Stanford University

Leveraging Ethical Hacking in Russia: Exploring the Design and Potential of Bug Bounty Programs Authors

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Our increasingly internet-connected world has yielded exponential demand for cybersecurity. However, protecting cyber infrastructure is technically complex, constantly changing, and expensive. Small organizations or corporations with legacy systems may struggle to implement best practices. To increase cybersecurity for organizations in Russia, we propose fostering a culture of ethical hacking by supporting bug bounty programs. To date, bug bounties have not had the same level of success or investment in Russia as in the United States; yet, we argue that bug bounty programs, when properly established, institutionalize a culture of ethical hacking by establishing trust between talented hackers and host organizations. This paper will first define ethical hacking and bug bounty programs. It will explore the current bug bounty landscape in Russia and the United States. Based on issues identified, we will proceed to offer a set of best practices for establishing a successful bug bounty program. Finally, we will discuss some considerations for setting up bug bounty programs in Russia.

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The Stanford US-Russia Journal
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Prospects for American-Russian Cooperation in Countering White Nationalism

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White nationalism remains an often overlooked terror threat amongst the many national security risks facing the United States and Russian Federation. While typically grounded in domestic theaters, white nationalist groups have increased the frequency and scale of their armed activities by incorporating aspects of transnational cooperation that are tactics often used by larger terrorist networks. This trend has raised questions regarding the ways in which white nationalism represents a new type of international technology-enabled terror threat toward the United States and Russian Federation and how policy makers can best address this challenge. This research paper will explore how white nationalist groups in the United States and Russian Federation have sought cooperation with one another through wider ideological and strategic alignment. This paper will also explore the respective communication techniques of these groups, which have been enabled through the internet and new technologies. This paper will conclude with a reflection on potential avenues of cooperation between the United States and the Russian Federation, drawing on previous examples of collaboration among government officials and non-state actors in combating terrorism.

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SPICE Webinar: "Japanese War Brides: Teaching History Through Multimedia Resources"

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Webinar recording: https://youtu.be/sp4EWuLct7E 

 

 

Following the end of World War II, more than 45,000 young Japanese women married American GIs and came to the United States to embark upon new lives among strangers. The mother of Kathryn Tolbert, a former long-time journalist with The Washington Post, was one of them.

 

Tolbert noted, “I knew there was a story in my mother’s journey from wartime Japan to an upstate New York poultry farm. In order to tell it, I teamed up with journalists Lucy Craft and Karen Kasmauski, whose mothers were also Japanese war brides, to make a short documentary film through a mother-daughter lens. Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides was released in August 2015 and premiered on BBC World Television.”

 

Tolbert spent a year traveling the country to record interviews, funded by a Time Out grant from her alma mater, Vassar College. The Japanese War Brides Oral History Archive is the result of her interviews. The Oral History Archive documents an important chapter of U.S. immigration history that is largely unknown and usually left out of the broader Japanese American experience. In these oral histories, Japanese immigrant women reflect on their lives in postwar Japan, their journeys across the Pacific, and their experiences living in the United States.

 

Join Kathryn Tolbert as she describes bringing the legacy of these stories to life through the documentary film, oral history archive project, and upcoming Smithsonian traveling exhibit. Waka Takahashi Brown, SPICE curriculum writer, will also share an overview of the teacher’s guide that she developed to accompany the documentary film, which is available to download for free from the SPICE website.

 

To attend, register here.

 

This webinar is sponsored by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA), and the USC U.S.-China Institute.

Featured Speakers:

 

headshot of woman dressed in black

Kathryn Tolbert is a former editor and reporter on the Metro, National and Foreign desks, a correspondent in Tokyo and director of recruiting and hiring at The Washington Post. She has also worked for The Boston Globe and the Associated Press. In addition, she has written about Japanese women who married American servicemen after World War II and co-directed the film Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides. Tolbert is a graduate of Vassar College with a BA in Political Science and an MA in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

 

headshot of woman sitting on a couch

Waka Takahashi Brown is an educator and writer. She manages and teaches Stanford e-Japan for SPICE and has authored curriculum on several international topics. She is the recipient of the Association for Asian Studies’ national Franklin Buchanan Prize, and has also been awarded the 2019 Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher award for her groundbreaking endeavors in teaching about U.S.–Japan relations to high school students in Japan and promoting cultural exchange awareness. In addition, Brown has authored three middle-grade novels: While I Was Away; Dream, Annie, Dream; and The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura. She is a Stanford graduate with a BA in International Relations and an MA in Secondary Education.

