Stanford University

Lunch Seminar Series | Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age: The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

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Join Stephen Stedman, Nathaniel Persily, the Cyber Policy Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) in an enlightening exploration of the recent report, Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age, put out by the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. Moderated by Kelly Born, Executive Director of the Cyber Policy Center.

More on the report:

 

Abstract:

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.

About the Speakers

Stephen Stedman
Stephen Stedman is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, professor, by courtesy, of political science, and deputy director of the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law. Professor Stedman currently serves as the Secretary General of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, and is the principal drafter of the Commission’s report, “Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age.”

Professor Stedman served as a special adviser and assistant secretary general of the United Nations, where he helped to create the United Nations Peacebuilding Commission, the UN’s Peacebuilding Support Office, the UN’s Mediation Support Office, the Secretary’s General’s Policy Committee, and the UN’s counterterrorism strategy. During 2005 his office successfully negotiated General Assembly approval of the Responsibility to Protect. From 2010 to 2012, he directed the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, an international body mandated to promote and protect the integrity of elections worldwide.  Professor Stedman served as Chair of the Stanford Faculty Senate in 2018-2019. He and his wife Corinne Thomas are the Resident Fellows in Crothers, Stanford’s academic theme house for Global Citizenship. In 2018, Professor Stedman was awarded the Lloyd B. Dinkelspiel Award for outstanding service to undergraduate education at Stanford.

Nathaniel Persily

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, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.

Also among the commissioners of the report were FSI's Alex Stamos, and Toomas Ilves. 

 

 

Stephen Stedman

Lunch Seminar Series | The DigiChina Project on Digital Policy and U.S.–China Relations

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Abstract:

China’s cyberspace and technology regime is going through a period of change—but it’s taking a while. The U.S.–China economic and tech competition both influences Chinese government developments and awaits their outcomes, and the 2017 Cybersecurity Law set up a host of still-unresolved questions. Data governance, security standards, market access, compliance, and other questions saw only modest new clarity in 2019. But 2020 promises new laws on personal information protection and data security, and the Stanford-based DigiChina Project in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, is devoted to monitoring, translating, and explaining these developments. From AI governance to the the nexus of cybersecurity and supply chains, this talk will summarize recent Chinese policymaking and lay out expectations for the year to come.

Graham Webster
About the Speaker:

Graham Webster is editor in chief of the Stanford–New America DigiChina Project at the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center and a China digital economy fellow at New America. He was previously a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale Law School, where he was responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center’s U.S.–China Track 2 and Track 1.5 dialogues for five years before leading programming on cyberspace and technology issues. In the past, he wrote a CNET News blog on technology and society from Beijing, worked at the Center for American Progress, and taught East Asian politics at NYU's Center for Global Affairs. Webster holds a master's degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. Webster also writes the independent Transpacifica e-mail newsletter.

Graham Webster

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Research Scholar
Graham Webster

Graham Webster is a research scholar in the Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He researches, writes, and teaches on technology policy in China and US-China relations.

Before bringing DigiChina to Stanford in 2019, he was its cofounder and coordinating editor at New America, where he was a China digital economy fellow. From 2012 to 2017, Webster worked for Yale Law School as a senior fellow and lecturer responsible for the Paul Tsai China Center’s Track II dialogues between the United States and China and co-taught seminars on contemporary China and Chinese law and policy. While there, he was an affiliated fellow with the Yale Information Society Project, a visiting scholar at China Foreign Affairs University, and a Transatlantic Digital Debates fellow with New America and the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. He was previously an adjunct instructor teaching East Asian politics at New York University and a Beijing-based journalist writing on the Internet in China for CNET News. 

In recent years, Webster's writing has been published in MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs, Slate, The Wire China, The Information, Tech Policy Press, and Foreign Policy. He has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg and spoken to NPR and BBC World Service. Webster has testified before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission and speaks regularly at universities and conferences in North America, East Asia, and Europe. His chapter, "What Is at Stake in the US–China Technological Relationship?" appears in The China Questions II (Harvard University Press, 2022).

Webster holds a bachelor's in journalism and international studies from Northwestern University and a master's in East Asian studies from Harvard University. He took doctoral coursework in political science at the University of Washington and language training at Tsinghua University, Peking University, Stanford University, and Kanda University of International Studies.

Editor-in-Chief, DigiChina
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Graham Webster

Cyber Reading Group Seminar: Process and Prospects for the UN Group of Government Experts and the UN Open-Ended Working Group

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Multilateral Negotiations on ICTs (information and communications technologies) and International Security: Process and Prospects for the UN Group of Government Experts and the UN Open-Ended Working Group

Abstract: The intent of this seminar is to provide an update on recent events at the UN relevant to international discussions of cybersecurity (and a primer of sorts on current UN processes for addressing this topic).

