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Cyber Initiative tackles Internet technology concerns

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Stanford University today launched the Stanford Cyber Initiative to apply broad campus expertise to the diverse challenges and opportunities that cybersecurity, cyberspace and networked information pose to humanity.                                                      

Information security has an expanding and deepening role in virtually every facet of our personal, social, governmental and economic lives. Yet the Internet is decentralized and vulnerable to malicious use. How does society protect its core values in the face of the promise and perils of digital information? And, how does society adapt to changing technologies?

These are the type of questions that Stanford researchers will study, thanks to the jumpstart given by a $15 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Stanford's initiative will be highly interdisciplinary in building a new policy framework for cyber issues. It will draw on the campus' experience with multidisciplinary, university-wide initiatives to focus on the core themes of trustworthiness, governance and the emergence of unexpected impacts of technological change over time.

"Our increasing reliance on technology, combined with the unpredictable vulnerabilities of networked information, pose future challenges for all of society," said Stanford President John Hennessy. "We share the Hewlett Foundation’s goal to seek a robust understanding of how new technologies affect us all at the most fundamental human levels. Stanford has a long history of fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to find thoughtful and enlightened answers to these paramount questions." 

Building on Stanford strengths

The Stanford Cyber Initiative will build upon the university's already extensive inquiry and research into Internet security. In doing so, Stanford has drawn on connections with industry and government by establishing, for example, a "cyber boot camp" for U.S. congressional staff (a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies/Hoover Institution collaboration,) a conference on the "ethics of data in civil society" and an ongoing "security conundrum" speaker series on cyber issues.

The initiative will work with Stanford’s existing research hubs addressing cyber issues, including those in the Computer Security Lab in the Department of Computer Science, the Freeman Spogli Institute's Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Hoover Institution and the Law School's Center for Internet and Society. FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law will also play a key role in the initiative.

The initiative will launch immediately and develop faculty seminars and conferences, organize working groups of faculty and students to tackle policy-relevant problems in information security, and provide support for internal research awards, teaching and curriculum development. Collaborations with industry and government are a vital part of the initiative.

The Stanford Cyber Initiative includes roles for faculty and students across a wide swath of research disciplines – computer science, law, the social sciences, engineering, political science and education, among others. And it will also enlist Stanford alumni who are leaders in the policy and technology fields.

For those seeking to participate, information is available on the Stanford Cyber Initiative website. 

A central hub

"We are deeply grateful to the Hewlett Foundation for recognizing Stanford's ongoing work and future potential in this area. With the help of their generous grant, this initiative will grow into a central presence on campus that more broadly comprehends the possibilities and perils of networked information," said Stanford law Professor George Triantis, who will chair the steering committee for the initiative.

The committee currently includes professors Jeremy Bailenson (communications,) Stephen Barley (management science and engineering,) Ian Morris (classics and history,) John Mitchell (computer science and electrical engineering,) Dan Boneh (computer science and electrical engineering,) Amy Zegart (Hoover Institution and CISAC) and Barbara van Schewick (law).

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, the director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Stanford law professor, is one of the founders of the initiative. 

"The Stanford initiative will create vast opportunities to advance knowledge about the future of cyberspace and cybersecurity," Cuéllar said. "Faculty and students will expand existing research efforts and conversations with the goal of building a safer, better world that balances humanity's concerns with the promise of new technologies."

Cuéllar noted that crucial areas of examination include how to resolve trust and security problems endemic to networked information technologies, how to govern the Internet in a world where people often disagree about what they value, and how to anticipate unexpected developments in information technologies that could affect national security, intellectual property, civil liberties and society.

Ann Arvin, Stanford's vice provost and dean of research, said, "Our scholars and students will examine pressing questions about how can we ensure security and protect privacy while continuing to foster an open, innovative and entrepreneurial culture and society. We want to better understand the short- and long-term consequences and implications of the pervasiveness of digital technology in our lives."

In exploring this conundrum, the initiative will encourage collaborative focus across disciplines on the challenges of trustworthiness – for example, can individuals trust that information technologies will deliver on their promise and also avoid the hazards of deliberately hostile or antisocial actions? 

A central goal is to create a policy framework that can generate lasting solutions not only to existing problems but also to problems that may emerge in the future.  

