Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
About the topic: A major challenge faced by President Obama is how to modernize the system of global governance to adapt to the rising influence of emerging powers and to more effectively address new, cross-cutting challenges. The Obama Administration has pursued a variety of strategies in this respect from the reform of existing institutions to the creation of new multilateral processes and mechanisms. How effectively these efforts are working - and to what extent these institutions actually change the behavior of states - remains an open question. Drawing on his experiences at the National Security Council, Weinstein will discuss the Obama Administration's approach to global governance, and in particular the efforts of the Administration to shape a more effective anti-corruption regime internationally, through the G-20 and the creation of the Open Government Partnership.
About the Speaker: Jeremy Weinstein is Associate Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at FSI. He serves as director of the Center for African Studies, and is an affiliated faculty member at CDDRL and CISAC. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.
From 2009 to 2011 he served as Director for Development and Democracy on the National Security Council staff at the White House. He played a key role in the National Security Council’s work on global development, democracy and human rights, and anti-corruption. Among other issues, he also was centrally involved in the development of President Obama’s Policy Directive on Global Development and associated efforts to reform and strengthen USAID, promote economic growth, and increase the effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance; led efforts to develop a robust international anti-corruption agenda, including the creation of the G-20 Action Plan on Anti-Corruption, the Open Government Partnership, and played a significant role in developing the Administration’s policy in response to the Arab Spring, including focused work on Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and others.
CISAC Conference Room
The software was built on the premise that information is a critical asset in human rights work, but such information is liable to various forms of threats. Careful documentation of information has been destroyed by termites, volcanic eruptions and other forms of natural hazards. Digitized data is liable to be stolen by those who seek to abuse such information, and so Martus has extended security features including backups, encryption, secure communication and even a panic button to erase data quickly.
To protect documentation of activists, Martus has a database that is easy to use and has safety features including encryption, version management backup and also the ability to share information with those who are authorized. Information can also be made public, which can then be discovered by others using the Martus search engine.
The talk explored various issues that human rights workers working on sensitive issues may face, and the efforts that were taken by the Benetech team to provide the greatest possible security to sensitive information. Klingner also discussed the organizational innovations that Benetech had to make to build a wider engagement with the coder community in order to build software for public purpose through initiatives such as socialcoding4good.
The ecological position, according to Morozov has a more nuanced position on technology. It describes the affect that technology has on the whole ecology: the actors, the incentives and the institutions. The Internet is seen not just as a tool but also as a means of transforming both the environment where politics happens and those who participate in politics. A possible long-term effect is that in authoritarian regimes, the Internet may be creating a new, digital, networked public sphere. Marc Lynch suggests that, “The strongest case for the fundamentally transformative effects of the new media may lie in the general emergence of a public sphere capable of eroding the ability of states to monopolize information and argument, of pushing for transparency and accountability and of facilitating new networks across society.”
Morozov suggested that we should not over-estimate the role that is played by the Internet. He suggested, “If a tree falls in a forest and everybody tweets about it, it may not mean that the tweets caused the tree to fall.” For example, Morozov argued that sometimes the system is almost dead when people start protesting. It is not that the protestors actually caused the system to fall. Morozov further questioned whether the Internet is facilitating the emergence of decentralized and leaderless political structures.
In addressing the Internet Freedom agenda, Morozov stressed the following points to policymakers:
Morozov is the author of ‘Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom’ and is a visiting scholar with the Program on Liberation Technology at CDDRL.
The Film's Mission
This film is meant to be a wakeup call for humanity, to help develop an understanding of the realities of the nuclear weapon, to explore ways of presenting the answers for “a way beyond” and to facilitate a dialogue moving towards resolution of this Gordian knot of nuclear weapons gripping the world. The documentary’s characters are the narrative voices, interwoven with highly visual sequences of archival and contemporary footage and animation. The story is a morality play, telling the struggle waged over the past six and half decades with the last act yet to be determined, of trying to find what is “the way beyond?”
Director's Statement
“In My Lifetime” takes on the complex realities of “the nuclear world”, and searches internationally for an answer to the question is there a Way Beyond? This documentary is part wake up call, part challenge for people to engage with the issue of ridding the world of the most destructive weapon ever invented.
