*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Join us on November 16th for “Analyzing Social Media From A User-eye View With PIEGraph” from 12 - 1 PM PT featuring Deen Freelon, associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina. This session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. 

Quantitative social media research has traditionally been conducted from what might be called a platform-centric view, wherein researchers sample, collect, and analyzed data based on one or more topic- or user-specific keywords. Such studies have yielded many valuable insights, but they convey little about individual users’ tailored social media environments—what Professor Freelon calls the user-eye view. Studies that investigate social media from a user-eye view tend to be rare because of the expense involved and a limited number of suitable tools. This talk introduces PIEGraph, a novel system for user-eye view research that offers key advantages over existing systems. PIEGraph is lightweight, scalable, open-source, OS-independent, and collects data viewable from mobile and desktop interfaces directly from APIs. The system incorporates an extensible tagging taxonomy that allows for straightforward classification of a wide range of political, social, and cultural phenomena. The presentation will focus on how Professor Freelon’s research team is using PIEGraph to examine users’ potential levels of exposure to high- and low-quality information sources across the ideological spectrum.

Speakers:

Deen Freelon is an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). His theoretical interests address how ordinary citizens use social media and other digital communication technologies for political purposes, paying particular attention to how identity characteristics (e.g. race, gender, ideology) influence these uses. Methodologically, he is interested in how computational research techniques can be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of communication science. Freelon has worked at the forefront of political communication and computational social science for over a decade, coauthoring some of the first communication studies to apply computational methods to social media data. 

Jeff Hancock is the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Professor Hancock and his group work on understanding psychological and interpersonal processes in social media. The team specializes in using computational linguistics and experiments to understand how the words we use can reveal psychological and social dynamics, such as deception and trust, emotional dynamics, intimacy and relationships, and social support. Recently Professor Hancock has begun work on understanding the mental models people have about algorithms in social media, as well as working on the ethical issues associated with computational social science.

For winter quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

                                                                                           

 

About the Event: Rather than assuming convergence in countries' military capabilities, this seminar examines why and how countries decide to develop different weapon capabilities within similar domains of warfare. To answer these questions, this seminar will explore the role of ideas and institutional bargaining in shaping decisions about military technology. This talk will subsequently apply the theory to the development of missile defense from the 1980s until today.

 

About the Speaker: Sanne Verschuren is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University. Her research interests include the development of military technology, shifts in military strategy and tactics, and the role of ideas and norms therein. Her book project examines why and how countries decide to procure different weapon capabilities within similar military domains, particularly the development of missile defense (1980s-today), air power (1920s-1930s), and aircraft carriers (1950s-1960s). At CISAC, Sanne conducts research on the intersection between nuclear and conventional weapons. Sanne received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University in August 2021.

 

For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)

                                                                                           

 

Seminar Recording

About the Event: The technology controlling United States nuclear weapons predates the Internet. Updating the technology for the digital era is necessary, but it comes with the risk that anything digital can be hacked. Moreover, using new systems for both nuclear and non-nuclear operations will lead to levels of nuclear risk hardly imagined before. This book is the first to confront these risks comprehensively.

With Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons, Herbert Lin provides a clear-eyed breakdown of the cyber risks to the U.S. nuclear enterprise. Featuring a series of scenarios that clarify the intersection of cyber and nuclear risk, this book guides readers through a little-understood element of the risk profile that government decision-makers should be anticipating. What might have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis took place in the age of Twitter, with unvetted information swirling around? What if an adversary announced that malware had compromised nuclear systems, clouding the confidence of nuclear decision-makers?

Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons, the first book to consider cyber risks across the entire nuclear enterprise, concludes with crucial advice on how government can manage the tensions between new nuclear capabilities and increasing cyber risk. This is an invaluable handbook for those ready to confront the unique challenges of cyber nuclear risk.

Purchase Book

 

About the Speaker: Since 2014, Herb Lin has been senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.  He also served as a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

 

Join us November 2nd from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “The Global Spyware Crisis and How to Stop It” featuring David Kaye, professor of law at University of California, Irvine, and moderated by Kelly Born, director of the Cyber Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This seminar series is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. 

The private surveillance (or spyware) industry has thrived with low levels of transparency and public scrutiny and weak controls on transfers of technology. Governments offer limited information on the use of surveillance products and regulations of private surveillance companies. Meanwhile, these tools – most famously but not exclusively the Pegasus malware of the Israeli NSO Group – are increasingly used against journalists, opposition figures, those in dissent, and others. Public reporting – particularly energized by release of the Pegasus Project reporting by the Forbidden Stories consortium in the summer of 2021 – has begun to generate increasing global concern, and yet policy and law lag far behind. This presentation will focus on a human rights-based legal and policy framework for the regulation and accountability of, as well as transparency within, the private surveillance industry.

Speaker Profile:

David Kaye is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, director of its International Justice Clinic, and co-director of the Center on Fair Elections and Free Speech. From 2014 – 2020 he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. Author of Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (2019), he is currently Independent Chair of the Board of the Global Network Initiative and a Trustee of ARTICLE 19.

 

On Wednesday, October 27 at 10 am Pacific Time, please join Andrew Grotto, Director of Stanford’s Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance, for a conversation with Jacob Helberg, senior adviser at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology and Governance and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to discuss his newly released book "The Wires of War:  Technology and the Global Struggle for Power" - an urgent and groundbreaking account of the high-stakes global cyberwar brewing between Western democracies and the autocracies of China and Russia that could potentially crush democracy.

From 2016 to 2020, Jacob Helberg led Google’s global internal product policy efforts to combat disinformation and foreign interference. During this time, he found himself in the midst of what can only be described as a quickly escalating two-front technology cold war between democracy and autocracy.

On the front-end, we’re fighting to control the software—applications, news information, social media platforms, and more—of what we see on the screens of our computers, tablets, and phones, a clash which started out primarily with Russia but now increasingly includes China and Iran. Even more ominously, we’re also engaged in a hidden back-end battle—largely with China—to control the Internet’s hardware, which includes devices like cellular phones, satellites, fiber-optic cables, and 5G networks.

This tech-fueled war will shape the world’s balance of power for the coming century as autocracies exploit twenty-first-century methods to re-divide the world into twentieth century-style spheres of influence. Helberg cautions that the spoils of this fight are power over every meaningful aspect of our lives, including our economy, our infrastructure, our national security, and ultimately, our national sovereignty. Without a firm partnership with the government, Silicon Valley is unable to protect democracy from the autocrats looking to sabotage it from Beijing to Moscow and Tehran. The stakes of the ongoing cyberwar are no less than our nation’s capacity to chart its own future, the freedom of our democratic allies, and even the ability of each of us to control our own fates, Helberg says. And time is quickly running out.

Praise for “The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power”: 

“An analytical tour de force on the rapidly increasing challenge of techno-authoritarian nations to our national security, our economy, and our democracy.” —President Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States