Since Thailand’s coup of September 2006, which forced the controversial government of billionaire businessman Thaksin Shinawatra out of office, pro- and anti-Thaksin forces have waged an intense battle for control of the government. Rural people in Thailand have played an important role in this struggle, but the nature of their politics is poorly understood. On the one hand there are breathless accounts of agrarian class struggle, while on the other hand rural protest is dismissed as the product of elite manipulation and financial inducement. These paradigms are unhelpful because they ignored the emergence of a new political relationship between the state and the rural population. Sustained economic growth since the 1960s had lifted rural households to levels of income and consumption previously unimagined. They are no longer mainly challenged by food insecurity but by the need to diversify economically and improve productivity. The state plays a key role in addressing these challenges through an array of subsidy, welfare, and community development schemes. Modern peasant politics in Thailand are motivated not by an antagonistic relationship with the state but by a desire to draw the state into mutually beneficial transactions. The classic frameworks for explaining peasant political behavior, based on rebellion or resistance, are impediments to understanding this new style of political behavior. Prof. Walker will propose instead an alternative model of rural “political society” based on the relationship between a persistent peasantry and a subsidizing state.  Copies of Thailand's Political Peasants will be available for signing and sale by the author following his talk.

Andrew Walker is an anthropologist who has worked in northern Thailand since the early 1990s. His latest book is Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (2012). His many earlier publications include “Royal Succession and the Evolution of Thai Democracy,” in Montesano et al., eds, Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand (2011); Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Mainland Southeast Asia (edited, 2009); Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand (co-authored, 2008); and The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma (1999). He also co-founded and co-convenes New Mandala, a widely read and highly regarded blog that offers fresh perspectives, both analytic and anecdotal, on mainland Southeast Asia.

 

About the Topic: Osama bin Laden’s demise was merely one sensational moment in the first decade of America’s shadow war, the transformation of the national security apparatus into a machine calibrated for man-hunting operations. Beyond the “big wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, America has pursued its enemies with killer robots and special operations troops, sent privateers on assassination missions and to set up clandestine spying networks, and relied on mercurial dictators, unreliable foreign intelligence services and ragtag proxy armies. A new military-intelligence complex has emerged: the soldiers have become spies and spies have become soldiers.

The CIA, created as a Cold War espionage service, is now more than ever a paramilitary agency ordered by the White House to kill off America’s enemies: from the sustained bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan and the deserts of Yemen and North Africa, to the simmering clan wars in Somalia. For its part, the Pentagon has turned into the CIA, dramatically expanding spying missions in the dark spaces of U.S. foreign policy.

About the Speaker: Mark Mazzetti is a national security correspondent for The New York Times, based in the newspaper's Washington DC bureau. In 2009, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the intensifying violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Washington's response, and he has numerous other major journalism awards including the George Polk Award (with colleague Dexter Filkins) and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for defense reporting. Mazzetti has also written for the Los Angeles Times, U.S. News & World Report, and The Economist.

Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) are used throughout the industrial infrastructure and military applications. These systems are designed to be highly reliable and safe, but were not designed to be cyber secure. Moreover, many of these systems do not even have cyber logging or forensics. Consequently, these systems, which constitute the “soft underbelly” of the American economy and defense, can enable a “cyber Pearl Harbor” to occur without having the capability of even knowing the impacts were cyber-induced. Stuxnet and Aurora have demonstrated that cyber can be used as a weapon to damage or destroy engineering equipment and systems.

To date, there have been more than 225 actual control system cyber incidents worldwide affecting electric power, water, chemicals, pipelines, manufacturing, mass transit, and even aircraft. Most of the incidents have been unintentional. Selected unintentional incidents will be addressed at the ICS Cyber Security Conference (http://www.icscybersecurityconference.com/). However, there have been a number of targeted cyber attacks. The Stanford presentation will focus on Stuxnet and Aurora. It will address the lack of air-gaps, insecureable legacy ICSs, lack of cyber forensics, and cultural issues between IT and Operations that can enable these attacks to occur and evade detection.

