After the public session, we went over to the press building and held a press conference.

Ethan Zuckerman begins. He says it’s very challenging to think of the impacts of the Net on terrorism and terrorism on the Net. Ethan says our group focused on the ways in which the Internet and its openness is a great way for democracies to combat terrorism. We had intense technical discussions, especially around anonymity. We feel that it’s impossible to eliminate anonymity and attempts to do so would eliminate the positive benefits of anonymity on the Net, e.g., allowing dissidents to speak. Our hope is that democracies can learn from the openness of the Net that has made the Net so resilient and so conducive of conversations in different cultures.

El Mundo asks how to define the role of bloggers as an alternative to the mainstream news.

Ethan: Readers are discovering that they need to become participants. There’s a synergy between bloggers and professional journalists.

Q: Shouldn’t we regulate Al Qaeda off the net?

John Perry Barlow: Who would regulate it and how? Al Qaeda spreading its views is part of the marketplace of ideas.

Joi Ito: This conference is about democracy. People sometimes forget that the press used to be a check on power, but now the press is owned by large media companies and is selling content. The press should look at blogs and the Internet to fill some of the gap. If you really believe in democracy and the freedom of expression. We need to be able to beat Al Qaeda in debate and expression. He tells of a friend who works with Hezbollah TV; Joi doesn’t want to receive email from her because that may put him on the terrorist watch list. That’s a chilling effect.

Barlow: Terrorism is motivated in part by a sense that no one is listening, that you’re out of the human conversation. And we have a tendency to objectify terrorists. When you can read what they’re saying and thinking, you have an opportunity to re-humanize them.

Q: We can all be journalists but we can also all be policemen. What is the role of individuals in the fight? Can they attack terrorist sites?

Rebecca MacKinnon: The war on terrorism is really a fight for hearts and minds. What’s most important is to fight bad speech with more speech.

Q: Professional journalists like us have problems with the lack of quality and rigor in citizen journalism.[At least that’s what I think he said. My Spanish isn’t that good.]

Barlow: If you say something that isn’t true on the Net, there are many people who can correct it. It’s a conversation, not a broadcast medium

Dan Gillmor: People who are the readers have come to expect that professional journalism makes an effort to try to get it right and offer some balance. It does worry people that there is this explosion of unverified voices. But, there is a self-correcting part of it. Over time, people will find new sources they trust and new kinds of journalism. In the new world, the reader will have to do a little more work, at least for a while, while we recalibrate what we can trust. I think that’s a healthy process.

Rebecca: MSM in the US is undergoing a crisis of trust. But weblogs won’t replace professional journalists.

Dan: I learned a long time ago that my readers know more than I do. As a journalist, that’s an opportunity. The news must stop being just a lecture. It has to become more like a seminar or a conversation, or people will find other ways to get informatoin.

El Mundo: Is Jeff Gannon the dark side of the blog? At Talon news, after Gannon was exposed, Gannon’s stories were expunged.

Dan: Bloggers have become press critics.

Me: Are all bloggers journalists?

Dan: No. Most of them write simply about what matters to the individual blogger.

Barlow: But you can never tell when a blogger will discover something that becomes a large news story. [Technorati tag: SafeDemocracy]

Categories: Uncategorized dw