19: Mallory Knodel on bits and bytes and human rights

FOSS and Crafts

With computing technology becoming integrated with every aspect of our lives, many issues are simultaneously human rights issues and technical issues. Thus, how are organizations concerned with human rights and social justice engaging with technological authorship and policy-making? Mallory Knodel, presently Chief Technology Officer for the Center for Democracy and Technology, explains her work as a Public Interest Technologist. Mallory is also heavily engaged in a wide number of technical standards-making organizations, and explains not only how technical standards are of interest to human rights organizations, but how the origin in work to define human rights overlaps with the emergence of standards-making efforts.

Links:

• Center for Democracy and Technology

• The Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group (of which Mallory is co-chair)

• A whole bunch of mentioned standards-making organizations: W3C, IETF, IRTF, IEEE, ITU, ICANN, ISO

• Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880

• [http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/](Rebalancing How the Web is Built) by Manu Sporny

• The slew of Google-related stuff, both good and bad:

  • Google's attempt to control which browsers are permitted to use their services

  • Controvercy around Google's AMP technology

  • Google Is Testing End-to-End Encryption in Android Messages

  • 3d party tracking cookies

• Governmental battles over root DNS split

• Russia blocking TLS 1.3

• IETF RFC 8890: The Internet is for End Users