Today marks the 20^th anniversary of the massacre of students and other anti-authoritarian protests in Tiananmen square.

If you want background info, including causes and the wider political context, check Wikipedia.

You can also see stirring videos on Youtube.

There are incredible photos on Flickr.

And of course Twitter has a wealth of real-time information and thinking about the anniversary.  Just search using the hash tag #Tiananmen.

But for those 1.5 billion people trapped behind the Great Firewall of China, absolutely none of those links are accessible.  To mark the event that the government assures never happened, the Chinese government has blocked most social networking sites.

More>

FISA’s been a major topic since the 90s at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, and this year’s no exception. For the first time ever, we’ll be streaming video, and so the great content will be available whether or not you’re making the trek to Washington DC … and the Twitter backchannel will give a way to participate in the discussion as well.

Here’s a brief summary of some of the sessions that are likely to be of interest to Get FISA Right members — and anybody else interested in domestic surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and a panoptic society.

– me, on the Get FISA Right blog

The rest of the post goes into more detail on Ari Melber’s Monday keynote on Net movements in the Obama era at the Twittering in the Trenches workshop, the back-to-back plenary sessions on Tuesday on Computers, Freedom and the Obama Administration and The Future of Security vs. Privacy, Wednesday night’s birds-of-a-feather (BoF) session on New strategies for fighting FISA and the PATRIOT Act, and NSA whistleblower Thomas Tamm’s participation in the closing plenary Panopticon: Internalizing the Gaze.

At last year’s CFP, Susan Crawford moderated the opening session, and McCain surrogate Chuck Fish’s description of telecom immunity as “selling indulgences” led to coverage in the Washington Post, New York Times, and National Review Online after Ryan Singel’s Wired story.  This year, Susan’s once again on the opening session (now as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy), and Ryan’s moderating the Future of Security vs. Privacy debate.  Will lightning strike twice?  Stay tuned!

jon

The Computers Freedom & Privacy conference is consistently one of the most interesting and forward-looking privacy conferences. This year, it’s at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. June 1-4.

I helped organize it this time, though by no means does the event skew libertarian.  What it does is bring together people of all ideologies to discuss common concerns about the present and future state of privacy.

I’ll be speaking on a panel called “The Future of Security vs. Privacy” on Tuesday, June 2nd.   Here’s the program page. And here’s the registration page if any of this whets your appetite.