CITP

Civil liberties activist Timothy Edgar describes how he tried to make a difference by going inside America’s growing surveillance state as an intelligence official in his new book, Beyond Snowden. Edgar explains how Snowden’s leaks of top secret documents led to reforms that made the NSA more transparent, more accountable, more protective of privacy—and, contrary to conventional wisdom, actually strengthened the NSA by making it more effective. While the reforms implemented by the Obama administration were a good first step, much more needs to be done to prevent abuse. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 prompted fears among both civil libertarians and intelligence officials that a new president would abuse his national security powers. The United States leads the world in mass surveillance. In Beyond Snowden, Edgar explains how the United States can lead the world in surveillance reform.

Timothy H. Edgar is a former national security and intelligence official, cybersecurity expert, privacy lawyer and civil liberties activist. Edgar joined the American Civil Liberties Union shortly before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and spent five years fighting in Congress against abuses in the “war on terror.” He left the ACLU to try to make a difference by going inside America’s growing surveillance state – a story he tells in Beyond Snowden: Privacy, Mass Surveillance and the Struggle to Reform the NSA.

In 2006, Edgar became the intelligence community’s first deputy for civil liberties, advising the director of national intelligence during the George W. Bush administration. In 2009, after President Barack Obama announced the creation of a new National Security Council position “specifically dedicated to safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Edgar moved to the White House, where he advised Obama on privacy issues in cybersecurity policy.

In 2013, Edgar left government for Brown University to help launch its professional cybersecurity degree program and he is now a senior fellow at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Edgar also works to help companies navigate cybersecurity problems and is on the advisory board of Virtru, which offers simple encryption software for businesses and individuals.

Edgar has been profiled by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and Wired, and he is a contributing editor to Lawfare: Hard National Security Choices. Edgar was a law clerk to Judge Sandra Lynch, United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Dartmouth College.

Computer scientists face thorny ethical questions in the course of everyday research: Could my new face detector be misused for racial profiling? Is my web crawler accidentally scooping up sensitive information about people? Inadequate attention to ethics risks undermining public trust; conversely, uncertainty about ethical norms and rules has a chilling effect on science.

This conference will bring together computer scientists and ethics scholars to tackle these questions, acknowledging that traditional research ethics may not easily translate to the new setting. Individual panels will consider ethics in subdisciplines such as data science and computer security, with major themes cutting across panels including how to teach ethics, how to engage with the public and other stakeholders about ethics in research, and what the research community can do to ensure that researchers act ethically.

Please RSVP here by April 28, 2017 for lunch and a name tag.

Last November, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a landmark privacy rule governing how Internet service providers (ISPs) could collect and share customer data. On April 4, 2017, President Trump signed a joint resolution that repealed this rule before it could ever take effect.

This panel will discuss how we arrived at this juncture and how the Internet privacy landscape may evolve in light of these developments. We will also explore the roles (and shortcomings) of both policy and technical mechanisms in protecting user privacy on the Internet.

Moderator:

Jennifer L. Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Computer Science and the chair for the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Jen, who came to Princeton in 2005 after eight and a half years at AT&T Research, is interested in Internet policy and Internet governance, stemming from her longstanding research on computer networks. She co-chairs the Secure BGP Deployment working group of the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council, and chairs the Mobile Broadband working group of the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee. Collaborating with a multi-institution group of colleagues, she has published papers on “Risking communications security: Potential hazards of the Protect America Act” (IEEE Security and Privacy) and “Can it really work? Problems with Extending EINSTEIN 3 to critical infrastructure” (Harvard Law School’s National Security Journal).

Panelists:

Nick Feamster is the deputy director of CITP and a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Before joining the faculty at Princeton, he was a professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Technology Review “TR35” award, a Sloan Fellowship, and the SIGCOMM Rising Star Award for his contributions to cybersecurity, notably spam filtering. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, with a focus on network operations, network security, and censorship-resistant communication systems. His research interests overlap with technology policy in the areas of censorship, broadband access networks, and network security and privacy.