In 2018, UN Member States decided to establish two concurrent negotiations with nearly identical mandates on the international security dimension of ICTs—a sixth limited membership UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and an Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) open to all governments. How did this happen? Are they competing or complementary endeavors? Is it likely that one will be able to bridge the longstanding divides on how international law applies to cyberspace or agree by consensus to additional norms of responsible State behavior? What would be a good outcome of each process? And how do these negotiations fit into the wider UN ecosystem, including the follow-up to the Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Digital Cooperation.  

Kerstin Vignard
About the Speaker: Kerstin Vignard is an international security policy professional with nearly 25 years’ experience at the United Nations, with a particular interest in the nexus of international security policy and technology. Vignard is Deputy to the Director at UNIDIR, currently on temporary assignment leading UNIDIR’s team supporting the Chairmen of the latest Group of Governmental Experts (GGEs) on Cyber Security and the Open-Ended Working Group. She has led UNIDIR’s team supporting four previous cyber GGEs. From 2013 to 2018, she initiated and led UNIDIR’s work on the weaponization of increasingly autonomous technologies, and is the co-Principal Investigator of a CIFAR AI & Society grant examining potential regulatory approaches for security and defence applications of AI.

CNN Perspective with Andy Grotto: Why unlocking Apple iPhones for law enforcement isn't the answer

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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.

Full Text at CNN

 

 

 

 

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Andrew Grotto

Lunch Seminar Series | Algorithm Skills: What are They and How Do We Measure Them?

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Abstract:

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.

Eszter Hargittai
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.

 

Elections Globally Are Under Threat. Here's How to Protect Them

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"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.

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Demystifying China

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Livestream: Registration is required and will close 24 hours before the event. Click here to register.

This event is available only to CISAC faculty, fellows, staff, and honors students.

 

About this Event: Jeopardizing U.S. research enterprises, provoking regional nationalism, and building a technological panopticon to rate every citizen's behavior: these assumptions about China fuel US foreign policy shadow-boxing with misplaced concerns. Our panel challenges prevalent narratives on China, providing informed, nuanced investigations that cut across a range of research methods. Julien de Troullioud's argues that the rise of China in science and technology is not a threat to the US but instead an opportunity to jointly work to solve global issues. Data shows that the current policies to protect the US research enterprise in science is hurting American and international scientific research. Xinru Ma finds that nationalism in China and in Southeast Asia are not necessarily all anti-foreign, and is more of a liability rather than an asset for domestic regimes, according to evidences from formal modeling and social media data. Shazeda Ahmed's interviews with Chinese government officials, tech firm representatives, and legal scholars reveal that the Chinese social credit system is more limited in its data collection and fragmented in its on-the-ground implementation than the dystopic institution its foreign critics presume it to be. Our research presents new data and fresh perspectives for rethinking US-China dynamics.

 

About the Speakers:

Shazeda Ahmed is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley who researches how tech firms and the Chinese government are collaboratively constructing the country's social credit system. She will be joining CISAC and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence in Fall 2019 as a pre-doctoral Fellow. Shazeda has worked as a researcher for the Citizen Lab, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, and the Ranking Digital Rights corporate transparency review by New America. In the 2018-19 academic year she was a Fulbright fellow at Peking University's law school.

 

Xinru Ma is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Political Science and International Relations (POIR) program at University of Southern California, and will join CISAC as a Postdoctoral Fellow for 2019-2020. Originally from China, Xinru is interested in combining formal modeling and computational social science with research on nationalist protests and maritime disputes, with a regional focus on East and Southeast Asia. Her research is informed by extensive field research in Vietnam, Philippines and China, during which she interviewed protestors, think tanks, diplomats, government officials, and foreign business owners that were impacted by nationalist protests. In addition to informing her of the complicated strategic interaction between mass mobilization, government repression and foreign policy-making, the field research further motivated her to focus on the methodological challenges for causal inference that stem from strategic conflict behavior. More broadly, Xinru is interested in public opinion and new methods of measuring it, foreign policy formation, alliance politics, East Asian security dynamics, and the historical relations of East Asia. 

 

Julien de Troullioud de Lanversin will be joining CISAC as a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow. Julien is finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He is interested in how to verify and reconstruct past fissile material production programs with scientific tools. To that end, he developed innovative methods that use isotopic analysis from nuclear reactors to gain information on their past operation (nuclear archeology) and designed an open source software that can compute the istopic composition of fissile materials from nuclear reactors. His current research looks at the various modalities of the production of plutonium and tritium in production reactors and how transparency on tritium could be used to improve estimates on plutonium stockpiles. Julien also studies security questions related to civil and military nuclear programs in Northeast Asia through the lens of fissile material, with a focus on China and North Korea. Julien visited the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technologies at Tsinghua University for one semester in 2018 to collaborate with Chinese experts on work related to nuclear engineering and arms control. Julien’s work on nuclear archaeology has been published in the Journal of Science and Global Security. He received his Diplôme d’Ingénieur (M.Sc. And B.Sc.Eng.) from Ecole Centrale de Marseille in 2014. The same year he also obtained a M.Sc. in Nuclear Science and Engineering from the University of Tsinghua where he was a recipient of the Chinese Government Scholarship. Julien speaks and uses Chinese in his research and is a native French speaker.

