau Brendler, Jerry Gregoire, Eric L. Howes and Nart Villeneuve at various times, frames the project's research agenda and methodology and is the body which helps to inform the public about StopBadware's work. StopBadware has been supported by AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

, Google, eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...

/PayPal
PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....

, Lenovo, Trend Micro
Trend Micro
Trend Micro Inc. is a computer security company. It is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and markets Trend Micro Internet Security, Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security, OfficeScan, and other related security products and services...

 and VeriSign
VeriSign
Verisign, Inc. is an American company based in Dulles, Virginia that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code...

 and has been advised by Consumer Reports WebWatch.

Stock markets and spam

Writing with Laura Freider of Purdue University
Purdue University
Purdue University, located in West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S., is the flagship university of the six-campus Purdue University system. Purdue was founded on May 6, 1869, as a land-grant university when the Indiana General Assembly, taking advantage of the Morrill Act, accepted a donation of land and...

, in 2008 Zittrain published Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity in the Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal to document the manipulation of stock prices via spam email
E-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...

. They found evidence that "stocks experience a significantly positive return on days prior to heavy touting via spam" and that "prolific spamming greatly affects the trading volume of a targeted stock". Apart from transaction costs, the spammer in some circumstances earned over 4% while the average investor who bought on the day of receipt of the spam would lose more than 5% if they sold two days later. Frieder said in 2006 that she knew of no other explanation for their results but that people do follow the stock tips in their spam email.

Recent publications

(online book)

External links

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