Edward W. Felten is the director of CITP, the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, and the director of the Program in Technology and Society, Information Technology track at Princeton University. He served at the White House as the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer from June 2015 to January 2017. Ed was also the first chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission from January 2011 until September 2012. His research interests include computer security and privacy, and public policy issues relating to information technology. Specific topics include software security, Internet security, electronic voting, cybersecurity policy, technology for government transparency, network neutrality and Internet policy.

Ed often blogs about technology and policy at Freedom to Tinker.

Arvind Narayanan is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton Univerity. He studies information privacy and security and has a side-interest in technology policy. His research has shown that data anonymization is broken in fundamental ways, for which he jointly received the 2008 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award. Narayanan leads the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability project that aims to uncover how companies are collecting and using our personal information. He also studies the security and stability of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Arvind is also an affiliated faculty member at CITP and an affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. You can follow him on Twitter at @random_walker.

Joel Reidenberg is a professor at Fordham Law School where he is a leading international scholar in internet law, privacy, and cybersecurity. Reidenberg was CITP’s inaugural Microsoft Visiting Professor of Information Technology Policy for 2013-2014 and a visiting research collaborator from 2014 to 2016. While visiting CITP, he collaborated on research with the CITP community and taught an undergraduate course on internet law and policy, which he still teaches every spring for the Woodrow Wilson School. At Fordham he holds the Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Chair, and he is the Founding Academic Director of the Center on Law and Information Policy. He received his A.B. from Dartmouth, J.D. from Columbia and Ph.D. from the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne. 

Information and communications technologies (ICTs) enrich everyday life and are essential to the global economy. Whether it is the allocation of the radio frequency spectrum for mobile wireless, supporting the free flow of information, or adopting voluntary technical standards, we need international policies that foster innovation and economic growth. This talk will explore how the United States engages stakeholders to develop international policy positions and negotiates with foreign governments to advance tomorrow’s technologies.

Julie Zoller is the acting Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy in the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs and is responsible for the formulation, coordination, and oversight international information and communications technology (ICT) policy. An expert on technology policy and an accomplished negotiator, Ms. Zoller works with a diverse constituency to shape and achieve U.S. ICT policy objectives at the global level.

Ms. Zoller was the 2016 chair of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) governing Council and headed the U.S. delegation to the 2016 ITU World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly. She also served as deputy head of delegation to the 2016 OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Digital Economy, 2015 ITU World Radiocommunication Conference, and 2014 ITU Plenipotentiary and World Telecommunication Development Conferences and was elected to two terms on the ITU’s Radio Regulations Board (2006 to 2014), serving as its first chairwoman. Ms. Zoller was the Deputy Associate Administrator for International Spectrum at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration from 2011 to 2013 and spent 14 years at ITT Information Systems, where she was a program director.

Streaming Live: http://mediacentrallive.princeton.edu/
Hashtag: #citptalk

Professor Felten recently completed a 20-month tour of duty at the White House, where he served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer. In this talk he will discuss his experience there, describe ongoing policy challenges, and reflect on the role of technology and academic expertise in policymaking.

Bio:

Edward W. Felten is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs and the Director for the Center for Information Technology Policy and Program in Technology and Society, Information Technology Track. Ed served at the White House as the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer from June 2015 to January 2017. He was also the first chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission from January 2011 until September 2012.

Ed’s research interests include computer security and privacy, and public policy issues relating to information technology. Specific topics include software security, Internet security, electronic voting, cybersecurity policy, technology for government transparency, network neutrality and Internet policy. He often blogs about technology and policy at Freedom to Tinker.

No RSVP required from current Princeton faculty, staff, and students. Open to members of the public by invitation only.  Please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu if you are interested in attending a particular lunch.

The idea of an emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is currently captivating both technologists and society at large. Although IoT techniques have their roots in ideas that are decades old, their increasingly widespread deployments have made them a hot topic these days, frequently discussed and hyped. As many as 50B networked devices are envisioned by 2020, and proponents of IoTs see a world where embedded sensing and control techniques help vehicle traffic flow more smoothly, where environmental sensing and data analysis facilitates better use of natural resources like water, and where personalized health monitoring helps individuals improve their quality of life. On the other hand, properly addressing policy concerns around security and privacy may play a role in IoT’s adoption and success. My talk will discuss key technology and policy challenges for future IoT applications and devices. Overall, I will be drawing from both technical experiences and trends, as well as from policy perspectives gained during a one year fellowship doing technology policy within the U. S. Department of State.

