Stanford University

Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

Bolstering the Information War’s Weakest Front: How to Build Citizen Resilience to Disinformation and Fake News

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/AJxhy6pf95U

 

About this Event: Rampant disinformation threatens democracy, security, and even public health worldwide. As malicious actors weaponize social media, societies worldwide are being challenged to find solutions. Technology and regulatory measures must be part of the solution but, especially in free societies, these solutions often fail to keep pace with rapidly evolving and escalating threats. Dr. Kristin Lord, President and CEO of IREX, an international non-profit organization focused on education and development, will argue that at a time when the cost of producing disinformation is effectively zero, building citizen resilience to misinformation and disinformation must also be part of the solution.

Dr. Lord will discuss concrete approaches to building citizen resilience to disinformation, and present and review data showing its impact. She will also highlight the research agenda needed to advance the field of media literacy if its interventions are to be effective. IREX’s own flagship media literacy program, “Learn to Discern” is currently operational in more than a dozen countries, including the US, and has demonstrated lasting behavior change in a rigorous evaluation. Such approaches can be an effective part of a counter-disinformation strategy – but only if they are urgently brought to scale.

 

About the Speaker: Kristin Lord is President and CEO of IREX, a global non-profit organization that promotes more just, prosperous, and inclusive societies by developing leaders, extending access to quality education and information, empowering youth, and supporting accountable governance and civic participation. She brings more than twenty years of experience in the fields of education, foreign policy, global development, and security and peacebuilding to this role. Prior to joining IREX in 2014, Dr. Lord served in leadership roles at the United States Institute of Peace, Center for a New American Security, Brookings Institution, and The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. She also served at the U.S. Department of State and is currently a board member of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition.

Kristin M. Lord President and CEO IREX
Seminars
Research Seminar Series

Lunch Seminar Series | Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age: The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

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Join Stephen Stedman, Nathaniel Persily, the Cyber Policy Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) in an enlightening exploration of the recent report, Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age, put out by the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. Moderated by Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center.

More on the report:

 

Abstract:

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) pose difficult challenges for electoral integrity. In recent years foreign governments have used social media and the Internet to interfere in elections around the globe. Disinformation has been weaponized to discredit democratic institutions, sow societal distrust, and attack political candidates. Social media has proved a useful tool for extremist groups to send messages of hate and to incite violence. Democratic governments strain to respond to a revolution in political advertising brought about by ICTs. Electoral integrity has been at risk from attacks on the electoral process, and on the quality of democratic deliberation.

The relationship between the Internet, social media, elections, and democracy is complex, systemic, and unfolding. Our ability to assess some of the most important claims about social media is constrained by the unwillingness of the major platforms to share data with researchers. Nonetheless, we are confident about several important findings.

About the Speakers

Stephen Stedman
Stephen Stedman is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, professor, by courtesy, of political science, and deputy director of the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law. Professor Stedman currently serves as the Secretary General of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, and is the principal drafter of the Commission’s report, “Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age.”

Professor Stedman served as a special adviser and assistant secretary general of the United Nations, where he helped to create the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, the UN’s Peacebuilding Support Office, the UN’s Mediation Support Office, the Secretary’s General’s Policy Committee, and the UN’s counterterrorism strategy. During 2005 his office successfully negotiated General Assembly approval of the Responsibility to Protect. From 2010 to 2012, he directed the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, an international body mandated to promote and protect the integrity of elections worldwide.  Professor Stedman served as Chair of the Stanford Faculty Senate in 2018-2019. He and his wife Corinne Thomas are the Resident Fellows in Crothers, Stanford’s academic theme house for Global Citizenship. In 2018, Professor Stedman was awarded the Lloyd B. Dinkelspiel Award for outstanding service to undergraduate education at Stanford.

Nathaniel Persily

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

Also among the commissioners of the report were FSI's Alex Stamos, and Toomas Ilves. 

 

 

Stephen Stedman

Lunch Seminar Series | The DigiChina Project on Digital Policy and U.S.–China Relations

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Abstract:

China’s cyberspace and technology regime is going through a period of change—but it’s taking a while. The U.S.–China economic and tech competition both influences Chinese government developments and awaits their outcomes, and the 2017 Cybersecurity Law set up a host of still-unresolved questions. Data governance, security standards, market access, compliance, and other questions saw only modest new clarity in 2019. But 2020 promises new laws on personal information protection and data security, and the Stanford-based DigiChina Project in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, is devoted to monitoring, translating, and explaining these developments. From AI governance to the the nexus of cybersecurity and supply chains, this talk will summarize recent Chinese policymaking and lay out expectations for the year to come.

Graham Webster
About the Speaker:

Graham Webster is editor in chief of the Stanford–New America DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and a China digital economy fellow at New America. He was previously a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale Law School, where he was responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center’s U.S.–China Track 2 and Track 1.5 dialogues for five years before leading programming on cyberspace and technology issues. In the past, he wrote a CNET News blog on technology and society from Beijing, worked at the Center for American Progress, and taught East Asian politics at NYU's Center for Global Affairs. Webster holds a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Webster also writes the independent Transpacifica e-mail newsletter.