'Profound implications'

The new program is supported through the Hewlett Foundation's Cyber Initiative, which has now committed $65 million over the next five years to the study of cybersecurity, the largest amount given to date by a private donor to this topic.

"Choices we are making today about Internet governance and security have profound implications for the future," said Hewlett Foundation President Larry Kramer, a former dean of the Stanford Law School. "To make those choices well, it is imperative that they be made with some sense of what lies ahead and, still more important, of where we want to go."

The other universities receiving Hewlett grants of $15 million each – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley – will take a complementary approach in setting up the new centers based on their particular strengths and expertise.

 

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Gellman talks about Snowden revelations

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Journalist Barton Gellman had left his job at The Washington Post and was working on a book about surveillance and privacy in America when he was contacted last year by someone using the code-name VERAX, or “truth teller” in Latin.

So began one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of modern American journalism – and government surveillance. In the spring of 2013, Gellman began having remote, encrypted exchanges with someone who clearly had inside knowledge of the NSA's global and domestic surveillance programs. 

“He was trying to figure out whether he could trust me and ... I was trying to figure out if he was for real,” Gellman told a packed Stanford audience Monday night.

Last December, he traveled to Moscow to put a face to the code-name and determine whether the information he was providing was accurate.

“All extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – and he was providing that.," Gellman said of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "I was convinced fairly early on that I was dealing with something fairly serious.”

So Gellman went back to The Washington Post, where he had been on teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the power and influence of Vice President Dick Cheney during the Bush administration.

“I went there because I trusted them and because I wanted their resources and their advice,” he told the audience of some 600 people at the CEMEX Auditorium on Monday. The Washington Post would go on to win the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, shared with The Guardian US, for their reporting on the Snowden materials and the NSA.

Gellman today is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a visiting professional specialist and author-in-residence at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency and is currently working on a book about the Snowden affair.

Snowden’s explosive disclosures about the National Security Agency’s intelligence-collection operations have ignited an intense debate about the appropriate balance between security and liberty in America.

In a special series this academic year at Stanford University, nationally prominent experts are exploring the critical issues raised by the NSA’s activities, including their impact on our security, privacy and civil liberties.

Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, launched the “Security Conundrum” series in October with its first speaker, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and CIA who defended the government surveillance programs. The metadata collection “is something we would have never done on Sept. 9 or Sept. 10,” Hayden told Zegart during their conversation on Oct.  8. “But it seemed reasonable after Sept. 11. No one is doing this out of prurient interests. No – it was a logical response to the needs of the moment.”

Zegart, in introducing Gellman, said: “Tonight, we move from inside the NSA to inside the newsroom, which played a key role in revealing the NSA’s secret activities over the past year.”

All Photos by Rod Searcey

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In the second lecture in the “Security Conundrum” series, Gellman was in conversation with Philip Taubman, former correspondent and Washington and Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times and a consulting professor with Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Taubman teaches the class Need to Know: The Tension Between a Free Press and National Security Decision Making.

Gellman recounted his dealings with Snowden and described how he and his editors weighed the Snowden materials. Few questions are more difficult for American journalists than determining how far a free press can venture in disclosing national security secrets without imperiling the nation’s security.

“I asked him very bluntly, `Why are you doing this?’” Gellman said of Snowden.

“He gave me very persuasive and consistent answers about his motives. Whatever you think of what he did or whether or not I should have published these stories, I would claim to you that all the evidence supports his claim that he had come across a dangerous accumulation of state power that we, the people, needed to know about.”

One of the first Snowden revelations, Gellman said, was the top-secret PRISM surveillance program, in which the NSA is allowed to tap into the servers of nine large U.S. Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Skype. Snowden believed the extent of mass data collection about American citizens was far greater than what the public knew.

The Post reported that PRISM allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from the Silicon Valley firms to a wide range of digital information, including audio, video chats, photographs, emails and stored data that enable analysts to track foreign targets. The program does not require individual warrants, but instead operates under the broader authorization of the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.

 

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The FISA Court had also been ordering a subsidiary of Verizon Communications to turn over to the NSA logs tracking all of its customers’ telephone calls.

Gellman said Snowden asked for a guarantee the Post would publish the full text of a PowerPoint presentation that he had obtained describing the PRISM program. Gellman told him that his editors would not make any guarantees about what they would publish and in the end the paper only reproduced several slides so as not to harm national security.

