Join us on Tuesday, April 26th from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “Bug Bounties & Bridge-Building: Lessons from Cybersecurity Vulnerability Disclosure for Addressing Socio-Technical Harms” featuring Camille François, Global Director for Trust & Safety at Niantic, Dr. Amit Elazari of Intel, and Alex Rice of HackerOne in conversation with Marietje Schaake of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

About The Seminar: 

Join us for a conversation on the nascent adoption of ‘bug bounties,’ a popular bug-for-reward-style audit mechanism in the cybersecurity domain, (and related approaches, such as VDPs and pentesting) to the discovery of various social-technical harms, including those inflicted through algorithmic (or “AI”) systems. 

Following the recent publication by the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) of a paper on the risks and opportunities presented by this shift, we are joined by one of the paper’s co-authors, Camille François, alongside practitioners with insights into these mechanisms from industry and government perspectives. Together, this group will explore these mechanisms in the context of emerging and historic practices, including as illuminated in AJL’s recent report.

Speakers:

Camille François works on the impacts of technology on society, with an emphasis on cyber conflict and information operations and currently serves as the global director of trust and safety at Niantic and is a lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She was previously the chief innovation officer at Graphika where she oversaw its investigation, analyses and R&D teams and led the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment. François was previously a principal researcher at Google, in the “Jigsaw” team, an innovation unit that builds technology to address global security challenges and protect vulnerable users. François has advised governments and parliamentary committees on both sides of the Atlantic, investigated Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee, and served as a special advisor to the chief technology officer of France. François is an affiliate scholar of the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, a Fulbright scholar and a Mozilla Fellow. She holds a masters degree in human rights from the French Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences-Po) and a masters degree in international security from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University.

Dr. Amit Elazari is a Director, Global Cybersecurity Policy at Intel Corporation and a Lecturer at University of California (UC), Berkeley School of Information Master in Information and Cybersecurity, as well as a member of the External Advisory Committee for the Center of Long Term Cybersecurity. She holds a Doctoral Degree in the Law (J.S.D.) from UC Berkeley School of Law, the world’s leading law institution for technology law, and graduated summa cum laude three prior degrees in law and business. Her research in cybersecurity, privacy and intellectual property has appeared in leading technology law and computer science journals, presented at conferences such as RSA, Black Hat, USENIX and USENIX Security, and featured at leading news sites such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the New York Times. She practiced law in Israel. 

Alex Rice is a founder and chief technology officer at HackerOne, the world's most popular bug bounty platform. Alex is responsible for developing the HackerOne technology vision, driving engineering efforts, and counseling customers as they build world-class security programs. Alex was previously at Facebook, where he founded the product security team, built one of the industry’s most successful security programs, and introduced new transport layer encryption used by more than a billion users. Alex also serves on the board of the Internet Bug Bounty, a nonprofit organization that enables and encourages friendly hackers to help build a more secure Internet.

Please join us on Wednesday, April 20th for a talk with Anna-Maria Osula, visiting scholar from TalTech. At this event co-sponsored by Stanford University Libraries, Anna-Maria will be introducing her research on private sector initiatives to develop and promote cyber norms of behavior.

Research Overview:

Given the multistakeholder nature of running the Internet and governing information and communication technologies, nation-states are not the only entities interested in shaping norms of behavior for cyberspace. Non-state actors are directly impacted by any decision on international norms in cyberspace. They are also expected to behave as responsible actors, being tied by the agreements negotiated by states at the UN platform. This means that non-state actors are involved in building and promoting norms and also playing a role in their interpretation and implementation. Anna-Maria will talk about her research project where she analyzes the private sector involvement in advancing cyber norms in international fora such as the United Nations.

Bio:

Anna-Maria Osula, currently a Global Digital Governance Fellow at Stanford University, is a senior researcher at Tallinn University of Technology and a senior policy officer at Guardtime. Her current research focus is cyber diplomacy and international law applicable to cyber operations. She also serves as a research fellow at Masaryk University under the project “Cyber Security, Cyber Crime and Critical Information Infrastructures Center of Excellence.” Previously, she worked as a legal researcher at the NATO CCDCOE, undertaking projects on national cyber security strategies, international organizations, international criminal cooperation, and norms. In addition to a Ph.D. in law from the University of Tartu, she holds an LLM degree in IT law from Stockholm University.

Join us on Tuesday, April 19 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for a book talk on “The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back” featuring Jacob Ward from NBC News, in conversation with Nate Persily of the Cyber Policy Center.  This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

In The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, Jake argues that AI is about to do to our ability to make decisions for ourselves what Google maps did to our ability to navigate. Drawing on interviews with over 100 scientists and 10-years of front-line reporting from the cutting edge of behavior-shaping technology, Jake’s book is a warning about our growing reliance on AI, and an encouragement to protect the best parts of being human.