Graham Webster

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Research Scholar
Graham Webster

Graham Webster is a research scholar in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He researches, writes, and teaches on technology policy in China and US-China relations.

Before bringing DigiChina to Stanford in 2019, he was its cofounder and coordinating editor at New America, where he was a China digital economy fellow. From 2012 to 2017, Webster worked for Yale Law School as a senior fellow and lecturer responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center’s Track II dialogues between the United States and China and co-taught seminars on contemporary China and Chinese law and policy. While there, he was an affiliated fellow with the Yale Information Society Project, a visiting scholar at China Foreign Affairs University, and a Transatlantic Digital Debates fellow with New America and the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He was previously an adjunct instructor teaching East Asian politics at New York University and a Beijing-based journalist writing on the Internet in China for CNET News. 

In recent years, Webster's writing has been published in MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, Slate, The Wire China, The Information, Tech Policy Press, and Foreign Policy. He has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg and spoken to NPR and BBC World Service. Webster has testified before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and speaks regularly at universities and conferences in North America, East Asia, and Europe. His chapter, "What Is at Stake in the US–China Technological Relationship?" appears in The China Questions II (Harvard University Press, 2022).

Webster holds a bachelor's in journalism and international studies from Northwestern University and a master's in East Asian studies from Harvard University. He took doctoral coursework in political science at the University of Washington and language training at Tsinghua University, Peking University, Stanford University, and Kanda University of International Studies.

Editor-in-Chief, DigiChina
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Graham Webster

Cyber Reading Group Seminar: Process and Prospects for the UN Group of Government Experts and the UN Open-Ended Working Group

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Multilateral Negotiations on ICTs (information and communications technologies) and International Security: Process and Prospects for the UN Group of Government Experts and the UN Open-Ended Working Group

Abstract: The intent of this seminar is to provide an update on recent events at the UN relevant to international discussions of cybersecurity (and a primer of sorts on current UN processes for addressing this topic).

In 2018, UN Member States decided to establish two concurrent negotiations with nearly identical mandates on the international security dimension of ICTs—a sixth limited membership UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and an Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) open to all governments. How did this happen? Are they competing or complementary endeavors? Is it likely that one will be able to bridge the longstanding divides on how international law applies to cyberspace or agree by consensus to additional norms of responsible State behavior? What would be a good outcome of each process? And how do these negotiations fit into the wider UN ecosystem, including the follow-up to the Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation.  

Kerstin Vignard
About the Speaker: Kerstin Vignard is an international security policy professional with nearly 25 years’ experience at the United Nations, with a particular interest in the nexus of international security policy and technology. Vignard is Deputy to the Director at UNIDIR, currently on temporary assignment leading UNIDIR’s team supporting the Chairmen of the latest Group of Governmental Experts (GGEs) on Cyber Security and the Open-Ended Working Group. She has led UNIDIR’s team supporting four previous cyber GGEs. From 2013 to 2018, she initiated and led UNIDIR’s work on the weaponization of increasingly autonomous technologies, and is the co-Principal Investigator of a CIFAR AI & Society grant examining potential regulatory approaches for security and defence applications of AI.

CNN Perspective with Andy Grotto: Why unlocking Apple iPhones for law enforcement isn't the answer

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Despite pressure from President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr, Apple continues to stand its ground and refuses to re-engineer iPhones so law enforcement can unlock the devices. Apple has maintained that it has done everything required by law and that creating a "backdoor" would undermine cybersecurity and privacy for iPhone users everywhere.

Apple is right to stand firm in its position that building a "backdoor" could put user data at risk.

At its most basic, encryption is the act of converting plaintext (like a credit card number) into unintelligible ciphertext using a very large, random number called a key. Anyone with the key can convert the ciphertext back to plaintext. Persons without the key cannot, meaning that even if they acquire the ciphertext, it should still be impossible for them to discover the meaning of the underlying plaintext.

Full Text at CNN

 

 

 

 

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Andrew Grotto

Lunch Seminar Series | Algorithm Skills: What are They and How Do We Measure Them?

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Abstract:

Considerable scholarship has established that algorithms are an increasingly important part of what information people encounter in everyday life. Much less work has focused on studying users’ experiences with, understandings of, and attitudes about how algorithms may influence what they see and do. The dearth of research on this topic may be in part due to the difficulty in studying a subject about which there is no known ground truth given that details about algorithms are proprietary and rarely made public. In this talk, I will report on the methodological challenges of studying people’s algorithm skills based on 83 in-person interviews conducted in five countries. I will also discuss the types of algorithm skills identified from our data. The talk will advocate for more such scholarship to accompany existing system-level analyses of algorithms’ social implications and offers a blue print for how to do this.