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Joseph Weiss is an industry expert on control systems and electronic security of control systems, with more than 35 years of experience in the energy industry. Mr. Weiss spent more than 14 years at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) where he led a variety of programs including the Nuclear Plant Instrumentation and Diagnostics Program, the Fossil Plant Instrumentation & Controls Program, the Y2K Embedded Systems Program and, the cyber security for digital control systems. As Technical Manager, Enterprise Infrastructure Security (EIS) Program, he provided technical and outreach leadership for the energy industry's critical infrastructure protection (CIP) program. He was responsible for developing many utility industry security primers and implementation guidelines. He was also the EPRI Exploratory Research lead on instrumentation, controls, and communications.

Abstract
Drawing on fieldwork among Free and Open Source software hackers and the Anonymous protest movement, I will discuss some attributes of hacker and geek activism that set their actions apart from other modalities of dissent and contextualize their actions in light of broader historical trends concerning censorship, intellectual property law and surveillance.

Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, teaches, researches, and writes on computer hackers. Her work examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Her first book, "Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking" is forthcoming with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism.

Abstract
The so-called "Arab Spring" saw politically and economically disenfranchised citizens take advantage of new tools such as social media and smartphones to break the state’s monopoly on information, and mobilize mass protest. While governments were quick to employ familiar, time-tested mechanisms of repression against demonstrators in the streets and main squares, they fumbled at first in controlling this new digital dissent.  

Against an increasingly security-aware online community, the traditional tools
of blocking, filtering, and wiretapping had become less effective. Nervous regimes turned to the largely unregulated $5 billion a year industry in Internet surveillance tools. Once the realm of the black market and intelligence agencies, the latest computer spyware is now sold at trade shows for dictator pocket change.

Activists and journalists soon found themselves the target of e-mails promising exclusive or scandalous information.  We analyzed messages forwarded to us by suspicious users, and found spyware products apparently from Gamma International and Hacking Team, recognized players in the surveillance industry.  For the first time, we analyzed their products, chasing internet addresses and shell corporations across the globe.  As we published our findings, servers disappeared, and spyware was rewritten.

In this talk, we detail the cat and mouse game between authoritarian regimes and dissidents, as well as our ongoing efforts to map out the relationship between surveillance software companies and governments.

Morgan Marquis-Boire works as a Security Engineer at Google specializing in Incident Response, Forensics and Malware Analysis. He is a security researcher and Technical Advisor at the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. Recently, he has been working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on issues surrounding dissident suppression in Syria.

 

Bill Marczak is a Computer Science PhD student at UC Berkeley working on developing new languages, abstractions, and tools for distributed
programming.  Bill is also a founding member of Bahrain Watch, a
monitoring and advocacy group that seeks to promote effective,
accountable, and transparent governance in Bahrain through research and evidence-based activism.

  

Abstract
The manifestations of 'open' are permeating the society enabled by the rise of participatory culture and improved communication technologies. In her research, Tanja Aitamurto examines the impact of openness on traditionally closed processes such as journalism, policy-making and design. Aitamurto draws on several case studies, in which collective intelligence is harnessed through crowdsourcing, open innovation and co-creation. Her work is based on data from 150 in-depth interviews and about 8,000 data points recorded by netnography. Aitamurto's research is situated in social sciences, informed by organization studies and management science and engineering. She finds that the 'open' challenges the incumbent power structures when participatory mechanisms become a means to practice social control.

Tanja Aitamurto is a visiting researcher at the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. In her PhD project she examines how collective intelligence, whether harvested by crowdsourcing, co-creation or open innovation, impacts incumbent processes in journalism, public policy making and design process. Her work has been published in several academic publications, such as the New Media and Society. Related to her studies, she advises the Government and the Parliament of Finland about Open Government principles, for example about how open data and crowdsourcing can serve democratic processes.

Aitamurto has previously studied at the Center for Design Research and at the Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford. She is a PhD Student at the Center for Journalism, Media and Communication Research at Tampere University in Finland, and she holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy, and a Master of Arts in Humanities. Prior to returning to academia, she made a career in journalism in Finland specializing in foreign affairs, doing reporting in countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Uganda. She has also taught journalism at the University of Zambia, in Lusaka, and worked at the Namibia Press Agency, Windhoek. More about Tanja’s work at www.tanjaaitamurto.com and on Twitter @tanjaaita.