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Cyrus Nemati
Web Producer

Cyrus Nemati is the Web Producer at the Center for Democracy and Technology. From the Washington, D.C. office, he implements new technologies to enhance the CDT web site and infrastructure.

Prior to joining CDT, Nemati has worked in the non-profit world as both a writer and web developer. He received his BS in History from Suffolk University.

Cyrus Nemati is the Web Producer at the Center for Democracy and Technology. From the Washington, D.C. office, he implements new technologies to enhance the CDT web site and infrastructure.

Prior to joining CDT, Nemati has worked in the non-profit world as both a writer and web developer. He received his BS in History from Suffolk University.

Blog Post - A Farewell to Austin
3/18/2010 Consumer Privacy

First of all, welcome to our new readers!  We had a great time at SXSW introducing ourselves and CDT to a new audience that's as excited as we are about keeping the Internet the awesome place that it is. Take some time to look around and read up on all the issues that matter to you.

Adam Rosenberg and I absorbed ourselves in some enlightening panels and got a chance to hobnob with a few tech world titans. Here's a list of all of our SXSWi 2010 coverage:

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Blog Post - SXSW: Of Tech, Nerds, and New Media
3/15/2010 Free Expression

It's the last day of our SXSW jaunt, and I thought I'd share some of the interesting bits of information and innovative ideas I've been hearing here.

I'm a big open-source advocate. There are those who suggest that open-source software is far clunkier than its commercially developed counterparts, and that might be true, but there are distinct benefits to the tech community and the Internet as a whole to use open-source software. There's a lower barrier to entry in writing code to make open-source technology better, and but there's an even greater benefit in having code that can be deployed anywhere.

At a panel I attended on Friday entitled "Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free," which was meant to explore how companies can make a profit developing open-source software (and honestly didn't do a  spectacular job of it), I learned about an open-source Twitter-like microblogging API called StatusNet. While I didn't really care about how to sell a StatusNet hosting service, I explored some existing deployments of the API and found that it's being used overwhelmingly by Internet users in countries like China and Iran - places where governments traditionally clamp down on any speech they deem "subversive." 

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Blog Post - How the Internet Gave Women a Voice in Iran: A brief history
3/14/2010 Free Expression

I was very excited to attend the panel "2009 Iran Election: Women's Revolution? Twitter Revolution?"  Before I headed out to SXSW, I'd read a history of modern Iran (All the Shah's Men, by Stephen Kinzer), and I'm half-Iranian. I learned that Twitter was just another way Iranian citizens have worked to incite social change, and that Iranian women have been using the Internet to their advantage for nearly a decade. Panelist Dr. David Parry, an Assistant Professor Emerging Media at UT Dallas, underscored that history by stating that the so-called "Iranian Twitter Revolution" was a revolution for Twitter - not necessarily for Iran.

Another panelist, Mona Kasra, a new media artist and educator from UT Dallas, explained briefly how the voice of Iranian women has evolved because of the Internet. In 2001, an influential Iranian blogger named Hossein Derakhshan released a document explaining how to create a blog in Farsi (two years ago he was imprisoned by the Iranian government and remains behind bars today). The Iranian blogging world exploded, and women were eager to embrace the technology. Frank and honest diary blogs, which were not meant to be inflammatory - just simple thoughts on daily events - were at first frowned upon by men, who eventually learned to tolerate their existence.

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Blog Post - Expectations of Privacy
3/13/2010 Consumer Privacy

danah boyd (no, my shift key isn't broken), a Microsoft researcher and Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center, delivered the opening keynote at SXSW today. To no one's surprise, it was a thought provoking address.

boyd posited that privacy, contrary to some opinion, is NOT dead. It's simply more complicated than we realize. boyd suggested that there is a prevailing thought that privacy is a binary choice - that one chooses to give away all of their information, or chooses to be an online hermit. The truth of the matter is closer to real life interactions, where we have certain expectations about where the information we give to our peers will go.

Stating an opinion among a group of friends is not something that many people have a problem with. If that opinion is spread around, either through friends or by the amplification that is the hallmark of social aggregators, it can pierce the bubble of your small circle of friends, becoming fair game to any and all.

Privacy, boyd said, is really all about control. In real life, we share personally identifiable information as well as "personally embarrassing information," as boyd put it, with our friends, but we choose not to shout this information in front of every one of our social circles. "Wanting privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's about wanting control," she said. The public-by-default paradigm is not "the great democratizer" as social media companies presumed it would be - it's only served to violate users' privacy expectations.

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