Online via Zoom.

Kathryn Tolbert

Waka Takahashi Brown

616 Jane Stanford Way
Encina Hall, E005
Stanford, CA 94305-6060

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Waka Brown is a Curriculum Specialist for the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). She has also served as the Coordinator and Instructor of the Reischauer Scholars Program from 2003 to 2005. Prior to joining SPICE in 2000, she was a Japanese language teacher at Silver Creek High School in San Jose, CA, and a Coordinator for International Relations for the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.

Waka’s academic interests lie in curriculum and instruction. She received a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University as well as teaching credentials and M.Ed. through the Stanford Teacher Education Program. 

In addition to curricular publications for SPICE, Waka has also produced teacher guides for films such as A Whisper to a Roar, a film about democracy activists in Egypt, Malaysia, Ukraine, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, and Can’t Go Native?, a film that chronicles Professor Emeritus Keith Brown’s relationship with the community in Mizusawa, an area in Japan largely bypassed by world media. 

She has presented teacher seminars nationally for the National Council for the Social Studies in Seattle; the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia in both Denver and Los Angeles; the National Council for the Social Studies, Phoenix; Symposium on Asia in the Curriculum, Lexington; Japan Information Center, Embassy of Japan, Washington. D.C., and the Hawaii International Conference on the Humanities. She has also presented teacher seminars internationally for the East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools in Tokyo, Japan, and for the European Council of International Schools in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

In 2004 and 2008, Waka received the Franklin Buchanan Prize, which is awarded annually to honor an outstanding curriculum publication on Asia at any educational level, elementary through university. In 2019, Waka received the U.S.-Japan Foundation and EngageAsia’s national Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award, Humanities category.

Instructor and Manager, Stanford e-Japan
Curriculum Specialist
Waka Takahashi Brown
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U.S.-Russian Nuclear Cooperation: Insights from History

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With arms control in crisis and strategic stability in jeopardy, it is worth remembering the remarkable success of nuclear cooperation between the United States and Russia in the late Cold War and post-Cold War periods, often referred to as the 'Golden Age of Arms Control'. In an effort to understand the current deterioration in U.S.-Russian arms control, this article presents a history of bilateral cooperation since the 1980s from both the American and Russian perspectives. We describe its past successes and investigate the current impasse using historical analysis and a collection of interviews with former diplomats, negotiation participants, and academics. From this analysis, we offer recommendations on best practices to reinvigorate arms control talks based on the historical lessons of success.

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When hearts meet minds: Complementary effects of perspective-getting and information on refugee inclusion

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Claire Adida

Perspective-getting and correcting misconceptions are common interventions to promote inclusion toward outgroups. However, each strategy has limitations. Information corrections yield ambiguous effects, and empathy-based interventions may reproduce the biases they are meant to alleviate. We develop a theoretical framework that clarifies the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy, and offer a design to identify the conditions under which they are most effective. Using three studies on refugee inclusion with nearly 15,000 Americans over three years, we find that information and perspective-getting affect different outcomes. Perspective-getting affects warmth, policy preferences, and behavior, while information leads to factual updating only. We show that combining both interventions produces an additive effect on all outcomes, that neither strategy enhances the other, but that bundling the strategies may prevent backfire effects of information. Our results underscore the promise and limits of information and perspective-getting for promoting inclusion, highlighting the benefits of integrating the two strategies.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Claire Adida is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego. She is also a faculty affiliate with the UCSD Policy Design and Evaluation Lab, the UCSD Future of Democracy Initiative, the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab, the Evidence in Governance and Politics Groups, and the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA). Professor Adida uses quantitative methods to study how countries manage new and existing forms of diversity. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, PLoS ONE, and several other very prestigious outlets. She has written two books on immigrant exclusion, her 2010 Cambridge University Press book on Immigrant Exclusion and Insecurity in Africa and her 2016 Harvard University Press co-authored book on Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies. Professor Adida’s work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, and the Evidence in Governance and Politics Group. Professor Adida serves on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review and is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Experimental Political Science. She received her PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2010.

