Can liberty survive the digital age? In this episode, Princeton University professors Jennifer Rexford and Janet Vertesi discuss internet infrastructure and its effect on how people use the web as a vehicle for communication and information.

This episode is part of a series featuring panelists who will participate in the Princeton-Fung Global Forum: “Society 3.0+: Can Liberty Survive the Digital Age?” The conference, to be held March 20-21 in Berlin, is being organized by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Jennifer Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Engineering, professor of computer science and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Before joining Princeton in 2005, she worked for eight years at AT&T Labs—Research. Rexford received her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991 and her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan in 1996. She is co-author of the book "Web Protocols and Practice" (Addison-Wesley, May 2001). She served as the chair of ACM SIGCOMM from 2003 to 2007. Rexford was the 2004 winner of ACM's Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding young computer professional. She is an ACM fellow (2008) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013) and the National Academy of Engineering (2014).

Janet Vertesi is a sociologist of science and technology at Princeton University, where she is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. At Princeton, she teaches classes on the sociology of science and technology, technology in organizations and human-computer interaction. Vertesi has spent the past decade as an ethnographer of spacecraft missions at NASA, and is the author of "Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars." In addition to her research on complex technical organizations, she nurtures a passion for public understanding about the intersection of technology and society, especially with respect to online privacy. Best known publicly for her “opt out” experiments that reveal underlying assumptions embedded in computing technologies, she is an advisory board member of the Data & Society Institute in New York City, has blogged extensively on the topic at Time.com and is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Information Technology Policy.