My personal nerdosphere of interest (that’s the Berkman Center/Harvard Law School quadrant of the cyberlaw sector of the whole sort of general technology mish-mash) has been lit up the last few days, following the Daily Beast’s publication of an essay on Harvard’s Berkman Center and Prof. Jonathan Zittrain. A lot of the commentary, from people I know and people I don’t, has condemn the article and its author, one Emily Brill. The article relates to conflicts of interest, so I should admit mine up front: I just graduated from HLS, made a lot of connections with the Berkman Center, and (although we’re not close) did enough work with JZ to regard him as a brilliant professor and a great human being. In spite of all this, I thought there were enough potentially valid points in the essay to warrant mention, and I thought I’d take a minute away from bar review to do so here.

Don’t get me wrong: surrounding the good stuff is a morass of points that are petty, dumb, or wrong. I have no reason to agree with Brill’s innuendo that Prof. Zittrain or anyone else at the Berkman Center is in any way corrupt — far from it. And, well, when you’re writing an article that’s going to upset a small but tightly knit community, you owe it to your own reputation to avoid all the common mistakes that are going to make that community use the phrase “hack job.” Let’s start with the silly stuff: even a little bit of searching would reveal plenty of online record of Zittrain’s sudden, severe illness earlier this year. (I’d link it here, had he not publicly asked for a little privacy after news of his illness hit the web and offers of help poured in). So yes, his excuse for not returning Brill’s emails was a real one.

Looking at the bigger picture, Brill frames her story around a seminar offered by HLS in Palo Alto over this most recent winter term, which Zittrain led and she attended. Now, I’m only capable of an ethical appeal, but look: I don’t know how you spend three weeks in a class led by Zittrain without coming away thinking, at a minimum, that he believes in what he’s saying. If nothing else, I don’t know how you spend three weeks in class with JZ, see the man’s relationship with his iPhone, and come away thinking that he was a single-minded opponent of Steve Jobs… Just so we’re clear: I hold the people I’ve met at the Berkman Center in the highest regard, and I can’t honestly believe anyone involved with it is ready to auction his or her research conclusions to the highest bidder.

But apart from the salacious accusations, I was struck by one thing in the article.

No one has alleged that anyone at Harvard Law School has formulated opinions because he or she was paid to. But Berkman and Zittrain, due in no small part to the force of Harvard’s branding, have become increasingly important players in Internet policy and media circles. The appearance of conflicts matter; even if such conflicts are not the stuff of life and death, as they might be in medical research, they do impact legislation, stock prices, and consumer choices.

The Fortune article I linked above may have been right to classify this paragraph as an editorially mandated walk-back. But it makes a real point: the appearance of conflicts does matter. When I say “blah blah only capable of an ethical appeal,” you’re right to dismiss it as bullshit, because who the hell am I? But when the Berkman Center speaks, well, it’s somebody. To be sure, one of the things that makes Berkman projects so cool is that they don’t simply ask you to take their word that the Internet is like this or like that, they actually go out and show you. But as our society is learning, not all research is created equal. All the talent, methodology, and press releases in the world won’t save research that doesn’t look credible. Prof. Larry Lessig, another HLS affiliate quoted in the article, reminded us of money’s effect on trust in institutions only last fall.^[1]

Brill cites the Center’s “relaxed approach” to ethical guidelines. Though I was never in a position to discover it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that charge were accurate — the Berkman Center has a relaxed approach toward a lot of things, and that’s part of what makes it such a great organization. But as articles like this get written and questions like Brill’s get asked, that approach might inhibit some of the Center’s work, and actually work a net loss on its institutional capital. I hope it doesn’t, and I don’t think it should, but I think it’s a useful prospect to consider more directly.

Actually, that’s another thing that bothered me about the article’s reception. To pick on that Fortune article again, its author introduces Brill herself into the debate in his third paragraph, and uses her identity — well-connected socialite, recently passed over for a Berkman job herself — as a frame for his response. Now, I’m happy to admit that “reporting on reporters” is part of the blogger’s stock in trade. But another part of it is surely collecting the facts, right? And no matter who collects them, they’re worth considering, right?

I didn’t take last winter’s Difficult Problems in Cyberspace course with JZ, but I took a version of it earlier in 2009. Had I taken the second version in sunny California, I would have been very interested to learn that the funding came from Microsoft, but I didn’t learn that until reading Brill’s piece. It sounds like the students in the class didn’t, either. That’s investigative journalism. That’s the kind of fact-finding that, if my Difficult Problems class is to believed, is dying out and ought to be encouraged — even if the facts it turns up are a little uncomfortable.

