The BHR Group Digital Rights Careers Newsletter - Issue 21

Mar 29, 2024

Dear Colleagues:

In previous newsletters, many of our guest practitioners have written compellingly about how their family background played an important role in shaping their own professional journey and interests. This month’s guest practitioner, Brittan Heller, explains how direct personal experiences have shaped her own interest, commitment, decisions, and advocacy in the field of digital rights. Whether or not we do so intentionally, we all bring some or all of who we are, and our collection of life experiences, to our work in the field of digital rights.

Brittan writes about some of the people who’ve influenced and inspired her work over the years, and not surprisingly it’s an impressive list. One of the lessons she shares that’s both profound and often under appreciated even in digital rights is how much scholarship and advocacy is not just an academic exercise (I think the pun is intended) that’s confined to classroom discussions, chalk boards, and journal articles. It is all that of course; but, it’s much more too. Scholarship and advocacy – whether in amicus briefs before the US Supreme Court, shaping future leaders, informing policy-makers, shedding light on corporate practices, or holding others and ourselves to account – is a critical part of advancing digital rights globally.

Read about her experience facilitating the Christchuch Call meeting to get a sense of the stakes and also the opportunity to not only contribute meaningfully on some of the most vexing and impactful digital rights issues globally but also to learn and be inspired in turn.

Brittan has worked for years at the intersection of various stakeholder groups in the field of digital rights, including civil society, academia, business, law, and government. She’s one of the foremost thinkers and writers on spatial-computing (think augmented reality and virtual reality) and AI issues, and I encourage you to follow her scholarship and advocacy on these topics.

Thank you, Brittan, for your pioneering work in the field of digital rights.

Michael Samway
The Business and Human Rights Group
Website: www.thebhrgroup.com

Guest Spotlight: Brittan Heller

Brittan Heller works at the intersection of technology, human rights and the law. She is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, examining XR's connection to society, human rights, privacy, and security. Heller is on the steering committee for the World Economic Forum's Metaverse Governance initiative and studied content moderation in XR as an inaugural AI and Tech Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights. She is a visiting fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, a Senior Non-Residential Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, and an affiliate at the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet. Heller has been awarded a 2024 Bellagio Residency to write about the intersection of spatial computing and AI.

What are some of the most formative period or events in your life, personal or professional, that shaped your work in technology and human rights?

My personal experience shaped my entry into technology and human rights. When I was in law school, I became the Jane Doe plaintiff in one of the first online harassment cases. It was designed to see if an average person could get redress, under the current structure of the law, for the type of technologically-facilitated gender-based violence that myself and other women had been facing. Through this experience, I learned the fundamentals of how computers and networks work.
After I became an attorney, focusing on human rights, I found that this experience actually placed me on the forefront of a new frontier in human rights practice. In essence, I learned that digital rights are human rights.

Who are some people or an individual you’ve met during your work in this field who have/has had profound influence on your work? And in what way?

I’ve been inspired by law professors who identify holes that are created in the law by emerging technology. In particular, Danielle Citron, Mary Anne Franks, and Mark Lemley have been inspirational for years. They remind me that scholarship and advocacy is not an academic exercise or an abstraction.

What’s a specific event when you feel like your team’s or organization’s work (or your own work) was able to make a significant impact in the field of digital rights?

In 2022, I was asked to facilitate the Christchurch Call meeting. For years, I’d been writing about human rights and technology – and this was a chance to actually be in the room with heads of state and leaders of industry to broker agreements on the issues I cared most about. I had my daughter a month prior to the meeting, so it was personally very inspirational working with Jacinda Ardern, given her example as a working mother.

For undergraduate or graduate students reading this, what type course (e.g., computer science, human rights, language) or activities (e.g., internships, summer jobs) do you think might be most helpful as they contemplate careers in technology, public policy, and human rights?

Let technology break your heart. By this, I mean to think about the issues in technology that bother you, and continue to do so over a period of time. This is one way of figuring out where to devote your energy and your attention.

For current practitioners in this field, and given your own career experience, what are some considerations you think are worth taking into account when deciding whether to change sectors, say from civil society or academia to the private sector? Or from the private sector to government or civil society?

Take a look at what you enjoy doing most and the skills that come from completing those tasks – oral argument, written analysis, one-on-one engagement with clients, working with ideas, investigation. When you’re looking to change positions, look at the type of skills that you’ll be using in the new job and how they fit with your preferences. Simply working on good issues is not enough, if you don’t enjoy the fundamental tasks you’ll be doing day to day.

What are some of the non-mainstream sources you turn to when building knowledge or keeping informed on tech, policy, law, and human rights related issues? And what sources do you follow to keep current on the latest happenings in technology and politics today?

The BHR Group Digital Rights Careers Newsletter

The BHR Group Digital Rights Careers Newsletter - Issue 21

Guest Spotlight: Brittan Heller

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