In February 2008, I began a journey to film and report on the story of the inner workings of the nuclear world. There has been a re-emergence of the realization that a world with nuclear weapons, including a proliferation of fissile nuclear materials, is a very dangerous place. Of course this realization has been known since the creation of the atomic bomb. It continues to be a struggle which has not been resolved.
This is a very complex issue with many voices, speaking from many perspectives, representing the forces and entrenched institutions in the nuclear states, not to speak of the rest of the world’s nations some of them with nuclear power capable of producing their own fissile materials and now there is the danger of so called “non-state actors”, who want to get their hands on the nuclear fissile materials necessary to create nuclear weapons. Today the materials and technology to make nuclear weapons are more readily available than any government who possess them would like one to believe.
At this writing it there are new developments in this parallel nuclear world, with a new emergence of the debate as to what has to change and steps need to be taken to move away from nuclear weapons. Since over the past year there definitely has been movement towards dealing with the reality, as a result this project has been able to record the changes taking place.
Following the screening, Robert Frye (the film's Director) will discuss the film with the audience.
For more information about the film, please visit the Nuclear World Project website.
CISAC Conference Room
Computers and the networks that connect them are powerful storehouses of information. They're also vulnerable to sabotage, and the data they handle can be stolen, altered or erased. President Obama has called cyberattacks "one of the most serious economic and national security threats our nation faces."
To help tackle the problem, researchers at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation are exploring issues in cybersecurity and keeping a close eye on the policy discussions. Earlier this month, CISAC brought together a group of lawmakers and industry leaders from Silicon Valley to discuss new efforts to prevent cyberespionage and related crimes.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) talked about a bill he’s introduced to safeguard technology. "The intelligence community believes strongly that it's just a matter of time before we have a catastrophic cyberattack," said Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "We have admired this problem for a very long time and it's time to do something."
Among the other speakers were Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini, and security experts from Google, Cisco Systems and Oracle.
After the invitation-only event, CISAC's Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Otellini and Rogers discussed the future of the Internet, the scope of the cyberthreat and government's role in defending against it. Excerpts:
There are core questions about where the world is going
"Cybersecurity problems are real and they’re immediate. And the threats are probably growing and the problems we face require solutions. But it’s just as important to think about where we’re going to be 20 to 30 years from now as it is to deal with the immediate problems. That’s because the choices we make about how to secure cyberspace are going to be choices about what your identity will be online, what powers government will have, what nation states will be able to do to each other, what companies will be able to do when they deal with cyberthreats, how aggressively they will be able to respond on their own -- those are essentially choices about the architecture of the world. So it's useful for us to understand as scholars and as people engaged in policy, that choices about cybersecurity are not just technical. They’re really core questions about where is the world going."
-- Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, co-director, Center for International Security and Cooperation
Preventing electronic pickpockets
"On the commercial side it's no secret that there's industrial espionage going on through cyberhacking. There are also rogue groups that are not nation states, but people who just want to steal your identity. So the ability to see those attacks coming, to see those profiles coming, and to be able to improve the quality of the computer network and the phone networks and the phones themselves will also allow us to protect our own intellectual property as companies, and protect the identity and potentially the financial assets of our collective customers. When your cell phone is your wallet -- as it will be in the not-too-distant future -- all of a sudden that's like having an electronic pickpocket. An attack is going to compromise everything you have. Beyond that, many large technology firms feel that as good corporate citizens and as good local citizens, we have a responsibility to try and make sure the world's computer networks are not disrupted. If computers aren’t trusted, we don't have much of a business. We are commercially incentivized to make all this stuff so much better."
-- Paul Otellini, chief executive officer, Intel.
We can be a partner with industry
"Individually, a company gets hacked for espionage purposes -- that's a criminal event. Collectively, it becomes a national security issue because of the sheer volume of intellectual property that would be compromised. You also have the other level: a disruptive cyberattack that shuts down certain capabilities, whether it's financial, in the energy sector or otherwise. We've fought this fight with dot-gov and dot-mil for quite a long time. Dot-com has, too, but they've been a bit on their own. This proposal has the government weighing in and saying, 'Hey, maybe we can be a partner.'"
-- Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
About the topic: Standards and regulations for the management, transportation and disposal of radioactive materials have been key to the development of strategies for the handling and disposing of radioactive materials at the “back-end” of the nuclear fuel cycle. This presentation summarizes previous U.S. experience in developing a standard and regulations for the geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The main purpose of a standard and its implementing regulations should be to protect human health and the environment, but the structure of the standard and regulations, as well as the standard-of-proof for compliance, should not extend beyond what is scientifically possible and reasonable. The demonstration of compliance must not only be compelling, but it must also be able to sustain scientific and public scrutiny. We can benefit from the sobering reality of how difficult it is to project the future behavior of a geologic repository over extended spatial and temporal scales that stretch over tens of kilometers and out to a million years.
About the Speaker: Rodney Ewing is the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. He was appointed to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Obama on July 28, 2011.
He has faculty appointments in the departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences and Materials Science & Engineering and is an Emeritus Regents' Professor at the University of New Mexico, where he was a member of the faculty from 1974 to 1997. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Mineralogical Society of America, the American Geophysical Union, the Geochemical Society, the American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Materials Research Society.
CISAC Conference Room
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E203
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
Rod Ewing was the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security and Co-Director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. He was also the Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he had faculty appointments in the Departments of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences and Materials Science & Engineering. He was a Regents' Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, where he was a member of the faculty from 1974 to 1997. Ewing received a B.S. degree in geology from Texas Christian University (1968, summa cum laude) and M.S. (l972) and Ph.D. (l974, with distinction) degrees from Stanford University where he held an NSF Fellowship. His graduate studies focused on an esoteric group of minerals, metamict Nb-Ta-Ti oxides, which are unusual because they have become amorphous due to radiation damage caused by the presence of radioactive elements. Over the past thirty years, the early study of these unusual minerals has blossomed into a broadly-based research program on radiation effects in complex ceramic materials. In 2001, the work on radiation-resistant ceramics was recognized by the DOE, Office of Science – Decades of Discovery as one of the top 101 innovations during the previous 25 years. This has led to the development of techniques to predict the long-term behavior of materials, such as those used in radioactive waste disposal.
He was the author or co-author of over 750 research publications and the editor or co-editor of 18 monographs, proceedings volumes or special issues of journals. He had published widely in mineralogy, geochemistry, materials science, nuclear materials, physics and chemistry in over 100 different ISI journals. He was granted a patent for the development of a highly durable material for the immobilization of excess weapons plutonium. He was a Founding Editor of the magazine, Elements, which is now supported by 17 earth science societies. He was a Principal Editor for Nano LIFE, an interdisciplinary journal focused on collaboration between physical and medical scientists. In 2014, he was named a Founding Executive Editor of Geochemical Perspective Letters and appointed to the Editorial Advisory Board of Applied Physics Reviews.
Ewing had received the Hawley Medal of the Mineralogical Association of Canada in 1997 and 2002, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2006, the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006, a Honorary Doctorate from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2007, the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2015, Ian Campbell Medal of the American Geoscience Institute, 2015, the Medal of Excellence in Mineralogical Sciences from the International Mineralogical Association in 2015, the Distinguished Public Service Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America in 2019, and was a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was also a fellow of the Geological Society of America, Mineralogical Society of America, Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, American Geophysical Union, Geochemical Society, American Ceramic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Materials Research Society. He was elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.
He was president of the Mineralogical Society of America (2002) and the International Union of Materials Research Societies (1997-1998). He was the President of the American Geoscience Institute (2018). Ewing had served on the Board of Directors of the Geochemical Society, the Board of Governors of the Gemological Institute of America and the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
He was co-editor of and a contributing author of Radioactive Waste Forms for the Future (North-Holland Physics, Amsterdam, 1988) and Uncertainty Underground – Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste (MIT Press, 2006). Professor Ewing had served on thirteen National Research Council committees and board for the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that have reviewed issues related to nuclear waste and nuclear weapons. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama to serve as the Chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which is responsible for ongoing and integrated technical review of DOE activities related to transporting, packaging, storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste; he stepped down from the Board in 2017.
