Join the Cyber Policy Center and moderator  Daniel Bateyko in conversation with Karen Nershi for How Strong Are International Standards in Practice?:  Evidence from Cryptocurrency Transactions. 

The rise of cryptocurrency (decentralized digital currency) presents challenges for state regulators given its connection to illegal activity and pseudonymous nature, which has allowed both individuals and businesses to circumvent national laws through regulatory arbitrage. Karen Nershi assess the degree to which states have managed to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges, providing a detailed study of international efforts to impose common regulatory standards for a new technology. To do so, she introduces a dataset of cryptocurrency transactions collected during a two-month period in 2020 from exchanges in countries around the world and employ bunching estimation to compare levels of unusual activity below a threshold at which exchanges must screen customers for money laundering risk. She finds that exchanges in some, but not all, countries show substantial unusual activity below the threshold; these findings suggest that while countries have made progress toward regulating cryptocurrency exchanges, gaps in enforcement across countries allow for regulatory arbitrage. 

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person (Stanford-affiliation required) and virtual attendance (open to the public) is available; registration is required.

Karen Nershi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Stanford Internet Observatory and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). In the summer of 2021, she completed her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in the fields of international relations and comparative politics. Through an empirical lens, her research examines questions of international cooperation and regulation within international political economy, including challenges emerging from the adoption of decentralized digital currency and other new technologies. 

Specific topics Dr. Nershi explores in her research include ransomware, cross-national regulation of the cryptocurrency sector, and international cooperation around anti-money laundering enforcement. Her research has been supported by the University of Pennsylvania GAPSA Provost Fellowship for Innovation and the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics. 

Before beginning her doctorate, Karen Nershi earned a B.A. in International Studies with honors at the University of Alabama. She lived and studied Arabic in Amman, Jordan and Meknes, Morocco as a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow and a Critical Language Scholarship recipient. She also lived and studied in Mannheim, Germany, in addition to interning at the U.S. Consulate General Frankfurt (Frankfurt, Germany).

Dan Bateyko is the Special Projects Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Dan worked previously as a Research Coordinator for The Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, where he investigated Immigration and Customs Enforcement surveillance practices, co-authoring American Dragnet: Data-Drive Deportation in the 21st Century. He has worked at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, the Dangerous Speech Project, and as a research assistant for Amanda Levendowski, whom he assisted with legal scholarship on facial surveillance.

In 2016, he received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. He spent his fellowship year talking with people about digital surveillance and Internet infrastructure in South Korea, China, Malaysia, Germany, Ghana, Russia, and Iceland. His writing has appeared in Georgetown Tech Law Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Dazed Magazine, The Internet Health Report, Council on Foreign Relations' Net Politics, and Global Voices. He is a 2022 Internet Law & Policy Foundry Fellow.

Dan received his Masters of Law & Technology from Georgetown University Law Center (where he received the IAPP Westin Scholar Book Award for excellence in Privacy Law), and his B.A. from Middlebury College.

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Alex Stamos in conversation with Ronald E. Robertson for Engagement Outweighs Exposure to Partisan and Unreliable News within Google Search 

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person (Stanford-affiliation required) and virtual attendance (open to the public) is available; registration is required.

If popular online platforms systematically expose their users to partisan and unreliable news, they could potentially contribute to societal issues like rising political polarization. This concern is central to the echo chamber and filter bubble debates, which critique the roles that user choice and algorithmic curation play in guiding users to different online information sources. These roles can be measured in terms of exposure, the URLs seen while using an online platform, and engagement, the URLs selected while on that platform or browsing the web more generally. However, due to the challenges of obtaining ecologically valid exposure data--what real users saw during their regular platform use--studies in this vein often only examine engagement data, or estimate exposure via simulated behavior or inference. Despite their centrality to the contemporary information ecosystem, few such studies have focused on web search, and even fewer have examined both exposure and engagement on any platform. To address these gaps, we conducted a two-wave study pairing surveys with ecologically valid measures of exposure and engagement on Google Search during the 2018 and 2020 US elections. We found that participants' partisan identification had a small and inconsistent relationship with the amount of partisan and unreliable news they were exposed to on Google Search, a more consistent relationship with the search results they chose to follow, and the most consistent relationship with their overall engagement. That is, compared to the news sources our participants were exposed to on Google Search, we found more identity-congruent and unreliable news sources in their engagement choices, both within Google Search and overall. These results suggest that exposure and engagement with partisan or unreliable news on Google Search are not primarily driven by algorithmic curation, but by users' own choices.

Dr. Ronald E Robertson received his Ph.D. in Network Science from Northeastern University in 2021. He was advised by Christo Wilson, a computer scientist, and David Lazer, a political scientist. For his research, Dr. Robertson uses computational tools, behavioral experiments, and qualitative user studies to measure user activity, algorithmic personalization, and choice architecture in online platforms. By rooting his questions in findings and frameworks from the social, behavioral, and network sciences, his goal is to foster a deeper and more widespread understanding of how humans and algorithms interact in digital spaces. Prior to Northeastern, Dr. Robertson obtained a BA in Psychology from the University of California San Diego and worked with research psychologist Robert Epstein at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.

Join the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) and moderator Andrew Grotto, in conversation with L. Jean Camp for Create a Market for Safe, Secure Software. 

This session is part of the Fall Seminar Series, a months-long series designed to bring researchers, policy makers, scholars and industry professionals together to share research, findings and trends in the cyber policy space. Both in-person (Stanford-affiliation required) and virtual attendance (open to the public) is available; registration is required.

Today the security market, particularly in embedded software and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is a lemons market.  Buyers simply cannot distinguish between secure and insecure products. To enable the market for secure high quality products to thrive,  buyers need to have some knowledge of the contents of these digital products. Once purchased, ensuring a product or software package remains safe requires knowing if these include publicly disclosed vulnerabilities. Again this requires knowledge of the contents.  When consumers do not know the contents of their digital products, they can not know if they are at risk and need to take action.

The Software Bill of Materials  is a proposal that was identified as a critical instrument for meeting these challenges and securing software supply chains in the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity} by the Biden Administration (EO 14028. In this presentation Camp will introduce SBOMs, provide examples, and explain the components that are needed in the marketplace for this initiative to meet its potential.

Jean Camp is a Professor at Indiana University with appointments in Informatics and Computer Science.  She is a Fellow of the AAAS (2017), the IEEE (2018), and the ACM (2021).  She joined Indiana after eight years at Harvard’s Kennedy School. A year after earning her doctorate from Carnegie Mellon she served as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She began her career as an engineer at Catawba Nuclear Station after a double major in electrical engineering and mathematics, followed by a MSEE in optoelectronics at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.