Stanford University

Science and Technology

The Future of Crime

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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. 

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Marc Goodman Chairman and Founder Speaker Future Crimes Institute
Seminars

China's Changing Media Landscape

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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.

Bechtel Conference Center

Conferences
Shorenstein Journalism Award

Technology Can Nudge Climate Change Politics

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Reducing carbon-dioxide emissions is primarily a political problem, rather than a technological one. This fact was well illustrated by the fate of the 2009 climate bill that barely passed the U.S. House of Representatives and never came up for a vote in the Senate. The House bill was already quite weak, containing many exceptions for agriculture and other industries, subsidies for nuclear power and increasingly long deadlines for action. In the Senate, both Republicans and Democrats from coal-dependent states sealed its fate. Getting past these senators is the key to achieving a major reduction in our emissions.

Technological challenges to reducing emissions exist, too. Most pressing is the need to develop the know-how to capture carbon dioxide on a large scale and store it underground. Such technology could reduce by 90 percent the emissions from coal- fired power stations. Some 500 of these facilities in the U.S. produce 36 percent of our CO2 emissions.

But these plants aren’t evenly spaced around the country. And therein may lie the key to addressing the political and technological challenges at the same time. If the federal government would invest in carbon capture and storage, it could go a long way toward persuading politicians in every state to sign on to emission reductions.

I’ll get to the specifics of the technology shortly. But first, consider how the costs of emission reduction fall hardest on certain parts of the country: A carbon tax levied on all major sources of released CO2, the approach favored by most of the environmental community, would make energy from coal-fired power plants cost more. To make a significant difference, such a tax would have to amount to $60 a ton.

Midwest Carbon Footprint

As a result, gasoline prices would rise 26 percent, and natural gas for household usage by 25 percent, nationwide. Rich and urbanized states could probably tolerate this. The West Coast, with its hydroelectric power, and the Northeast, which relies to a large extent on natural gas, could most easily absorb the associated increase in energy costs.

But the price of energy in the rural, Midwestern states would more than quadruple because of their large carbon footprint. Midwesterners get most of their electricity from coal; they drive relatively long distances to get to work, shopping and entertainment; and rural homes and buildings use more energy for heating and cooling.

One carbon-tax proposal now being considered is a “cap and dividend” plan that would send the tax revenue back to all U.S. citizens equally. But that would also favor the rich states that are less dependent on driving and coal.

It would be more helpful for the coal-dependent states if the federal government would use revenue from a carbon tax to help develop the technology for carbon capture and storage.

And that brings us to the technological challenges: No plant of any size with the capacity for CCS yet exists, but it has been demonstrated to work at small scales. Three different processes for capturing the CO2 are being tested, and scaling them up for 500-megawatt or 1,000-megawatt facilities should be possible.

For two years, the Mountaineer plant in New Haven, West Virginia, has been capturing and storing a tiny amount of its CO2 -- 2 percent of it -- but plans to build a full-scale carbon-capture plant here have been abandoned. Because Congress has dropped any idea of imposing a tax on carbon emissions, the investment doesn’t make sense.

A large plant in Edwardsport, Indiana, was being constructed with the expensive gasification process that makes it easy to add carbon-capture facilities, but it, too, has been shelved.

China may finish its large demonstration carbon-capture plant before the U.S. gets any model up to scale. Others are planned in Europe, and a small one is operating in Germany. This plant has been unable to get permission for underground storage, so it is selling some of its CO2 to soft-drink companies and venting the rest.

Subterranean Storage

Storing captured CO2 is eminently possible, too. For 15 years, the Sleipner facility in Norway has been storing 3 percent of that country’s CO2 underneath the ocean floor, with no appreciable leakage. Algeria has a similar facility, the In Salah plant, operating in the desert.

One storage strategy under consideration in the U.S. is to inject captured CO2 into huge basalt formations off both the east and west coasts. Inside the basalt, the carbon gas would gradually turn into bicarbonate of soda.

There are other ways to dispose of carbon dioxide. It has been used for enhanced oil recovery for many decades without any danger, and has been effectively stored in depleted oil reservoirs. (The gas is dangerous only in high concentration.)

It remains uncertain how much of the captured CO2 might leak during storage. Even if this were as much as 10 percent, however, it would mean that 90 percent of it would stay underground.

As CCS technology develops, it will have to be made more efficient so that it uses less energy. As it is, the capture phase is expected to require that a power plant burn 20 percent to 25 percent more coal than it otherwise would.

The technological challenges may explain why energy companies haven’t lobbied for subsidies to develop CCS. The electric-energy sector isn’t known for innovation and risk- taking. Just look at the U.S.’s outdated power grid.

But the federal government could pay for the subsidies through a tax on carbon. Such a levy would have other advantages, too: It would raise the cost of energy to reflect the damage that burning coal and oil now do to the environment, and spur the development of renewable sources.

If states with large carbon footprints can’t accept such a tax, the CCS subsidies could be paid from the general fund. The cost to build coal-fired power plants with CCS technology is estimated to be about $5 billion to $6 billion -- about the price of a single nuclear power plant. The total price for the U.S.’s 500 large plants would be $250 billion. That’s as much as the planned modernization and expansion of our missile defense system over 10 years.

But it would slash our carbon emissions by at least 20 percent. There is no other politically possible way to cut CO2 as much, and as quickly -- in a decade or two. And devastating climate change is far more likely than a missile attack.

U.S. investment in CCS technology could also induce China and Europe to follow suit. And this would allow the world time for renewable-energy technologies to mature -- to the point where we could do away with coal burning altogether.

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Pamela Matson

Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building
473 Via Ortega, room 373
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-2750 (650) 725-6566
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Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, FSE Affiliated Faculty
Pam_dean_11.jpg MS, PhD

Pamela Matson is an interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, academic leader, and organizational strategist. She served as dean of Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences from 2002-2017, building interdisciplinary departments and educational programs focused on resources, environment and sustainability, as well as co-leading university-wide interdisciplinary initiatives. In her current role as the Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies and Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment, she leads the graduate program on Sustainability Science and Practice. Her research addresses a range of environment and sustainability issues, including sustainability of agricultural systems, vulnerability and resilience of particular people and places to climate change, and characteristics of science that can contribute to sustainability transitions at scale.

Dr. Matson serves as chair of the board of the World Wildlife Fund-US and as a board member of the World Wildlife Fund-International and several university advisory boards. She served on the US National Academy of Science Board on Sustainable Development and co-wrote the National Research Council’s volume Our Common Journey: A transition toward sustainability (1999); she also led the NRC committee on America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change. She was the founding chair of the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability, and founding editor for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources. She is a past President of the Ecological Society of America. Her recent publications (among around 200) include Seeds of Sustainability: Lessons from the Birthplace of the Green Revolution (2012) and Pursuing Sustainability (2016).

Pam is an elected member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a AAAS Fellow. She received a MacArthur Foundation Award, contributed to the award of the Nobel Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among other awards and recognitions, and is an Einstein Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Matson holds a Bachelor of Science degree with double majors in Biology and Literature from the University of Wisconsin (Eau Claire), a Master degree in Environmental Science and Policy from Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Doctorate in Forest Ecology from Oregon State University, and honorary doctorates from Princeton, McGill and Arizona State Universities. She spent ten years as a research scientist with NASA-Ames Research Center before moving to a professorship at the University of California Berkeley and, in 1997, to Stanford University.

Authorship and Responsibility: Literary Trials and the Ethics of Writing (France, 19th-21st Centuries)

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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?

CISAC Conference Room

Gisèle Sapiro Speaker CNRS, EHESS, Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique
Lectures
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