Taubman asked Gellman what gives any journalist the right to publish classified documents and not hand those papers back to the NSA.

“I’m not accountable to anyone for my decisions about what is in the interest or not in the interest of the national security of the United States,” Gellman said. “What happens is the government tries to keep information a secret and I try to find it out – and then when that spillage happens, well, then we talk.”

In the case of PRISM, he sent emails to two “quite senior people” in the government and told them this was the type of email he only sends once every several years, when he is onto a big story they would want to know about. But he didn’t want to do anything over email, so when the senior officials called, Gellman gave them the title of the document about which he was going to write.

That started the negotiations with the government and The Washington Post. In the end, the paper only published several of the government’s PowerPoint slides that explained the PRISM program because they were concerned about harming national security.

“We had no interest in doing that; we only had an interest in writing about the public policy question on a program that had secretly expanded in ways that almost no one knew about,” Gellman said. “To the extent that it involves drawing new boundaries allowing the government to spy on its citizens and the citizens never get to know that – that is quite relevant to know when you’re trying to decide whether you like what your government is doing.”

In a statement responding to the PRISM revelations by the Post, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said information collection under the program “is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

Clapper called the Snowden leaks about the legal program “reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”

Gellman said Snowden has turned down million-dollar book and movie deals and lives in  “ascetic” asylum in Russia. Snowden told NBC News earlier this year that he was on his way from Hong Kong to Latin America, via Moscow, when his passport was confiscated and that Russia then granted him a one-year asylum.

“He is fascinating to me because he’s an unusual figure,” Gellman told Taubman, who had asked him what Snowden was like. He said the 31-year-old former systems administrator for the CIA did something most Americans would not: He gave up his personal freedom and changed the course of his life to make public the government surveillance programs that he believes are a danger to the American people.

“He described himself to me once as an indoor cat,” Gellman said. “He lives in a virtual world; there’s not a whole lot of difference for Snowden whether he’s living in Moscow or Hawaii – he’s is what I would call a net native. He has an ascetic personality; he doesn’t have or want very much stuff.”

Gellman added: “He is sort of Zen-like in his confidence that he has done the right thing.”

***

The Security Conundrum series is co-sponsored by CISAC, Hoover, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford in Government and the Stanford Law School.

Other nationally prominent speakers will include Reggie Walton, the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

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The Security Conundrum Series - Inside the Newsroom: The Media and Edward Snowden: An Evening with Barton Gellman

In an age of terrorism, where should a democratic society draw the line on government surveillance? Edward Snowden’s explosive disclosures about the National Security Agency’s intelligence-collection operations have ignited an intense debate about the appropriate balance between security and liberty in America. In a special series this year, nationally prominent experts will explore the critical issues raised by the NSA’s activities, including their impact on our security, privacy, and civil liberties. This timely series will address one of the most challenging questions the nation faces today as it tries to strike the right balance between safety and liberty. The Security Conundrum will look behind and beyond the headlines, examining the history and implementation of the NSA operations, the legal questions generated by them, the media’s role in revealing them, and the responsibility of Congress to oversee them. It will also address the NSA’s uneasy and evolving relationship with Silicon Valley. Each session in the series is designed to explore these issues from a different vantage point. The guest speakers, in conversation with Stanford scholars, will probe the problems, explain the political, legal, and technological contours of the NSA actions, and outline ways to preserve the nation’s security without sacrificing our freedoms. 

Inside the Newsroom: The Media and Edward Snowden: An Evening with Barton Gellman 

When Edward Snowden decided in 2013 that the time had come to reveal the deepest secrets of the National Security Agency, one of the first journalists he approached was Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. Snowden gave Gellman a code name: BRASSBANNER. The name he chose for himself was VERAX, “truth teller” in Latin. So began one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of modern American journalism. In the ensuing months, Gellman received dozens of top-secret documents from Snowden, traveled to Moscow to meet him, and wrestled with tough questions about what, and what not, to publish. The Washington Post shared the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the nation’s highest journalism honor, for Gellman’s reporting about the Snowden materials and the NSA. 