William J. Perry Conference Room (Encina Hall, 2nd floor, 616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford)

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Claire Adida

Political Parties Are Essential Democratic Institutions

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In April 2023, New America, the Center for Ballot Freedom, Protect Democracy, Lyceum Labs, and Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law convened a conference at Stanford University on the future of political parties in the United States. The conference, titled “More Parties, Better Parties,” focused on the idea that U.S. democracy would benefit from stronger and more representative parties and that essential to that vision was opportunity for more parties beyond the current party duopoly to emerge. The essays in this collection, derived from papers prepared for the conference, trace the following argument: Parties are essential institutions in a democracy; there is an unjustified hostility to parties in much American political discourse; and fluid and overlapping coalitions of a multiparty system can improve governance and confidence. We then look at the promise of fusion voting, a practice once widespread and now prohibited in most states, which could allow new parties to gain a foothold by cross-endorsing candidates from established parties.

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Essay within "The Realistic Promise of Multiparty Democracy in the United States," a political reform report from New America.

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New America
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Didi Kuo

KFAS–Stanford Sustainable Democracy Roundtable Conference Report

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Cover of the report showing a crowd of labor union members demonstrating in Seoul, South Korea

In partnership with the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL) at Stanford University presented the inaugural event in a new annual roundtable series, where experts diagnosed the current state of democracy, its threats, and possible prescriptions for democratic prosperity. This series, titled “Sustainable Democracy Roundtable,” aims to create a necessary platform and opportunity for scholars of various disciplines and ranks to identify core issues and propose unique solutions to globally pertinent policy issues. 

The roundtable series is part of SNAPL's Democratic Crisis and Reform research track.

The inaugural roundtable was made possible thanks to the generous support and partnership with the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS).

This report summarizes the discussions held at the roundtable using a modified version of the Chatham House Rule, only identifying speakers by their country of origin.
 

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New Research Program Explores Intersection of Identity, Democracy, and Justice

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Nora Sulots
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In an era marked by profound societal transformations, identity, democracy, and justice have become central to the discourse on shaping fair and inclusive societies. Recognizing the imperative to delve into these complex issues, political scientist Hakeem Jefferson is launching a new research initiative at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. The Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice (IDJ) serves as a nexus for researchers committed to unraveling the multifaceted dimensions of identity and informing tangible steps toward a more equitable future.

Against the backdrop of diverse topics such as racial and ethnic identity, gender and sexuality, religion, class, and citizenship, the IDJ program emerges as a hub for interdisciplinary collaboration. Its reach extends beyond academic circles, bringing together researchers and organizations who are thinking about how to build fairer, more inclusive societies.

“Hakeem's work on race and politics in America is an important part of the Center's expanding work on the quality of American democracy,” shared Kathryn Stoner, Mosbacher Director of CDDRL. “We are thrilled to launch this new program on such a crucial issue at CDDRL.”

"This program is the embodiment of years of hard work by Hakeem Jefferson in building an innovative research agenda and a vibrant scholarly community attentive to pressing questions on struggles for recognition, inclusion, and social justice,” added Hesham Sallam, the Center’s Associate Director for Research. “I look forward to seeing the program flourish and grow while contributing to intellectual life at CDDRL and Stanford at large."

This program is the embodiment of years of hard work by Hakeem Jefferson in building an innovative research agenda and a vibrant scholarly community attentive to pressing questions on struggles for recognition, inclusion, and social justice.
Hesham Sallam
Associate Director for Research, CDDRL

On January 11, 2024, IDJ will host its inaugural event, titled Multiracial Democracy and its Future in the United States, with Harvard University professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Levitsky and Ziblatt are the New York Times best-selling authors of How Democracies Die and will discuss their newest book, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (Crown, 2023). In a moderated conversation with Professors Hakeem Jefferson and Jake Grumbach (UC Berkeley) and an audience Q&A, Levitsky and Ziblatt will offer a framework for understanding the current crisis in America's democracy. You can learn more about the event and register to attend here.

In the following Q&A, Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences, shares more about the motivations and objectives of the new IDJ program and the transformative potential of identity-focused research.


What motivated the establishment of the Program on Identity, Democracy, and Justice (IDJ) at CDDRL, and what specific gaps or challenges in existing research does it aim to address?


As a scholar of race and politics, it has always been clear to me that we cannot understand threats to democracy or the promise of democracy without engaging issues of race and identity more broadly. I am excited to launch this program at CDDRL because I think we have a real opportunity to bring together scholars, practitioners, and community members concerned with creating a society of political and social equals. At IDJ, we hope to expand people’s understanding of what it means to care about democracy and what the study of democracy looks like. For us, these questions necessitate a focus on difference, a focus on inequality, and a concern with democracy beyond the ballot box. To be sure, we will engage questions related to elections and the health of electoral democracy, but we also want to make the strong case in the research we platform and in the conversations and workshops we convene that being concerned with democracy means thinking quite carefully about how societies are stratified, how power is distributed, and how justice is achieved.

