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.
Tracy Navichoque is the Program Manager at the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi). Before coming to Stanford, Tracy was the Membership and Education Manager at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. She holds an MA in Public Diplomacy from USC and BA in History and International Studies from Northwestern University. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Uruguay and worked in education and public affairs at the binational center in Montevideo. She serves as a Gilman International Scholarship Alumni Ambassador.
Program Manager at the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi)
Democratic consolidation around the world currently faces major challenges. Threats to democracy have become more insidious, especially due to the manipulation of legal and constitutional procedures originally designed to guard democracy against arbitrary action and abuse. Free and fair elections, the cornerstone of democratic legitimacy, are under considerable stress from populism and post-truth movements, who abuse new digital communication technologies to confuse and mislead citizens. Today, free and fair elections, the primary expression of democratic will for collective government, are far from guaranteed in many countries around the world. Protecting them will require a new set of policies and actions from technological platforms, governments, and citizens.
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.
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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.
"The Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age found the rise of social media has caused irrevocable harm to global electoral integrity and democratic institutions—and the effects may get even worse," Paris Martineau writes in Wired. CDDRL's Deputy Director Stephen J. Stedman served as the Secretary-General of the Commission. Read here.
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. kofi-annan-protecting-electoral-integrity.pdf
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Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Nathaniel Persily
Nathaniel Persily
Alex Stamos
Alex Stamos
Stephen J. Stedman
Stephan Stedman
Laura Chinchilla, Yves Leterme, Noeleen Heyzer, Ory Okolloh, William Sweeney, Megan Smith, Ernesto Zedillo
Since the publication of the Journal of Democracy began in 1990, the political climate has shifted from one of democratic gains and optimism to what Larry Diamond labels a “democratic recession.” Underlying these changes has been a reorientation of the major axis of political polarization, from a left-right divide defined largely in economic terms toward a politics based on identity. In a second major shift, technological development has had unexpected effects—including that of facilitating the rise of identity-based social fragmentation. The environment for democracy has been further transformed by other slow-moving changes, among them the shift toward neoliberal economic policies, the legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lowered expectations regarding democratic transitions. Sustaining democracy will require rebuilding the legitimate authority of the institutions of liberal democracy, while resisting those powers that aspire to make nondemocratic institutions central.
Since 2006, democracy in the world has been trending downward. A number of liberal democracies are becoming less liberal, and authoritarian regimes are developing more repressive tendencies. Democracies are dying at the hands of elected authoritarian populists who neuter or take over the institutions meant to constrain them. Changes in the international environment, as well as technological developments and growing inequality, have contributed to this democratic slump. Yet mass prodemocracy protests in authoritarian and semiauthoritarian settings, from Armenia to Hong Kong to Sudan, underscore democracy's continuing appeal. Moreover, authoritarian populism has an Achilles' heel in the form of unchecked leaders' tendency to sink into venality, cronyism, and misrule. There is still an opportunity to renew democratic progress, but a return to first principles and renewed efforts on the part of the advanced democracies will be needed. Read online.
Following the death of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, five international affairs experts from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) gathered to discuss Soleimani’s prominence in Iran, the potential consequences of Soleimani’s death on the surrounding Gulf states and U.S.-Iran relations, and the rising presence of Russia and China in the region.
Several hundred people packed Encina Hall for the panel discussion, “The Strike on Soleimani: Implications for Iran, the Middle East & the World,” which was moderated by FSI Director Michael McFaul.
Soleimani was a unique figure in Iranian society, said panelist Abbas Milani, who is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford. Soleimani had perhaps a closer relationship with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini than anyone, and his assassination was a major event that transformed the country for several days.
“Iranian television and radio were constantly talking about him, and they described him as a pious soldier, and a national hero,” Milani said. “For the first time in maybe 15 years, Iran played an iconic secular song, which to most Iranians is the equivalent of ‘La Marsailles.’ Hundreds of thousands of people turned out [for Soleimani’s funeral] — it was a huge demonstration of support.”
Soleimani was portrayed by the American media in a much different way, said Colin Kahl, the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). The description of Soleimani by some U.S. news organizations as a “terrorist mastermind” is accurate to a certain degree, Kahl said, but it doesn’t fully describe his role in Iran.
“His title doesn’t really have an equivalent in the U.S., but you can think of him as a mashup between the director of the CIA, the Secretary of Defense, and the shadow Secretary of State all rolled up into one,” Kahl said. “You can imagine how escalatory it would be in our view if an American secretary of defense was killed on foreign soil by another state.”
The effects of the strike on Soleimani are reverberating throughout the Middle East, said Lisa Blaydes, who is a professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at FSI. Iraqis are very unhappy about Iranian intervention in their country and about U.S. intervention in Iran, she said.
“A national poll conducted in Iraq last year found that most Iraqis want to open up their country more to the international economy — and guess which country they are interested in having intervene to a greater extent?” Blaydes asked. “It’s not Iran, it’s not the U.S. — it’s China.”
Brett McGurk, the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at FSI and CISAC, discussed changes to the United States’ national security strategy, which outlines the major national security concerns of the United States and how the administration plans to deal with them. The strategy that was released in 2017 — when he was still working for the government — was a major shift from what it had been in previous years, he said.
“It said that we were actually going to reduce our commitments in the Middle East — that we’ve been too invested in the Middle East,” McGurk said. “It said that we were going to shift to a great power competition, which meant we were going to shift our resource focus, our diplomatic focus, and our prioritization to Asia, China, and Russia. A few months later, President Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and announced an uber-maximalist Iran policy.”
Meanwhile, other countries are beginning to expand their influence in the Middle East, Milani said. He told the audience that the degree of influence that China and Russia have in the region has never been as great as it is today.
“In 200 years, Russia never had a naval base in the Persian Gulf — but they’re about to get one,” Milani said. “Never in history has China, Russia, and Iran had joint naval operations in the Persian Gulf — but they just had one about three weeks ago. I can tell you with absolute certainty that China and Russia have never been as strong in the Persian Gulf as they are now.”
Five scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) discuss the potential consequences of Qassem Soleimani's death on the surrounding Gulf states and U.S.-Iran relations, and the rising presence of Russia and China in the region.
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.
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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.
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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.
