The unprecedented rapid rate of scientific progress is creating new opportunities for transnational criminal and terrorist organizations to exploit advances in technology for unintended nefarious purposes. While much research has been dedicated on the common cyber security threats of today, little if any study has been devoted to next generation forms of technological crime and terrorism.

This discussion will provide an engaging and entertaining futurist perspective on the effects technological progress on crime, policing and national security. Specific topics to be covered include the criminal and terrorist implications of emerging technologies such as robotics, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, the human genome, virtual worlds, the social data revolution and ubiquitous computing.

Speaker Biography: Marc Goodman is a global thinker, writer and consultant focused on the disruptive impact of advancing technologies on security, business and international affairs.  Over the past twenty years, he has built his expertise in next generation security threats such as cyber crime and cyber terrorism working with organizations such as Interpol, the United Nations, NATO, the Los Angeles Police Department and the U.S. Government.  Marc provides a front seat view into the digital underground and insights into the emerging technological, geopolitical, and security trends shaping our common future.

Mr. Goodman frequently advises industry leaders, security executives and global policy makers on transnational cyber risk and intelligence and founded the Future Crimes Institute to inspire and educate others on the security implications of newly emerging technologies.  In addition, Mr. Goodman serves as the Chair for Policy, Law and Ethics at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, a NASA and Google sponsored educational venture dedicated to using advanced science and technology to address humanity’s grand challenges. 

PLEASE NOTE VENUE CHANGE

In association with the annual Shorenstein Journalism Award for Asia, conferred this year on China's pioneering Caixin Media group, this panel will look at the current state and the future of the Chinese media. The Chinese state continues to play a powerful role in controlling the media and the free flow of information to the Chinese people. But China's media is undergoing rapid change, from the growing role of social media to the proliferation of new publications, some of which, like Caixin, are challenging the boundaries of state control. Which will win in China's changing media landscape—the forces of the market, state censorship, or quality journalism?

PANELISTS

Hu Shuli, editor-­in-chief of Caixin Media, and dean of the School of Communications and Design at Sun Yat-sen University, has a distinguished career that spans both print and broadcast journalism. Hu is a former Stanford Knight Journalism Fellow (1994) and a recipient of the Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism (2007). She is frequently named on annual Who’s Who lists by publications such as Foreign Policy and Time Magazine.

Wang Shuo, managing editor of Caixin Media, was ranked among China’s top 10 young editors in 2011. He is a former international editor for People’s Daily, a Chinese government-run newspaper published nationally. Recognized as one of the brightest rising stars in his field, Wang was named as a Young Leader in 2007 and 2008 by the Boao Forum for Asia, and as a media leader by the World Economic Forum. He has led the investigative journalism teams at Caixin.

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director at the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, and is also a former jury member for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He has written extensively on China, and was awarded the 1997 George Peabody Award for producing the groundbreaking documentary the Gate of Heavenly Peace. He received the Shorenstein Journalism Award in 2003.

Hu Ben, a journalist with Southern Weekend, is the current Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Knight Fellow at Stanford. He started his journalism career in 2005, when he joined a writer's network blogging about international affairs not covered by official media. At Southern Weekend, he has written about how Chinese government works, how public policies are made, and how information flows inside the government.

Daniel Sneider serves as the associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC and also as a research associate with the prestigious National Asia Research Program. He frequently contributes articles to publications such as Foreign Policy, Asia Policy, and Slate and had three decades of experience as a foreign correspondent and editor for publications including the Christian Science Monitor and the San Jose Mercury News. 

ABOUT THE AWARD

The Shorenstein Journalism Award was launched in 2002 to recognize the contributions of Western journalists in deepening our understanding of Asia. In 2011, the recipients of the award have been broadened to encompass Asian journalists who are at the forefront of the battle for press freedom in Asia and who have played a key role in constructing a new role for the media, including the growth of social media and Internet-based journalism. The award will also identify those Asian journalists who, from that side of the Pacific Ocean, have aided the growth of mutual understanding between Asia and the United States.

Carrying a cash prize of $10,000, the award was named after Walter H. Shorenstein, the philanthropist, activist, and businessman who endowed two institutions that are focused respectively on Asia and on the press: Shorenstein APARC in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Read the 2011 Shorenstein Journalism Award press release for more details about Caixin and about the history of the award.