Jacob Ward is a correspondent for NBC News, reporting for the TODAY show, Nightly News, MSNBC, and NBC News Now on the unanticipated consequences of science and technology in our lives. From 2018 to 2019, Jacob was a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, along with its partner the Berggruen Institute, which gave him space and companionship on the Stanford campus to write The Loop, his book about the effects of artificial intelligence on human decision making, with Hachette Book Group. Between 2016 and 2020, Jacob hosted a landmark four-hour television series on the science and implications of bias. Prior to that, he was a television correspondent for Al Jazeera, covering science and technology in the US and around the world. He was also editor-in-chief of Popular Science, the world’s largest science and technology publication.

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, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.

This is event is Stanford-only; please use your Stanford email to register.

The rise of right-wing populism has emerged as one of the most significant threats to democracy and liberal values worldwide. While populism is increasingly viewed as a global phenomenon, it takes on many forms and has different causes and consequences in diverse contexts. This presentation addresses the potential of populist civilizationalism to transform political cleavage structures in the Baltic states, notably by downplaying and transcending deeply entrenched post-Soviet political cleavages (geopolitical, mnemopolitical and ethnic ones). Construing ‘self’ and ‘other’ in civilizational, as opposed to narrowly national or ethnic terms, expands the notion of ‘self’ to include various internal others, notably Russian-speaking minorities, and shifts the focus from historical grievances, the Russian threat and the demographic legacies of Soviet occupation to alleged current threats to the European civilization, such as immigration, Islam, and global liberalism.

This transformation of cleavages entails a significant shift in the position assigned to the European Union: instead of being seen as the guarantor of the (post-Soviet) national ‘self,’ the EU is construed as a liberal globalist threat to the civilizational ‘self’. These claims are supported with examples of rhetoric used by the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE). This analysis leads to the conclusion that, paradoxically, the rise of right-wing populism has rendered Estonian politics more global and less post-Soviet.

Piret Ehin is Professor of Comparative Politics and Deputy Head for Research at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu. Her main research interests include democracy, elections and voting behavior, legitimacy and political support, as well as European integration and Europeanization. Her work has appeared in the European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Common Market Studies, Cooperation and Conflict, Politics, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, and the Journal of Baltic Studies. Prof Ehin has been awarded the 2022 Short-Term Research Fellowship at Stanford University for Estonian Scholars, hosted by Stanford University Libraries’ Baltic Studies Program and co-hosted by the Europe Center/Stanford Global Studies.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact: Shannon Johnson (sj1874@stanford.edu) by May 19, 2022.

Co-sponsored by  

This event is part of Global Conversations, a new series of talks, lectures, and seminars focusing on the benefits and fragility of freedom. The series is co-sponsored by Stanford Libraries and Vabamu.

 

 

 

Join us on Tuesday, April 12 from 12 PM - 1 PM PT for “Internet Freedom Under Threat: The Divergent Paths of Taiwan and Hong Kong” featuring Charles Mok, Visiting Scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator and Jason Hsu, Chief Initiative Officer at Taiwan AI Labs, in conversation with Larry Diamond, co-lead for the Global Digital Policy Incubator and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. This weekly seminar series is jointly organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

About The Seminar: 

Both Taiwan and Hong Kong face increasing threats of online misinformation and cybersecurity risks, but the freedoms of the Internet for their citizens appear to be heading in opposite directions. From censorship and surveillance to influencing public opinions and elections, what are the lessons from the experiences of Hong Kong and Taiwan for the world?

Our speakers will provide an overview of the state of internet freedom in Hong Kong from before to after the enactment of the National Security Law in 2020. Censorship and surveillance are on the rise, and a misinformation law is looming on the horizon, to give the government and the police even more unfettered power. We will also cover the techniques used by cyber intrusion groups aimed at toppling election campaigns. Drawing research work from Taiwan AI Labs, we elaborate on how AI is used to track misinformation on social media particularly on Chinese-language speaking portals.

Jason Hsu is Senior Research Fellow at The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation Harvard Kennedy School. From 2016 to 2020 Hsu served as Legislator At-Large in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan (national parliament) overseeing technology policy, development, entrepreneurship and innovation. Known as Crypto Congressman, Jason is credited for setting up Asia Blockchain Alliance (ABA),Taiwan Parliamentary Coalition for Blockchain (TPCB) and Self- Regulatory Organization(SRO).

Charles Mok is a Visiting Scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator. Prior to his time at Stanford, Charles served as an elected member of the Legislative Council in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, representing the Information Technology functional constituency, for two terms from 2012 to 2020. He served alternatively as chair and vice chair of the Information Technology and Broadcasting Panel from 2016 to 2020. As a lawmaker, Charles was a champion for policies and legislations on privacy, open data, freedom of expression and information, cybersecurity, innovation, fintech, electronic health records, as well as human rights and democracy.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He is also professor by courtesy of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford. He leads the Hoover Institution’s programs on China’s Global Sharp Power and on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region.  At FSI, he leads the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, based at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, which he directed for more than six years.  He also co-leads with (Eileen Donahoe) the Global Digital Policy Incubator, based at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center. He is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as senior consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around the world and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy.

