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.

Corruption is rampant in many authoritarian regimes, leading to the widespread perception that autocrats have little incentive or ability to curb government wrongdoing. Yet meaningful anti-corruption efforts by nondemocratic governments are more common and more often successful than is widely assumed.

In this talk, Christopher Carothers draws on extensive documentary research to argue that Xi Jinping’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign in China, despite its limitations, has been effective at curbing bribery, embezzlement, and other illicit practices since 2012. Moreover, although corruption control is often thought to rely on democratic or quasi-democratic institutions constraining power, Xi’s campaign has succeeded through a top-down, authoritarian approach. The outcomes of this signature Xi policy, Carothers explains, hold broader implications for our thinking about China’s future direction.

This talk is based on Carothers’ first book, Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons From East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Christopher Carothers is a political scientist conducting research on authoritarian politics with a regional focus on China and East Asia. His research has been published in Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of East Asian Studies, the Journal of Contemporary China, Politics and Society, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and other leading publications. Dr. Carothers received his PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2019 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China.

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.