What are the limits of literary freedom? Writers' claims for autonomy have encountered legal restrictions to their freedom of speech.  As suggested by Foucault, censorship has shaped the very notion of authorship. This talk will confront the diverging conceptions of the author’s responsibility in France and the beliefs in the power of writing that underlie them through the debates surrounding literary trials, including the cases of Béranger, Courier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the naturalists, and the purge trials after World War II. In reaction to these conceptions, writers developed their own code of ethics, which contributed to the emergence of an autonomous literary field and to the construction of the figure of the public  intellectual, embodied by Zola and by Sartre.

Gisèle Sapiro is Research director at the CNRS and Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. She is also head of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris, and been a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg and at NYU, among other places. Her interests include the sociology of intellectuals, literature, publishing and translation. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (Fayard, 1999; forthcoming in English translation with Duke University Press), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France (19e-20e siècles) (Seuil, 2011), and of numerous articles published in journals of sociology, history, political science, aesthetics and literature, cultural studies and French studies. She is also editor or co-editor of Pour une histoire des sciences sociales (Fayard, 2004), Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (Fayard, 2004), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (CNRS Editions, 2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Nouveau Monde, 2009), and L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte, 2009).

Co-sponsored by:  The Europe Center, Department of French and Italian, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Center for the Study of the Novel, Department of Sociology, DLCL Research Unit on Literature and Ethics, Hebrew Literature Workshop, and the French Culture Workshop

Event Summary

Sapiro describes how writers during the inter-war period were targeted for social and political subversion, and even accused of being responsible for the French military defeat. The belief in the power of the written word, a legacy from the French Revolution, along with the Catholic fear of the dangers of reading, contributed to the perception of the printed word as a vehicle for inciting crime. Censorship was prevalent, with many prosecutions for writing and publishing carried out during the 19th century.

Sapiro traces how this repression led to the development of two competing ideas of professional ethics around writing: the idea of art for art's sake, and the political commitment of public intellectuals. She also describes the application of objective and subjective responsibility theories, ideas about criminality, and the absence of a professional ethics in writing, to the laws of free press during this period. Sapiro outlines several specific cases of prosecution against prominent authors in France, and the variety of arguments used in the defense - sometimes unsuccessfully.

A discussion session following the talk raised such questions as: How does the identity of the author relate to concepts of citizenship? Could the trials of authors be considered a form of censorship? Were there structural similarities between the trials and the public debate? Was there any reaction in the literary realm? Was there ever any criticism about the legal mechanism as the appropriate arena for discussing this moral debate? Why wasn't the debate held within the government?

Conference organizer: Nancy Ruttenburg

What is conscience, what was conscience, and what is its future?

The purpose of the conference is to examine the authority of conscience as it is presently invoked in various arenas of contemporary life—including law, medicine, journalism, and politics—and as its meaning is inflected by scholarly debates in the fields of history, literature, religious studies, psychology, and philosophy. From their various fields of expertise and interest, participants will address the central question the conference raises: in our post-Freudian and post-Nietzschean age, to what degree does conscience possess the kind of authority that an earlier and less secular age reserved for first things? This question entails a host of others.  Do our invocations of conscience reveal it to be the still-vital residue of a kind of certainty linked to infallible authority from which we cannot alienate ourselves even when we’d like to? If so, is the enduring vitality of conscience a sign that the process of secularization remains incomplete, even in secular rationalists, those who might consider themselves to be exempt from the religiosity that distinguishes United States culture from those of other modern Western democracies? Do we regard conscience as a type of knowledge? Or is it possible to understand conscience ontologically, as a category of self or mind that—insofar as it speaks to all humanity by means of a "small, still voice" issuing from each human heart—bridges the gap between individual and corporate being? Whether or not underwritten by a discipline or a tradition, conscience is commonly invoked to justify a range of acts and behaviors: what relation do these invocations of moral law, even when unexamined, bear to the burgeoning interest in ethics we see across the humanities disciplines and into the legal, medical, and journalistic fields? Between the extremes of authoritarianism and anarchy, where do we place conscience in American political life and how do we understand its peculiar agency?