In a conversation with Philip Taubman, Gellman will recount his dealings with Snowden and describe how he and his editors weighed how to handle the Snowden materials. Few questions are more difficult for American journalists than determining how far a free press can venture in disclosing national security secrets without imperiling the nation’s security. 

Barton Gellman
Journalist
Barton Gellman is a three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. In 2002, he was a member of the Washington Post team that received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its coverage of the 9/11 attacks. Gellman is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a visiting professional specialist and author-in-residence at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

Philip Taubman
Consulting Professor, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford; Former Moscow and Washington Bureau Chief, The New York Times
Philip Taubman served as a reporter and editor at The New York Times for nearly thirty years, specializing in national security coverage. He is author of Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage, and The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. 

The Security Conundrum is co-sponsored by Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Hoover Institution, Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford in Government, and the Stanford Law School.

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Bart Gellman Senior Fellow Speaker The Century Foundation

Philip Taubman

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Philip Taubman is an affiliate at CISAC. His biography of George Shultz, In The Nation's Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz, was published by Stanford University Press in January 2023. Before joining CISAC in 2008, Taubman worked at the New York Times as a reporter and editor for nearly 30 years, specializing in national security issues, including United States diplomacy, and intelligence and defense policy and operations. At the Times, Taubman served as a Washington correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, deputy editorial page editor, Washington bureau chief and associate editor. McNamara At War: A New History, co-authored by Philip Taubman and William Taubman, will be published in September 2025 by W.W. Norton. Philip Taubman was a history major at Stanford, Class of 1970, and served as editor-in-chief of the Stanford Daily in 1969. Before joining the New York Times, he worked as a correspondent for Time magazine and was sports editor of Esquire. He was a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, 1978-1982, and served as secretary of the Stanford Board, 2011-2018. He is author of The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (Harper Collins, 2012) and Secret Empire: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage. (Simon & Schuster, 2003). 

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Philip Taubman Consulting Professor, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford; Former Moscow and Washington Bureau Chief, The New York Times Speaker CISAC
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Erin Baggott Carter

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Erin Baggott Carter (赵雅芬) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. She is also a non-resident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center. She has previously held fellowships at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.

Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. Her first book, Propaganda in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press), explores how political institutions determine propaganda strategies with an original dataset of eight million articles in six languages drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by a number of media platforms, including the New York Times and the Little Red Podcast.

Her research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.

Dr. Carter regularly tweets about Chinese politics and propaganda at @baggottcarter. She can be reached via email at baggott [at] usc.edu or ebaggott [at] stanford.edu.

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Interactive cartoon introduces cybersecurity fellows, their work

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CISAC scholars are putting Stanford at the center of research on cybersecurity and the future of the Internet, drawing on experts from across campus and around the globe. Privacy and Internet freedoms in countries whose government restrict the use of social media and Web browsing, as well as the use of information technologies by organized crime and individual hackers, are all topics driving the innovative work underway at CISAC. 

Leading the charge are CISAC's inaugural cybersecurity fellows: Jonathan Mayer, Andrew K. Woods, and Timothy Junio. In this interactive cartoon by political journalist Dan Archer, we are introduced to the fellows, their work, and what they believe are the most pressing issues facing us today. The cartoon includes links to audio, video and articles.

View Cartoon

 

Learn More About CISAC Fellowships

(Applications Due February 1)
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Round table with Internet Freedom Fellows

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The Internet Freedom Fellows program brings human rights activists from across the globe to Geneva, Washington, and Silicon Valley to meet with fellow activists, U.S. and international government leaders, and members of civil society and the private sector engaged in technology and human rights. A key goal of the program is to share experiences and lessons learned on the importance of a free Internet to the promotion of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly as fundamental human rights.  As a part of the Silicon Valey tour, the six fellows for this year will stop at Stanford for a round table discussion. 

The fellows will present their work pertaining to internet freedom and challenges they face, that we will have a chance to discuss.  The event is free and open to the public.
You can find more information about the fellowship program at:

 

The internet freedom fellows for this year are:

 

Mac-Jordan Disu-Degadjor

@MacJordaN

 

A co-founder and executive of the sole blogging association in Ghana, Blogging Ghana, Mr. Disu-Degadjor promotes the freedom of expression through blogs and social media both on and off-line. Starting in 2009, Mac-Jordan and other young Ghanaians organized 18 BarCamps across Ghana, providing aspiring Ghanaian bloggers with technical help and networking opportunities. These conferences are designed to inspire youth to get on-line wherever and however they can.

