Pick Our Panels: OTI's SXSW Voting Guide

Each year, SXSW brings together innovative thinkers from across the globe to explore the latest in music, film and tech innovation. One of the highlights is their line up of SXSW Interactive workshops that delve into different subjects including interactive media, tech and policy. Each year, eager participants submit their session ideas to the SXSW “Panel Picker” where the public can vote on who they want to hear from and what issues are important to them. This year, OTI submitted three diverse panel ideas examining online hate speech, the decentralized web, and the software vulnerabilities market. Each panel is briefly explained below.  If you find them as interesting as we do, vote for them between August 8th and September 2nd!  

Take Back the Web … And Decentralize It

In April of 2015, a group of internet thinkers and tinkerers gathered at the Internet Archive in
San Francisco to discuss the state and the future of the internet. A combination of internet elders - such as Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf - and innovative newcomers came together because they were concerned that the internet had moved from a network in which many nodes interconnected and shared data with one another, to one in which a few large companies control the majority of the content available within walled gardens. During this panel, participants will be treated to a deep dive of the Decentralized Web Conference, hear about advances in the past year, and discover the future of decentralization on the internet. Whether it’s MerkleDAGs, blockchains, or federated protocols, there are exciting and innovative things happening. Come learn how you can be a part of the movement!

Speakers include:

Ross Schulman
Co-Director of Cybersecurity and Senior Counsel, New America’s Open Technology Institute

Brewster Kahle
Founder and Digital Librarian, Internet Archive

Paige Peterson
Communications, MaidSafe

Matthew Hodgsen,
Technical Co-Founder, Matrix.org

Bugs in the System: Mapping the Vulns Market

Apple’s legal fight with the FBI over iPhone encryption—and the FBI’s highly-publicized purchase of a hacking tool to defeat that encryption—put a new spotlight on the shadowy market for software vulnerabilities. Building on the work in OTI’s latest paper, “Bugs in The System”, this panel will explore who discovers, buys, and sells these “vulns” and the hacking tools that rely on them, and will answer questions like “When should the government disclose the vulns it buys or discovers, and how can software companies convince bug-hunters to disclose the vulns so they can be fixed, rather than selling them to criminals or governments?” Experts with experience ranging from Silicon Valley to the White House to the hacker community will debate and discuss the latest developments around these controversial questions.

Speakers include:

Kevin Bankston,
Director, New America’s Open Technology Institute

Katie Moussouris
Founder and CEO, Luta Security

Ari Schwartz
Managing Director of Cybersecurity Services, Venable LLP

Heather West
Senior Policy Manager, Mozilla

Hate Speech and Fear-Mongering in the Digital Age

From the sexist and racist attacks on Ghostbuster star Leslie Jones to everyday people who are being harassed by anonymous trolls, it is clear that the internet has created siloed echo chambers that affirm and amplify hate speech and provide many platforms for vitriolic discourse. Yet the internet has, at the same time, provided solutions for affected communities to lift up their voices and organize against such forces. This panel will discuss both the challenges and benefits that the internet presents for perpetuating and mitigating hateful speech, as well as the policy solutions needed to ensure that it remains an open, accessible platform for everyone. It will examine how hate groups are using the internet to organize and recruit new members, and discuss powerful examples of successful campaigns or movements to push back against online hate.

Speakers include:

Sarah Morris
Director of Open Internet Policy, New America’s Open Technology Institute

Jessica Gonzalez
Executive Vice President and General Counsel, National Hispanic Media Coalition

Brandi Collins
Campaign Director: Media and Economic Justice, Color of Change