The Quantum Age

Join us on Tuesday, February 8 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “The Quantum Age” featuring Chris Hoofnagle, Faculty Director, Center for Long–Term Cybersecurity at UC Berkeley, and Zahra Takhshid, University of Denver Sturm College of Law in conversation with Kelly Born of the Hewlett Foundation. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. 

Quantum technologies have provided capabilities that seem strange, are powerful, and at times, frightening. These capabilities are so different from our conventional intuition that they seem to ride the fine border between science fiction and fantasy—yet some quantum technologies can be commercially purchased today, and more are just around the corner. This discussion will explore the different kinds of quantum technologies and their legal, political, and social implications and, more broadly, the ways we can think about regulating the fast growing ecosystem of emerging technologies.

About the Speakers:

Chris Jay Hoofnagle is Professor of Law in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where he teaches cybersecurity, programming for lawyers and torts. He is an affiliated faculty member with the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, a Professor of Practice in the School of Information, and a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. Hoofnagle’s new book with Simson Garfinkel, Law and Policy for the Quantum Age is now available (open access) from Cambridge University Press, which also published his first book, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy (2016). An elected member of the American Law Institute, Hoofnagle is of counsel to Gunderson Dettmer LLP, and serves on boards for Constella Intelligence and Palantir Technologies.

Zahra Takhshid is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. Before joining DU, she was the Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School where she taught “Common Law and Privacy Torts.” Zahra is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and has been selected as the 2021 Quantum Fellow at the Center for Quantum Networks of the University of Arizona in partnership with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP). She teaches and writes about torts, privacy, technology and the law.  A second strand of her interest is comparative and Islamic law. Zahra’s research has been published or is forthcoming in Cardozo Law Review, Minnesota Law Review Online, UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near. Eastern Law, Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology, among others.

 

Moderator: Kelly Born is the Director of the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She leads a ten-year, $130 million grantmaking effort that aims to build a more robust cybersecurity field and improve policymaking. Previously, Kelly was executive director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Prior to that, she was a Program Officer for the Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, an 8-year, $150 million portfolio focused on improving U.S. democracy. Kelly oversaw Madison’s grantmaking on campaigns and elections, and digital disinformation. Before that, Kelly worked as a strategy consultant with the Monitor Institute, a nonprofit consulting firm, where she supported strategic planning efforts at a number of foundations. Earlier in her career, she consulted with nonprofits, the private sector, and governments in the United States, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe.