Last night, I attended the Yale-ISP/Harvard-Berkman Cyberscholars Group. John Palfrey, David Johnson, and Susan Crawford presented The Accountable Net. It's a paper they haven't yet published, but when it is, we'll blog it. However, the discussion was quite lively, giving the presenters suggestions about areas they might fill in regarding spam, informational privacy, and network security, using peer governance to try to control particular kinds of unwanted behavior. We discussed using social networks, individual's use of their outgoing email boxes, online communities such as blogs and other linked groups, among other definitions of acceptable groups for communications, both practically and theoretically, and whether or not these definitions could work to deter certain kinds of behavior, verses traditional kinds of control and law. People were skeptical, but also supportive, and the discussion seemed to further their work on the paper.

I suggested that when considering social networks, they consider that people have many different kinds of links to people they "know" and that they are very clunky, and may not give the sort of trust or endorsement that trusted online communications need to rely on, and that maybe other means might work better.

Eddan Katz, Derek Slater and James Grimmelman were there, and I met Nimrod Kozlovski (who said, so you're stationed in Berkeley... I said if the people of Berkeley only knew that....) and Shlomit Wagman, and later that night at a party, Paul Szynol, all of whom were Lawmeme writers. Also, Susan Crawford is very lively and a lot of fun. It was great to see people and hang out after. And of course, Yale Law School, actually all of Yale, is lovely, freshly dusted with snow, and then it snowed again in the middle of the night. Just beautiful.

(ps, I wrote this on Friday, but was unable to post it until Sunday, because my hotel's DSL seems to have some issue with publishing on MT, though most everything else works.)