We want to make the strong case in the research we platform and in the conversations and workshops we convene that being concerned with democracy means thinking quite carefully about how societies are stratified, how power is distributed, and how justice is achieved.
Hakeem Jefferson
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Faculty Director of IDJ

What are some of the program's key goals and objectives?


I want to invite folks who study the program themes to be in community with one another. The hope is that these interactions will lead to more thoughtful scholarship and initiatives. We want people to share early-stage ideas, make connections with like-minded collaborators, sharpen later-stage research, and broaden their aims and interests through consuming the work hosted by the program. We want to keep researchers aware of practitioners, especially at the local level, who are working to promote democratic principles and, in parallel, keep those organizations abreast of findings relevant to our shared interest in a healthier democracy.

How does the IDJ program approach the study of identity-related issues, and what makes it distinctive compared to existing research programs?


IDJ is ideas first. Different backgrounds, training, and scholarly dispositions mean that we think about identity-related questions in different ways. IDJ seeks to bring our attention to how we are engaging the same objective — equitable democracies — whether we are concerned with different identities, different contexts, or different sorts of evidence. By pursuing common insights, IDJ aims to produce work that is interesting to a broad audience.

As the IDJ program unfolds, how do you envision its role in shaping public discourse and influencing policies related to identity, democracy, and justice, both locally and globally?


Throughout my career — and since I was a young boy in South Carolina — I have engaged in public conversations about issues of justice. In recent years, I have written extensively for public audiences about topics ranging from the January 6 insurrection and whiteness to the crisis facing multiracial democracy in the United States. As I launch the IDJ program, this commitment to public engagement remains at the heart of what we plan to do. From writing Op-Eds to engaging directly with those working on the ground to safeguard democracy, we hope to be a public-facing program whose stakeholders include those far beyond our Stanford community.

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New Initiative Examines Stanford’s Role in Advancing Democracy

Upon completing the inventory phase of its research, the effort released a list of the courses, research and engagement activities that it feels advance democracy. The next phase involves holding deliberations with the larger Stanford community.
New Initiative Examines Stanford’s Role in Advancing Democracy
Hakeem Jefferson
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Welcoming Hakeem Jefferson to CDDRL

Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, will join the center as a faculty affiliate.
Welcoming Hakeem Jefferson to CDDRL
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View of the huge crowd from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument during the March on Washington.
Warren K. Leffler / U.S. Library of Congress
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Led by Professor Hakeem Jefferson, the program housed at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law will advance innovative research on the multifaceted dimensions of identity and their role in democratic development, struggles for recognition, social justice, and inclusion.

Under Fire and Under Water

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Cover of Under Fire and Under Water by Bruce Cain

Epic wildfire. Devastating drought. Cataclysmic flooding. Extreme weather in the wake of climate change threatens to turn the American West into a region hostile to human habitation—a “Great American Desert,” as early US explorers once mislabeled it. As Bruce E. Cain suggests in this timely book, the unique complex of politics, technology, and logistics that once won the West must be rethought and reconfigured to win it anew in the face of a widespread accelerating threat.

The challenges posed by increasingly extreme weather in the West are complicated by the region’s history, the deliberate fractiousness of the American political system, and the idiosyncrasies of human behavior—all of which Cain considers, separately and together, in Under Fire and Under Water. He analyzes how, in spite of coastal flooding and spreading wildfires, people continue to move into, and even rebuild in, risky areas; how local communities are slow to take protective measures; and how individual beliefs, past adaptation practices and infrastructure, and complex governing arrangements across jurisdictions combine to flout real progress. Driving Cain’s analysis is the conviction that understanding the habits and politics that lead to procrastination and obstruction is critical to finding solutions and making necessary adaptations to the changing climate.

As a detailed look at the rising stakes and urgency of the various interconnected issues, this book is an important first step toward that understanding—and consequently toward the rethinking and reengineering that will allow people to live sustainably in the American West under the conditions of future global warming.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Bruce E. Cain is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He is the author of Democracy More or Less: America’s Political Reform Quandary and coauthor of Ethnic Context, Race Relations, and California Politics.

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Wildfire, Flooding, and the Fight for Climate Resilience in the American West

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University of Oklahoma Press
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