This year’s Oksenberg Conference, "Prospects for the New Sino-Russian Partnership,” explores the “why” and “so what” of this newly bolstered alliance that has been declared as a partnership “with no limits.” What does it mean for the U.S. and other non-autocratic states? Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the unprecedented economic sanctions that the US and its allies have slapped on Russia in the wake of that attack, the more immediately important question is: What does this alliance mean for China? How strong is this new bond with Russia? China now finds itself in an extremely difficult position as it tries to protect its own economic relationships with the US and its allies in Europe and Asia. What can or will China do about Russia? How was this alliance sold to the domestic audience of each country?

A roundtable of experts on China and Russia, including those with extensive government experience, joins us to examine this critically important relationship and address the many questions that it raises. Each panelist will present 10-12 minutes of opening remarks before turning to a moderated discussion. During the last 20 minutes, the moderator will pose curated questions to the roundtable from the audience.

The Oksenberg Conference is held annually and honors the legacy of the late Stanford professor Michel Oksenberg (1938-2001), who was a Senior Fellow at Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Professor Oksenberg also served as a key member of the National Security Council when the U.S. normalized relations with China, and consistently urged that the U.S. engage with Asia in a more considered manner. In tribute, the Oksenberg Lecture recognizes distinguished individuals who have helped to advance understanding between the U.S. and the nations of the Asia-Pacific.

Panelists in alphabetical order:

Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is a political scientist, China scholar, Head of Political Science Doctoral Programme and China Studies Centre at Rīga Stradiņš University, Head of the Asia program at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, a member of the China in Europe Research Network (CHERN) and European Think Tank Network on China (ETNC). She has held a Senior visiting research scholar position at Fudan University School of Philosophy, Shanghai, China, and a Fulbright visiting scholar position at the Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University. Bērziņa-Čerenkova publishes on PRC political discourse, contemporary Chinese ideology, EU-China relations, Russia-China, and BRI and her most recent monograph is Perfect Imbalance: China and Russia.

Thomas Fingar is the former first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, currently at Stanford as a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. From 2005-2008, he served as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and, concurrently, as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar previously served as Assistant Secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-2001 and 2004-2005), Principal Deputy Assistant (2001-2003), Deputy Assistant Secretary for Analysis (1994-2000), Director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-1994), and Chief of the China Division (1986-1989). Fingar's most recent books are Uneasy Partnerships: China and Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, 2017), Fateful Decisions: Choices that will Shape China’s Future, co-edited with Jean Oi (Stanford, 2020), and From Mandate to Blueprint: Lessons from Intelligence Reform (Stanford, 2021)

Alex Gabuev is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research is focused on Russia's policy toward East and Southeast Asia, political and ideological trends in China, and China's relations with its neighbors—especially those in Central Asia. Prior to joining Carnegie, Gabuev was a member of the editorial board of Kommersant publishing house and served as deputy editor in chief of Kommersant-Vlast, one of Russia's most influential newsweeklies. He has previously worked as a nonresident visiting research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and taught courses on Chinese energy policy and political culture at Moscow State University. Gabuev is a Munich Young Leader of Munich International Security Conference and a member of Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (Russia).

Michael McFaul is Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. McFaul is also an International Affairs Analyst for NBC News and a columnist for The Washington Post. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). He has authored several books, most recently the New York Times bestseller From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. Earlier books include Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; Transitions To Democracy: A Comparative Perspective (eds. with Kathryn Stoner); Power and Purpose: American Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (with James Goldgeier); and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

Evan Medeiros is a Professor and Penner Family Chair in Asia Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and former top advisor on the Asia-Pacific in the Obama Administration, responsible for coordinating U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific across the areas of diplomacy, defense policy, economic policy, and intelligence. Prior to joining the White House, Medeiros worked for seven years as a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation and served at the Treasury Department as a Policy Advisor-China to Secretary Hank Paulson Jr., working on the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue. Medeiros is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a member of the International Advisory Board of Cambridge University's Centre for Geopolitics, and a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jean Oi (Moderator) is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She also directs the China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at FSI and is the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University. Oi has published extensively on political economy and the process of reform in China. Her books include State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government and Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform. Recent edited volumes include Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County, co-edited with Steven Goldstein, and Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China's Future, co-edited with Thomas Fingar. 

Using 'big data' computational techniques to scrutinize cases covering 2009–2016 from all 252 basic-level courts in two Chinese provinces, Henan and Zhejiang, Ethan Michelson reveals that women have borne the brunt of a dramatic intensification since the mid-2000s of a decades-long practice of denying divorce requests. This talk discusses key findings from his new book of the same name. Michelson's analysis of almost 150,000 divorce trials reveals routine and egregious violations of China's own laws upholding the freedom of divorce, gender equality, and the protection of women's physical security. Michelson takes the reader upstream to the institutional sources of China's clampdown on divorce and downstream to its devastating and highly gendered human toll, showing how judges in an overburdened court system clear their oppressive dockets at the expense of women's lawful rights and interests.

Ethan Michelson is the James and Noriko Gines Department Chair in East Asian Languages and Cultures as well as Professor of Sociology and Law at Indiana University Bloomington, where he has been teaching courses on law and society, law and authoritarianism, and contemporary Chinese society since 2003. He has won several awards for his published research on China’s legal system.