Update: I just received an email from Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School and the person responsible for organizing and funding the Difficult Problems class. He disputes Ms. Brill’s characterization of the Microsoft money, and I agreed to post his comment to the article:

To say that Professor Zittrain’s class at Stanford was funded by a “special grant” from Microsoft is highly misleading. The class was an experimental and unusual arrangement that involved bringing Harvard students to Stanford for a special three-week joint class. It was arranged long before the grant from Microsoft was even in the works. The grant, in turn, was secured with room for discretionary uses and with no mention of the Zittrain class. We subsequently decided that we could use some of these resources to fund Zittrain’s class, which was within its general terms. But while we did, as a courtesy, let Microsoft know later that we had used a portion of their grant for this purpose, we did not seek their permission. Nor did we inform either Professor Zittrain or the class of the source of funding, as it was irrelevant under the circumstances. Dinners for the three weeks were catered because to fit the course into this short time frame required meeting for many hours each evening, including through the dinner hours.

To my mind, Dean Kramer’s explanation is perfectly credible, and sounds a lot more like how I would imagine a one-off law school class would be funded. It may well be that the central “revelation” in the Daily Beast story is bunk, and there’s no story here at all. So, let me temper my already limited defense of Brill’s reporting — it’s hardly investigative journalism to just make stuff up. Still, maybe it’s an opportunity to remember how the appearance of bias problem works. Even when such an appearance is unfounded, it can interfere with an organization’s capacity to operate in the real world.

Here Come The Warm Jets is a nicely varied, mix of 10 tracks that are very well written songs by this clearly talented artist. With many of the songs displaying a lot of the kind emotion that makes for a really great listen. Clearly drawing from what I can only imagine are him own personal experiences. At different points touching on the most real emotions like love, and the pain of failed relationships can certainly be heard. …

My Bonus Pick, and the one that got Sore [...as in "Stuck On REpeat"] is track 1 – Needles In The Camel’s Eye. It’s a great track! …

Brian Eno originally released Here Come The Warm Jets on June 1, 2004 on the Astralwerks label.

Imagine one of your favorite albums being reviewed by the kind of person who sets up spam domains for Adsense clicks. Now imagine it being reviewed by a PHP script that guy wrote.

(Of course, for those playing along at home, Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets was originally released in 1973 on Island, and marked the high water point (well, along with Before and After Science) of Eno’s post-Roxy Music, pre-ambient career. Highly recommended.

It looks like the real thing, I guess (though Barack would never stoop to Times New Roman). Actually, it looks a little too close — the site’s images are ripped from the campaign’s official page. It offers a realistic-looking form to sign you up for some email list. Sure, it’s a little unseemly that a candidate’s fundraiser would include Google AdSense. But the real weirdness starts when you click “donate.” Donatetoobama.org doesn’t make it very easy for users to donate. Eschewing Paypal and Google Checkout, let alone the Obama campaign’s official donation form, the site offers only an address in Bellingham, Washington, for mailing checks. “Please have your check made out to: Concerned Citizens For Obama,” it politely requests. So what’s the deal with Concerned Citizens for Obama?

It’s certainly not easy to tell from the group’s web presence, which appears to consist solely of www.donatetobarackobama.com (an alias of  donatetoobama.org). Interesting, though it’s not hard to imagine in this age of astroturf that such a group might comprise only one “concerned citizen.” At this point, hoping to learn more, I wondered what Concerned Citizen was running this site. A whois search shows that the domain name is registered to a private individual, with the same address given on the donation page. Punching the site into a reverse IP lookup engine, the same server hosting donatetoobama.org appears to also host donatetogiuliani.com, donatetotothompson.com, and hillaryclintonrevealed.net, among nonpolitical sites. Needless to say, the information “revealed” on that last site is not very favorable to Sen. Clinton.

Searching for the domain name on Google, I turned up a blog apparently belonging to the same person, hosted at hillarylied.blogspot.com. The post that turned up in the search results describes the blogger’s motivation for creating his various Obama sites:

The best way I can help this country is to try and help Obama win the Democratic party nomination. I’m starting to like this guy … say what you want about his policy stances, etc., I certainly don’t agree with much of his positions -

But that being said, at least he is honest, and is forthcoming about what he wants to do. Whatever the direction, clarity of purpose will go a long way right now. Our feds are so corrupt at this point in our history, that the simple honesty and intelligence of this man might be just what the Dr. ordered.

. . .

Check out the websites I am building for him. It’s just a start on a homepage, but within the month, it will be complete. Here are the URL’s they will appear on:

http://www.donatetoobama.org/ (current layout rough draft)
http://www.donatetobarackobama.com/ , & .org
http://www.hillaryclintonrevealed.net/ (current)
http://hillarylied.blogspot.com/ (current and growing)
http://www.hillarylied.org/ (coming soon)

So, if I understand correctly, he’s not a big fan of Obama’s political positions, but he likes the guy personally, enough to raise money for him. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with what he’s doing — it’s perfectly legitimate to support a candidate for any reason at all, even if you don’t like his political party, and some political donations are protected speech — but it still seems kind of strange. It’s possible that “Concerned Citizens for Obama” was a project that never got off the ground (the blog post is from March, 2007), and I’m willing to give the site’s owner the benefit of the doubt. Nevertheless, if you’re thinking about sending some money to Barack, I’d recommend sending it directly to his campaign by using his official site.