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Shazeda Ahmed, Xinru Ma, Julien de Troullioud de Lanversin
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Bipartisan US support for Ukraine at risk as Republicans echo Kremlin

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Speaking on Monday about Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, Ukraine’s foreign minister said “please don’t drag us into your [America’s] internal political processes.”  Unfortunately, Republicans appear intent on doing precisely that, as they repeat the false Russian claim that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 US election.

Republicans see this as part of their effort to defend President Trump. In doing so, they put at risk America’s long-standing support for its Ukrainian partner.

The US government and large bipartisan majorities in Congress have backed Ukraine since the early 1990s, when it regained independence following the Soviet Union’s collapse. By the end of the decade, Congressionally-approved assistance for Ukraine had reached USD 300-400 million per year.

When Ukrainians took to the streets in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity, their striving for democracy won interest and support from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill.

Such Congressional support offered Kyiv grounds for comfort when Trump became president in 2017. Candidate Trump had suggested he might recognize the illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia. He also questioned the sanctions imposed on Moscow for its seizure of Crimea and subsequent aggression in eastern Ukraine.

Despite Trump’s apparent skepticism about Ukraine and his reluctance to criticize Vladimir Putin (or Russian actions), Congress continued to back Ukraine. It regularly voted by wide margins to approve funding for reform and military assistance for Kyiv while pressing the administration to bolster sanctions on Russia.

Things took a turn last September with the revelation of Trump’s effort to extort Ukraine’s president into investigating his possible 2020 political opponent by withholding an Oval Office visit and military assistance. The president’s alleged abuse of power led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives in December.

I visited Kyiv in late October during the period between the private depositions of US officials about Trump’s actions and the public House hearings. While in Kyiv, I spoke with a number of Ukrainians including senior officials. Developments in Washington make them nervous about the depth and resilience of US support, especially as Kyiv sees the United States as the only geopolitical counterweight to its aggressive Russian neighbor.

I tried to assure my Ukrainian interlocutors that, whatever President Trump did, they had an ace in the hole: the bipartisan support their country enjoyed from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. This was support that, if necessary, would produce veto-proof votes to aid Ukraine. Today, I am not so sure.

It has long been clear that Trump buys Moscow’s disinformation line that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election. It is true that individual Ukrainian officials criticized candidate Trump, just as officials from many European countries did. But it was Russian intelligence agencies, with Putin’s approval, that hacked the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails and gave them to Wikileaks. It is Russia’s Internet Research Agency that used social media to sow division among Americans.

However, in November and December as they sought to defend Trump against impeachment, Republicans began to make the Russian argument that Ukraine had interfered. There were many examples of this from Republicans who will sit in judgment as the Senate conducts the impeachment trial. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) commented, “I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.” Meanwhile, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) argued, “There’s no difference in the way Russians put their finger early on, on the scale and how Ukrainian officials did it,” and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stated bluntly, “Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election.”

We can expect more such charges in the coming days. Republicans have put themselves on a slippery slope as regards support for Ukraine.

 

Will Republicans who assert that the Ukrainian government interfered in the US election vote in the future to approve assistance for Ukraine? And, if they can separate their espousal of the Kremlin’s talking point from their votes on assistance, how do they defend to constituents and others less sympathetic to Ukraine a vote to assist the country that they say interfered in the 2016 US election?

This is dangerous ground that could undermine US support for a country whose success is in America’s national interest.

Steven Pifer, a William Perry research fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, is a former US ambassador to Ukraine.

 

Read the Rest at The Atlantic Council

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Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age | The Report of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

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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.

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Nathaniel Persily
Alex Stamos
Stephen J. Stedman

In the Wake of Soleimani’s Death, Experts Discuss What’s Next for Iran, the U.S., and the Middle East

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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.” 



Related: Listen to Abbas Milani discuss Iran’s response to the strike against Soleimani, Iran's economic and political troubles, and why Soleimani’s death is a big deal on the World Class podcast.

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Panelists Colin Kahl, Abbas Milani, Lisa Blaydes and Brett McGurk shared their perspectives on what the future of U.S.-Iran relations may entail with moderator Michael McFaul (far left) at the Freeman Spogli Institute on January 10, 2020
Panelists Colin Kahl, Abbas Milani, Lisa Blaydes and Brett McGurk shared their perspectives on what the future of U.S.-Iran relations may entail with moderator Michael McFaul (far left) at the Freeman Spogli Institute on January 10, 2020. Photo: Ari Chasnoff
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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.

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