The Freedom of Expression Berkterns: A Polyvalent Power Team

The first time I heard about Berkman, I was in eastern Turkey, teaching English to civil aviation university students and trying my best to immerse myself in Turkish culture and language. When the Turkish Prime Minister blocked YouTube, I didn't know what to think or where to turn. I began to read Ars Technica, Global Voices, Slate's Future Tense, Hacker News as well as the Twitter feed run by Professor Zeynep Tufekci, who I later learned was a faculty associate at the Berkman Center. Until my trek to Turkey, I had always perceived of freedom of expression as a concept that was rooted in the offline world; I'd focused specifically on translators and the legal, ethical, and political problems they encounter in the Middle East and in conflict zones. Reading the Turkish Penal Code was my pastime.

But when Erdoğan made part of the Internet inaccessible, I realized that there was a world of Internet law, policy, and jurisprudence that lived far outside the confines of languages I understood. And thus, I gradually became interested in how netizens traverse language barriers and how individuals engaged in tech policy research keep track of what's happening each day online and in the courts of over eighty countries. How do Pashto cultural norms permeate the Twittersphere in Afghanistan? What impact will the digitization of public and university libraries have upon my generation? What are memes, really and what do they say about the cultures and communities that produce them? In what ways can researchers engage with Twitter ethically, if they are collecting the words and thoughts of individuals who might not have a clue that their Tweets are being collated and analyzed? These are some of the questions I had when I applied to the Berkman Center's summer internship program to work on their Freedom of Expression team.

The beauty of Berkman wasn't that I got all of my questions answered (I didn't!) but rather that I was permitted to spend an entire summer working alongside tremendously curious people who were also trying to make sense of the Internet and law. The atmosphere is bibliophilic, quirky, and interdisciplinary, and you can't escape the energy bouncing off everyone in the Berkman community. Each Berktern brought questions to the table (many of which I didn't even know needed to be asked), and the dialogue, the questions don't stop at the end of the summer. Even months after the internship, I'm developing projects that, to a great extent, grew out of conversations had with other Berkterns over lunch, over late-night walks around Cambridge, and in the halls of Harvard Law School.

When I interned at the Center last summer, I began to see that almost every Berktern had taken a different path to get to the little yellow house on Everett Street. So, this month I decided to track down a few of them and ask about their experiences. What follows are brief Q&As with four former Freedom of Expression Berkterns: Kendra Albert (2011), Priya Kumar (2013), Mayukh Sen (2014), and Simon Columbus (2011).

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Kendra Albert, a Harvard Law School JD candidate, spoke to me about the beauty of the Berktern community and the ways in which Berkman altered their trajectory.

Muira McCammon: What led you to apply for the FOE internship?

Kendra Albert: I went to Carnegie Mellon for undergrad. Many of my friends were computer science majors, and I got steeped in all of this technological stuff. Even though I didn't have a formal background in technology specifically, I'd done a lot of science and technology studies. The way I wrote my application was like "look, I have done a wide range of things that have nothing to do with each other, and I'm very good at them. So if you hire me, I will do things that I've never done for you and it will go well." Shockingly, this was a good application strategy (or at least they liked me)! I think it's the weirdest cover letter I've ever written in my entire life.

MM: What was the best part of your summer at Berkman?

KA: I think the real highlight was how awesome the people were, and how people I knew from the Berkman internship pop up in the most amazing places in my life now. I'll look at the staff of an organization doing tech policy, and I'll see that there's someone I interned with! It's really cool. I think it speaks to the variety of folks who are brought into the community and how awesome the people who congregate at Berkman over the summer are. The people are the best part.

MM: I think part of the beauty of being a FOE Berktern is that each summer, there are different projects on the proverbial table. What made you tick that summer, and what did you work on?

KA: I was hired as a Freedom of Expression intern. I was doing a bunch of Freedom of Expression work. I was super interested in the Sony hacks, which were a big thing that summer. The