Eszter Hargittai
About the Speaker:

Eszter Hargittai is Professor and Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Institute of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich. Previously, she was the Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department at Northwestern University. In 2019, she was elected Fellow of the International Communication Association and also received the William F. Ogburn Mid-Career Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association’s section on Communication, Information Technology and Media Sociology. For over two decades, she has been researching people’s Internet uses and skills, and how these relate to questions of social inequality.

 

Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age | The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

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Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age | The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) pose difficult challenges for electoral integrity. In recent years foreign governments have used social media and the Internet to interfere in elections around the globe. Disinformation has been weaponized to discredit democratic institutions, sow societal distrust, and attack political candidates. Social media has proved a useful tool for extremist groups to send messages of hate and to incite violence. Democratic governments strain to respond to a revolution in political advertising brought about by ICTs. Electoral integrity has been at risk from attacks on the electoral process, and on the quality of democratic deliberation.

The relationship between the Internet, social media, elections, and democracy is complex, systemic, and unfolding. Our ability to assess some of the most important claims about social media is constrained by the unwillingness of the major platforms to share data with researchers. Nonetheless, we are confident about several important findings.

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Nathaniel Persily
Alex Stamos
Stephen J. Stedman

Good Science and Silenced Security: On Anticipatory Governance in Biobanking

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Seminar Recording: https://youtu.be/P1-Q0OSo4yM

 

About this Event: The governance of big data and the prevention of their misuse is among the most topical issues in current debates among security experts. But what does it mean when security is not an issue for the stakeholders governing big biomedical data? This paper answers this question by looking at what it describes as a peculiar omission of the issue of security in the biggest harmonization cluster of biomedical research in Europe - BBMRI-ERIC. While it does treat personal data, the risks and threats are constructed through a language of anticipation and self-governance rather than security. The analysis explains why: based on document analysis, interviews, and field research, it studies (1) how are risks and threats constructed in the research with big biomedical data, (2) what regime of their governance is established in this area, and (3) what are the implications for the practices of science and the politics of security. The paper argues that this silence is a by-product of bureaucratization and responsibilization of security, which is in biobanking characteristic by discourse and practices of responsible research, ethics, and law. The paper suggests that this regime of governance precludes the prospects of addressing bigger questions that biobanks may need to deal with in the future, such as regarding the access to the biomedical data by state or private actors and their use for policing, surveillance, or other types of population governance.

 

Speaker's Biography: Dagmar Rychnovská is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Techno-science and societal transformation group at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. She holds a PhD in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an MA in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and University of Zurich), and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam). Her research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, security studies, and science and technology studies. Her current research explores security controversies in research and innovation governance, with a focus on bioweapons, biotechnologies, and biobanks.

Dagmar Rychnovská Institute for Advanced Studies
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Research Seminar Series

Lunch Seminar Series | Monitoring Disinformation in Taiwan: Evidence from the Lead Up to the 2020 Election

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On January 11, 2020 Taiwan held its presidential and legislative elections. Many observers expected the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to run an online disinformation campaign during the lead-up to the election in support of their preferred candidate, Han Kuo-yu, who was challenging incumbent Tsai Ing-wen. Such concerns were increased by demonstrated PRC online disinformation targeting the Hong Kong protests, and claims by an alleged PRC spy saying he led disinformation efforts targeting Taiwan during the 2018 elections. 

In this talk, we delve into case studies that highlight the role social media plays in disinformation at large in the Taiwanese information environment. We examine that while the fears of disinformation were generally not realized, we did find evidence of coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook, in particular on fan Pages and Groups for the two candidates. Our findings hold implications for researchers trying to distinguish authentic hyper-partisan domestic activism from coordinated disinformation. 

Carly Miller

Carly Miller is a social science researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. In addition to covering the Taiwanese election, she assists the team in other digital forensic research and thinking about how researchers external to social media platforms think about disinformation campaign and concepts such as attribution. Before coming to Stanford, Carly was a Team Lead at the Human Rights Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law School where she worked to unearth patterns of various bad actors’ media campaigns. Carly received her BA with honors in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2019.

 

Vanessa Molter

 

Vanessa Molter is a Research Assistant at SIO and a Master in International Policy candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on International Security in East Asia. At SIO, she monitors and writes on the Taiwanese social media environment. Previously, she has studied Taiwanese security affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, Taiwan, a government-affiliated defense think-tank. Vanessa is fluent in Mandarin and holds a B.S. in International Business and East Asian studies from Tubingen University, Germany.

 

Why Invading Iran Would Be a Military Disaster

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In the wake of a rollercoaster week of escalatory and de-escalatory signaling between the United States and Iran, both sides appear to have taken a step back from the abyss. Iran’s retaliatory missile barrage did not kill any U.S. personnel and President Trump has not signaled any plans to escalate beyond the killing of General Qasem Suleimani. But the core political stakes of the contest have risen. In response to the killing, Iran sloughed off the remaining limits on its nuclear hedge. Trump reflexively tightened sanctions.

 

Read the Rest at The National Interest

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