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

*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.

 

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department.  The application period opens on January 10, 2022 and runs through February 11, 2022.   For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

Join us online via Zoom on Friday, January 21st at 12:00pm (PST) to learn more! 

REGISTER NOW

CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

 

*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.

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. 

 

About the Event: In January 2017 and again during his presidential campaign, then-Vice President Biden said that “I believe that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring—and, if necessary, retaliating against—a nuclear attack.” The Biden Administration is now undertaking its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), in which it is possible that the United States would, for the first time, formally adopt such a “sole purpose” or perhaps even “no first use” policy for its nuclear weapons. Yet some former government officials, as well as press accounts, have publicly reported that the possibility of a biological weapons attack that might cause casualties comparable to a nuclear attack blocked the adoption of a no-first-use or a sole-purpose policy in previous administrations’ NPRs. Should it do so again? I will present a technical and policy analysis of this question, with the aspiration of helping to bring systematic attention to this issue in the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review.

 

About the Speaker: Christopher Chyba is a professor of astrophysical sciences and international affairs at Princeton University, and past director of the Program on Science and Global Security. As an associate professor of geological sciences at Stanford University before coming to Princeton, he co-directed the Center for International Security and Cooperation and held the Sagan Chair at the SETI Institute. He has been a Marshall Scholar and a MacArthur Fellow.

During President Clinton’s first term, Chyba served on the staffs of the National Security Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, entering as a White House Fellow. He served for a decade as a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and on President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) from April 2009 through January 2017, on which he co-chaired the working groups on antibiotic resistance and on biodefense. In late 2020 to early 2021, Chyba served on the national security and foreign policy team for the Biden-Harris transition. His current policy-relevant research focuses on possible pathways to nuclear weapons use (for the past two years, he has co-chaired a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on this topic), nonproliferation and strategic arms control issues, and biodefense -- including as a member of the OPCAST pandemic response group. 

Chyba's scientific research ranges across planetary science and exobiology, as well as work in classical electrodynamics. His published work has included dynamical modeling of the Neptune-Triton system, the role of impacts on the origin of life on Earth, the Tunguska atmospheric explosion and planetary defense, radar, seismic, and magnetometer sounding of Europa's ice shell, bioenergetic models for possible ecosystems on Europa, electromagnetic heating of planetary satellites, and planetary protection. 

The Taliban’s shock takeover of Kabul in August 2021 has implications for South Asia far beyond Afghanistan’s borders. The Taliban does not have transnational political ambitions, but it is closely tied to the Pakistan security establishment, and its victory will resonate among other networks of terrorists. This webinar will explore the regional geopolitical consequences of the Taliban takeover. It will examine the Taliban victory’s impact on Pakistan’s regional strategy, on security in disputed Kashmir, on the role of China in the region, and on the trajectory of Islamist groups across the region.

Javid Ahmad is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and was, until recently, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the UAE. He was previously a nonresident fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point and worked with U.S. defense contractors, where he provided counterterrorism/economic analysis to U.S. government and business clients on South Asia/Central Asia. He has worked for the Pentagon’s AfPak Hands, the German Marshall Fund in Washington, and NATO in Brussels. He has written for Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, The Hill, and CNN. He studied at Beloit College and Yale University.

C. Christine Fair is a Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Her most recent book is In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (OUP, 2019).  She has authored or co-edited several books, inter alia: Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (OUP, 2014); Pakistan’s Enduring Challenges (UPenn, 2015), Policing Insurgencies (OUP, 2014); Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2010); Treading on Hallowed Ground: (OUP, 2008); The Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States (GlobePequot, 2008).  She has a PhD from the University of Chicago, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilization. She causes trouble in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.

Avinash Paliwal is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Deputy Director of the SOAS South Asia Institute. He specialises in South Asian strategic affairs. He is author of the much-acclaimed book My Enemy’s Enemy - India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal (2017), and is currently authoring a strategic history of India's near east. Avinash holds an MA and PhD in International Relations from King’s College London, and a BA (Hons) in Economics from the University of Delhi.

Moderator:

Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, the Observer Research Foundation, and the East-West Center in Washington. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defence Department, which included an operational deployment to Afghanistan. Arzan holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. This event is part of the year-long initiative on “Ethics & Political Violence” jointly organized by the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. This event is hosted by CISAC and is co-sponsored by McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.

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: We consider how the U.S. news media reports on international affairs. Analyzing ≈40 million news articles published between 2010 and 2020, we explore whether the American news media report differently on various international affairs topics based on partisan leanings. We then analyze ≈25 million articles published by top online news sites to determine whether collective reporting shows disparities between the level of attention afforded major global issues and objective measures of their human costs (e.g. numbers of individuals killed). We find that left- and right-leaning news outlets tend to report on international affairs at similar rates but differ significantly in their likelihood of referencing particular issues. We find further strong evidence that the frequency of reporting on the international issues we study tracks only modestly with their associated human costs. Given evidence U.S. public and policymakers dependence on news reports for foreign affairs information, our findings raise fundamental questions about the influence of these reporting biases.

Draft Paper

 

About the Speakers: Andrew Shaver is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. He is a CISAC affiliate and a former postdoctoral research fellow within Stanford’s political science department. He is the founding director of the Political Violence Lab and focuses broadly on contemporary sub-state conflict. His research appears in outlets including the American Political Science Review, American Economic Review, Annual Review of Sociology, and Journal of Politics. Dr. Shaver has served in different foreign affairs/national security positions within the U.S. Government. He completed his PhD in Public Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs.

Amarpreet Kaur is a recent graduate of University of California, Merced with a bachelor in Public Health and a minor in Political science. Kaur has been working the lab for a year under the guidance of Professor Shaver. Kaur has aspirations to go on and get a PhD in Health Policy.

Robert Kraemer is a graduate student of data science at the University of Denver. Prior to this, Kraemer earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has been working in the Political Violence Lab with Professor Shaver for over a year, developing his research and analytic skills.