Abstract
The Internet is now approaching near-ubiquity as a method for gathering, distributing and obtaining the news. Over the last decade, social tools and websites built in Silicon Valley have come to dominate that conversation. The use of those tools, the Net and the nature of online journalism varies wildly from country to country. Danny O'Brien of the Committee to Protect Journalists discusses how those tools are used by journalists and their sources in dangerous conditions, and what technologists can learn about the future from these edge cases.

Danny O'Brien is CPJ's Internet Advocacy Coordinator. He has spent over twenty years documenting and explaining the growth of the Internet and new media and its effect on free expression and society. He has written articles for Wired, New Scientist, the Guardian, and TV shows for the BBC. Prior to joining CPJ last year, O'Brien was International activist for the original Internet freedom organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was a founder of the British pressure group, the Open Rights Group. He is based in San Francisco. http://www.twitter.com/#!/danny_at_cpj

Abstract 
There will be a discussion of two different examples of liberation technology, one used to collect and protect human rights data, and the other used to analyze it. Martus is a software program that encrypts and remotely backs up data, designed for and used widely by human rights monitors and advocates to protect witness reports and other sensitive human rights data. the focus will be on the security design of Martus and how we addressed the inevitable tradeoffs with usability, as well as the reasons for and consequences of our choice to make Martus free and open source. The legitimacy of human rights advocates is based on their claim to speak truth about a human rights situation, but our ability to know the truth of what is happening on the ground is often severely limited. Founding conclusions on anecdotes or observable events alone can misinterpret both trends over time and the relative distribution of violence with respect to regions, ethnicity or perpetrators. Through the careful application of rigorous statistical methods, the limitations of incomplete data can sometimes be overcome, enabling scientifically-based claims about the total extent and patterns of human rights violations. Also discussed will be how this kind of analysis is enabled by technology, including computational statistical methods, and tools like R and version control to make the analysis auditable and replicable.

Jeff Klingner is a computer scientist with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group at Benetech, where he codes and runs data analysis addressing a variety of human rights questions, including command responsibility of high-level officials in Chad and Guatemala, and mortality estimation in several countries, including India, Sierra Leone, and Guatemala. His technical focus is on data deduplication, machine learning, data visualization, and analysis auditability and replicability. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

A police “encounter killing,” or simply “encounter,” is a term with no legal validity but which has seeped via the media into Indian English so surely that it has acquired a life of its own. It refers to a face-to-face interaction between the police and suspects leading to the killing of the suspects. While intended to convey serendipity, encounter killings in reality are often pre-planned executions by police or security agencies. First used against Maoists in the 1970s, and counterinsurgents in the Northeast and Kashmir, executions as unstated state policy were perfected in dealing with Sikh militant groups in the 80s and 90s. The ‘Punjab solution’, as it came to be known, became the model for the internal security establishment. Mumbai’s underworld was reined in through a series of high profile encounter killings—much celebrated in the popular media for imposing order into the urban anarchy that the gang-wars were breeding. Indeed, this became the preferred quick-fix method of dealing with a range of ‘undesirables’, from petty criminals to gangsters, to alleged terrorists and separatists. But more often than not, those lumped together as ‘encounterables’ were simultaneously marked out through their caste, ethnic and religious affiliations. The talk will discuss the history of fake encounters in India and the role of the media and judiciary in dealing with them.

Manisha Sethi is Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Comparative Religions and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research interests are in the area of gender and religion, communalism, and law and terrorism. She has published extensively on these themes in academic as well as popular publications. She is currently Associate Editor, Biblio: A Review of Books, India’s premier book review journal, with which she has been associated for over a decade. Sethi is the President of the Jamia Teachers' Solidarity Association, which has been closely involved in a campaign against extra judicial killings. Her book, Escaping the World: Chastity, Power and Women’s Renunciation among Jains, Routledge India, is due later this year.

This event is co-sponsored with the Stanford Center for South Asia and

The Indian American Muslim Council

Nuclear energy is politically sensitive. For its proponents, nuclear energy is clean and highly efficient and indeed is the only alternative to fossil fuels in providing a base supply of electricity. For its opponents, nuclear energy is nothing but trouble, a symbol of war and weaponry par excellence, and one that creates environmental problems for mankind today and in the future. What is remarkable in this highly emotional debate is the general division between developed and developing countries. Asian and Gulf states are more active than many in other continents in expanding or developing their nuclear energy capacities. China is leading this expansion with 27 reactors under construction now.

Nuclear development in China highlights a series of objectives many developing countries try to balance – energy and economy, energy and development, energy and environment, energy and security, and the need for both clean energy and adequate and reliable energy supplies. It tells a counterintuitive story about Chinese politics – a single-party authoritarian political system with an extremely fragmented institutional structure in nuclear energy policy making, implementation and regulation and with highly competitive market forces in play. It provides a cautionary tale about the Chinese as well as global nuclear future. This paper discusses the challenges of nuclear energy development, using China as an example. It asks who drives it, what technology is selected and adopted, how human capital is developed, what the rules of the games are, and more importantly, which institutions are responsible for issuing licenses, regulating standards, and overseeing the compliance, and what forms of regulation do they use. At the core of these questions is if and how countries can ensure safe, secure and sustainable nuclear development.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Xu Yi-chong is a research professor of politics and public policy at Griffith University. Before joining Griffith University in January 2007, Xu was professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is author of The Politics of Nuclear Energy in China (2010); Electricity Reform in China, India and Russia: The World Bank Template and the Politics of Power (2004); Powering China: Reforming the electric power industry in China (2002); co-author of Inside the World Bank: Exploding the Myth of the Monolithic Bank (with Patrick Weller 2009) and The Governance of World Trade: International Civil Servants and the GATT/WTO, (with Patrick Weller 2004); and editor of Nuclear Energy Development in Asia (2011) and The Political Economy of Sovereign Wealth Funds (2010). All these projects were supported by the research grants from either Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) or Australian Research Council.

The decades-long political winter in the Arab world seemed to be thawing early this year as mass protests toppled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and it appeared that one Arab dictatorship after another might fall during the so-called Arab Spring. Analogies were quickly conjured to the collapse of dictatorships in Europe and Latin America in the 1970s; Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines in the 1980s; and Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s—the transformative “third wave” of global democratization. Many scholars and activists reasonably imagined that a “fourth wave” had begun.  At this momentous inflection point, which may well define the future shape of the Arab world, the United States has never faced a more urgent set of opportunities and challenges there. Diamond will discuss the prospects for democratic development that exist alongside the very real risks of Islamist ascension, political chaos, and humanitarian disaster, and suggest principles and long-term strategic thinking the U.S. might employ to increase its legitimacy in the region.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he also directs the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond is co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and a senior consultant to the National Endowment for Democracy. Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group.  Diamond, author of the Spirit of Democracy and several other works on democratic development, has also edited or co-edited some 36 books on democracy. A renowned teacher and mentor, Diamond, who teaches courses on comparative democratic development and post-conflict democracy building, was named “Teacher of the Year” by the Associated Students of Stanford University and received the prestigious Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education in 2007.