On November 16th, we interviewed the Senior Director of Strategy at Free Press, Timothy Karr. Timothy talked to us about everything from his history as a journalist in Vietnam to his work at Free Press and what it stands for. We learned a lot about how free speech and neutralized internet relate to each other, and how that ties in to Free Press’s “Save The Internet” campaign that you can find here.

During our interview, we also had a chance to meet one of Timothy’s friends, David Isenberg. David worked for AT&T in the late 90s, where he found his criticism for the way that AT&T did business. He proceeded to write “Rise of The Stupid Network,” an article about the faults of the way Internet was provided. This was printed at the time, in an issue of Computer Telephony. The article that David wrote can still be found here. David left AT&T in 1998, and was asked by them to take the article down. He did, but AT&T still is not happy.

After David left (it was a brief encounter), we talked more with Timothy about how Government organizations are handling the net neutrality movement. We talked about Governments putting “backdoors” in encryption software in order to track down communication between people without their consent. This was a big issue for privacy in the United States and presented an even bigger issue to the first amendment. Timothy talked about how one might not speak freely knowing that they are being spied on. This taught us a lot about the relationship between privacy, net neutrality, and freedom of speech.

Over all, this interview was fantastic and educational. Thank you, Timothy Karr and David Isenberg for taking the time to answer questions of the Little Red School House.