Margaret Martonosi is the Hugh Trumbull Adams ’35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where she has been on the faculty since 1994. From August 2015-2016, she served as a Jefferson Science Fellow doing international aspects of technology policy within the U. S. Department of State. Martonosi’s technical research focuses on computer architecture and mobile computing, particularly power-efficient systems. Past projects include the Wattch power modeling tool used by thousands of engineers worldwide, and the ZebraNet mobile sensor network, which was deployed for wildlife tracking in Kenya. Martonosi holds affiliated appointments in Princeton’s Electrical Engineering Department, its Center for Information Technology Policy, its Environmental Institute, and its Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. From 2005-2007, she served as associate dean for Academic Affairs for the School of Engineering and Applied Science. From 2016-2022, she holds (in addition to her primary position at Princeton) a visiting position as Andrew Dickson White Visiting Professor-At-Large at Cornell University.

Martonosi is a fellow of both IEEE and ACM. Her major awards include Princeton University’s 2010 Graduate Mentoring Award, the Anita Borg Institute’s 2013 Technical Leadership Award, NCWIT’s 2013 Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award, the 2015 Marie Pistilli Women in EDA Achievement Award, and ISCA’s 2015 Long-Term Influential Paper Award. Martonosi is an inventor on seven granted US patents, and has co-authored two technical reference books on power-aware computer architecture. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA).

Streaming Live: https://www.youtube.com/user/citpprinceton

The Federal Trade Commission is the US government’s leading consumer protection agency. The agency can take action against businesses that deceive consumers or unfairly place them at risk, and its reach stretches from advertising to privacy practices across broad sectors of the economy. As advanced technologies have become ubiquitous in our lives, the FTC’s mission has required a greater appreciation of technical practices. This increased technical focus has permeated nearly all aspects of the agency and, in recent years, has led to the introduction of both a Chief Technologist and the Office of Technology Research and Investigation (OTech).

This talk will provide an introduction to the FTC, including what the agency does and how it operates. We will discuss some of the FTC’s relevant recent activity before moving on to the role of OTech and its research. Finally, we will explore the important role that outside researchers can play in promoting consumer welfare.

Joseph A. Calandrino is the Research Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Technology Research and Investigation. The FTC is the US government’s primary consumer protection agency. Dr. Calandrino’s office explores the evolving impact of technology on consumers, examining topics such as consumer fraud, online advertising, financial technologies, and connected devices. He is the author of numerous refereed research publications, and he has spoken on security, privacy, and consumer protection issues in a variety of venues. Prior to joining the FTC, Dr. Calandrino provided technical consulting services, including leading a company’s security and privacy consulting practice and serving as an expert in a variety of legal disputes.

Dr. Calandrino received his doctorate in Computer Science from Princeton University, where he was advised by Edward W. Felten. His graduate research focused heavily on the privacy and security risks created by emerging technologies, from electronic voting systems to recommender systems. He holds master’s degrees in Computer Science from both Princeton University and the University of Virginia, and he received a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Virginia.

For lunch and a nametag please RSVP here by Friday, October 14, 2016.

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents opportunities for innovation in domains ranging from smart homes to smart cities.

Yet, many IoT devices ship with security flaws that put citizens and consumers at risk and create broader security, privacy, and robustness issues. In some cases, for example, IoT vendors have stopped supporting the devices entirely, resulting in malfunctioning (or even non-functioning) IoT devices. Additionally, the proliferation of IoT devices, many of which are controlled from cloud services, allows device vendors to collect—and potentially share—an unprecedented amount data about consumers.

Solutions to these emerging security, privacy, and robustness challenges around IoT will require perspectives, input, and collaboration from technologists and policymakers.

To begin this discussion, the CITP Conference on Security and Privacy Policy for the Internet of Things (IoT) will convene experts at the intersection of technology and policy from industry, academia, and civil society to discuss the latest issues surrounding the security and privacy for the Internet of Things.

