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Cybersecurity talk draws business and political leaders to Stanford CISAC

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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. 

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Standards & Regulations for Yucca Mountain: What Went Wrong?

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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

Rodney C. Ewing

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E203
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-8641
0
1946-2024
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security
Professor of Geological Sciences
rodewingheadshot2014.jpg MS, PhD

      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.

https://profiles.stanford.edu/rodney-ewing

Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
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Rodney Ewing Edward H. Kraus Distinguished University Professor, University of Michigan; Member, Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board; Affiliate, CISAC Speaker
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2012 Robert G. Wesson Lecture - Michael Manley: Decolonization and the International Politics of Sovereignty

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Anthony Bogues is currently the Harmon Family Professor of Africana Studies and affiliated Professor of Political Science and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and a Visiting Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is also a Honorary Professor at the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa  and Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

His books are: Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (1997); Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (2003); and Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom and Desire ( 2010).  He is the editor of two volumes of Caribbean intellectual history, After Man - The Human: Critical Essays on the Thought of Sylvia Wynter (2006); and The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonization (2011). He has published over 60 essays in the fields of intellectual history, political theory, cultural and literary history and is an associate editor of the journal Small Axe and member of the editorial collective of the journal Boundary 2.

He recently co-curated a national exhibition on Haitian Art, titled, Reframing Haiti –Art, History and Performativity.  He is currently working on three major projects, a political/philosophical project on questions of the human, freedom, human emancipation and the black intellectual tradition; co-curating a major exhibition on Haitian art for 2014 in Paris and Cape Town, South Africa; and an intellectual/political biography of Michael Manley and Jamaican postcolonial politics.

Professor Bogues served as chief of staff to then Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley.

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Anthony Bogues Harmon Family Professor, Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University Speaker
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Tavneet Suri- Liberation Technology Seminar Series

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Tavneet Suri is a development economist, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Broadly, she studies the evolution of markets and various market failures in these economies. In particular, her main areas of focus are agriculture and formal and informal financial access. For example, she has worked on the adoption of seed technologies in Kenya and the extent of informal risk pooling mechanisms in rural Kenya. Her ongoing research includes understanding the adoption and impact of mobile money (M-PESA) in Kenya; the role of infrastructure in agricultural markets in Sierra Leone; the diffusion of improved coffee farming practices through social networks in Rwanda; the role of different types of formal and informal collateral in credit markets for assets in Kenya. She regularly spends time in the field, managing her various research projects and data collection activities.

Tavneet is a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER, an Affiliate of BREAD, J-PAL and CEPR, and Co-Director of Agriculture Research Program at the International Growth Center.

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Abstract:
The Government of India is embarking on an ambitious program to provide all residents with a biometric unique ID (UID) to improve beneficiary experiences in public programs. The Andhra Pradesh Smartcard Program is the longest-running biometric electronic benefits transfer (EBT) initiative in India and the experiences from Andhra Pradesh can therefore provide key insights into the process and impact of implementing such a biometrically authenticated payment system. The Andhra Pradesh Smartcard Study is a large-scale randomized evaluation of the impact of using biometric smartcards on beneficiary welfare and has been underway for 18 months at this point. Professor Muralidharan will present preliminary results from this research focusing on the insights gained from studying the process of rolling out Smartcards in Andhra Pradesh.

Karthik Muralidharan is an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego where he has been on the faculty since 2008.Born and raised in India, he earned an A.B. in economics (summa cum laude) from Harvard, an M.Phil. in economics from Cambridge (UK), and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Junior Affiliate at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), a Member of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) network, an Affiliate at the Center of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA), and a Research Affiliate with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA).

Prof. Muralidharan's primary research interests include development, public, and labor economics. Specific topics of interest include education, health, and social protection; measuring quality of public service delivery; program evaluation; and improving the effectiveness of public spending (with a focus on developing countries). Courses taught include undergraduate and graduate classes in development economics, program evaluation, and the economics of education.

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Respect for Context

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Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media. Nissenbaum's research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. She has written and edited four books, including Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, which was published in 2010 by Stanford University Press. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, including search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.

Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

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Helen Nissenbaum Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science Speaker New York University
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Combating Cyber Insecurity Around the Globe

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Christopher Painter has been on the vanguard of cyber issues for twenty years. Most recently, Mr. Painter served in the White House as Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy in the National Security Staff. During his two years at the White House, Mr. Painter was a senior member of the team that conducted the President's Cyberspace Policy Review and subsequently served as Acting Cybersecurity Coordinator. He coordinated the development of a forthcoming international strategy for cyberspace and chaired high-level interagency groups devoted to international and other cyber issues.

Mr. Painter began his federal career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles where he led some of the most high profile and significant cybercrime prosecutions in the country, including the prosecution of notorious computer hacker Kevin Mitnick. He subsequently helped lead the case and policy efforts of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the U.S. Department of Justice and served, for a short time, as Deputy Assistant Director of the F.B.I.'s Cyber Division. For over ten years, Mr. Painter has been a leader in international cyber issues. He has represented the United States in numerous international fora, including Chairing the cutting edge G8 High Tech Crime Subgroup since 2002. He has worked with dozens of foreign governments in bi-lateral meetings and has been a frequent spokesperson and presenter on cyber issues around the globe. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Cornell University.

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Tools of Change: How the Internet Helped Shape the Arab Spring

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Abstract
The Internet has served as a tool in the struggle for freedom in the Arab Spring uprisings, from Tunisia--where bloggers made sure the struggle was heard around the world--to Syria, where revolutionaries have used YouTube to fill in the gaps the mainstream media has been unable to report. Though not a catalyst, social media has nonetheless played a role in organizing and disseminating information from protests this past year, from Tahrir Square to Zucotti Park.

Jillian York has studied the powerful role of social media in the Arab Spring, as well as the drawbacks of these dynamic tools, and speaks to their use throughout the past year in the Middle East and North Africa.


Jillian C. York is Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), where her work focuses on a range of issues including government Internet censorship, corporate social responsibility, export controls, surveillance technology, and online safety. She writes regularly about these and related issues for publications including Al Jazeera English, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, and Al Akhbar English.

York is also a contributor to and on the board of Global Voices Online. Prior to joining the EFF, she worked at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society on a number of projects including the OpenNet Initiative and Herdict.

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Jillian York Author and Director for International Freedom of Expression Speaker Electronic Frontier Foundation
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An Evening With the Knights

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Abstract:
Stanford’s Knight fellowship program offers a unique opportunity for experienced journalists a space to rethink journalism by providing the space and time to innovate. Five teams of Knight fellows will share their ideas on using technology to push the boundaries of journalism. They will discuss ideas to empower non-professional journalists to create compelling news stories for the new media, using technology to share government information across boundaries, circumventing censorship and other ideas.

Presentations will be made by:

Grima Fantaye
Djordje Padejski
Deepa Fernandes
Emad Mekay
Michelle Holmes

and their teams.

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Knight Fellows Speaker Stanford University
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