At Amazon, we innovate on behalf of customers. Some of our most important innovations seemed downright crazy at first, and nearly all were initially derided by some observers. Customer Reviews, Marketplace, Amazon Web Services, CreateSpace, Kindle, Fulfillment by Amazon, and Amazon Prime Air are but a few of the innovations that have puzzled pundits. Many also have posed novel questions for policymakers, some of whom are uncomfortable with the pace of innovation or simply the fact that new technologies and services often don’t fit neatly into existing regulatory systems. Could customer-focused innovation itself have novel characteristics that could be recognized and appreciated by policymakers acting in the public interest?

Paul Misener is Amazon.com’s Vice President for Global Public Policy, and has served in this position for 16 years. Both an engineer (B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Princeton University, 1985) and lawyer (J.D., George Mason University, 1993; Distinguished Alumni Award, 2001), he is responsible for formulating and representing the company’s public policy positions worldwide, as well as for managing public policy specialists in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Formerly a partner in the law firm of Wiley, Rein & Fielding, Paul also served as Senior Legal Advisor to a Commissioner of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Prior to this government service, he was Intel Corporation’s Manager of Telecommunications and Computer Technology Policy, and leader of the computer industry’s Internet Access Coalition.

In the late 1980s, Paul was a policy specialist for the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where he was a U.S. delegate to several conferences of the ITU. Prior to that, he designed radio communications systems. In 2013, he chaired the technical subcommittee of the FAA’s advisory committee on airplane passenger use of portable electronics.

Streaming Live: https://www.youtube.com/user/citpprinceton

During an official “inspection tour” to the manufacturing hub Shenzhen in the South of China in 2015, the Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang visited the local makerspace Chaihuo 柴火. The prime minister lauded Chaihuo for its entrepreneurial mindset and proclaimed that its innovation attitude was to be supported by the government. Only two weeks later, the national government announced a new policy, entitled “mass makerspace” 众创空间, followed by a series of initiatives such as “mass innovation” 大众创业 and “mass entrepreneurship” 万众创新. The underlying vision was that “making” would help democratize technological and scientific innovation beyond a set of privileged few and mobilize many – if not masses of – people to start-up their own tech venture.

How did it happen that “making” came to be seen a central enabler of transforming China into a producer of knowledge and innovation? In this talk, drawing from long-term ethnographic research in China spanning more than 6 years, Lindtner traces how a grassroots movement of free culture advocates morphed within only 5 years into a high-stake sociopolitical project aimed at upgrading China from a manufacturing to a global knowledge economy. Building on a line of research invested in the cultural politics of global innovation discourse and technology production in science and technology studies (STS), Lindtner investigates “the making of” making, i.e. how making came to be seen by diverse actors as enabler of participatory values, intervention in the status-quo and eventually a form of life that addressed contemporary environmental, societal, and economic challenges. More specifically, this talk will show how sites of industrial production in China became enrolled in the vision of making and were made into a key site to experiment with new models of work and education, techno-urban renewal, and technoscientific advances.

Silvia Lindtner is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information, with a courtesy appointment in the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design. Lindtner’s research and teaching interests include transnational networks of innovation and entrepreneurship culture, DIY (do it yourself) making and hacking, science and technology studies in China, and Internet and digital cultures. She is currently writing a book on the culture and politics of “making” and transnational entrepreneurship in urban China. Her research has been awarded support from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), IMLS, Intel Labs, Google Anita Borg, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation. Her work has appeared at ACM SIGCHI, ACM CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing), ST&HV (Science Technology & Human Values), Games & Culture, China Information, and other venues. Lindtner is affiliated with several interdisciplinary centers and initiatives on campus including the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, the Science, Technology and Society Program and the Michigan Interactive and Social Computing Research Group, and directs the Tech.Culture.Matters. Research Group. Together with Professor Anna Greenspan and David Li, Lindtner co-directs the China-based Research Initiative Hacked Matter, dedicated to critically investigating processes of technology innovation, urban redesign, and maker-manufacturing cultures in China.