On several occasions, Mac-Jordan has presented on the need to use blogs and other social media to amplify youth voices. In 2009, Global Voices appointed him as their aggregator for Ghana, and Dr. Dorothy Gordon, the Director-General of Ghana's Advanced Information Technology Institute, stated that he was a critical and necessary voice for the advancement of the nation.

Michael Anti

@mranti

 

Michael Anti was a computer programmer before turning to journalism in 2001. He is a longstanding advocate for a freer internet in China, noting that social media is the force that may ultimately challenge the political foundation of the country. Mr. Anti believes that the internet will facilitate a new conception of civic participation, inspiring the Chinese to see freedom of speech as a fundamental right. Microsoft MSN was forced to delete his award winning blog under pressure from the Chinese government, causing a media uproar in 2005. He has been an advocate of Virtual Private Networks for Chinese citizens, stating that those who don’t use them are “second-class citizens in the world of the internet.” Mr. Anti is known for his prolific career as a journalist, his 2012 Ted Talk, and his commitment to a freer China.

Edetaen Ojo

@EdetOjo; @MRA_ Nigeria

 

Edetaen Ojo is the director of The Media Rights Agenda, an organization that promotes excellence and professionalism in journalism. He spearheaded and orchestrated the movement that led the Nigerian legislature to pass the Freedom of Information Act, which empowers journalists to seek and access information from government establishments.

Mr. Ojo holds over twenty years of experience promoting and defending internet freedom as part of the broader right to freedom of expression, through monitoring transgressions and limitations on freedom and human rights online. His involvement in international human rights includes positions on the advisory group for the BBC World Service Trust-led Africa Media Development Initiative (AMDI) and the Task Force of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). Mr. Ojo also serves as Convenor (Chair) of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), a global network of organizations with its secretariat in Toronto, Canada.

Grigory Okhotin

@okhotin; @OvdInfo

 

Grigory Okhotin is a prominent journalist and human rights activist in Russia. Previously the director of the news site Inosmi.RU, Mr. Okhotin resigned in protest of the censorship imposed upon public media in Russia. After his resignation, Mr. Okhotin began writing publically about censorship and human rights violations in Russia.

After experiencing detainment himself, Mr. Okhotin co-founded the portal ovdinfo.org to provide a public forum for sharing information about Russian citizens detained while exercising their right to freedom of assembly. Mr. Okhotin’s website is unique in that it provides real-time detailed information about those who have been detained, and features mini-interviews in which activists describe the manner of their arrest and the conditions of their confinement. According to Mr. Okhotin, “That helps us to understand what happens behind closed doors.”

 

Usamah Mohamed

@simsimt

 

Usamah Mohamed is a computer programmer and human rights activist, who currently owns and operates an IT business in Khartoum. During the recent wave of anti-government demonstrations in Sudan, Mr. Mohamed organized peaceful demonstrations from the Twitter page he supervises and supplied international media with fresh pictures and news on demonstrations across the country. The government took several steps to halt Mr. Mohamed’s work, including subjecting him to a period of detention. Undeterred, Mr. Mohamed continues to use social media to promote human rights in Sudan. The U.S. Embassy follows his blog daily, considering it an important source of news and opinions about Sudan. In April 2012, Usamah was chosen to be a part of the Sudan Social Media Team to meet with the U.S. Department of State’s special representative to Muslim communities, Farah Pandith.

Mr. Mohamed currently trains activists to use online tools effectively and efficiently. This includes training on blogging, bypassing online censorship, using circumvention tools, digital and online security, citizen journalism, effective audio and video recording, and live-tweeting for the coverage of events such as protests, sit-ins, and forums.

 

Bronwen Robertson

 

Bronwen Robertson is the Director of Operations for a London based NGO called Small Media. While in Iran working on a PhD in music, Ms. Robertson became interested in working for the rights of repressed Iranians, especially homosexuals. In Iran, Ms. Roberson spearheaded a research project and report entitled “LGBT Republic of Iran: An Online Reality?” The report, published in May of this year, led to a number of projects that connect Farsi speaking communities worldwide. One such project is a website called Degarvajeh, which gives online support to the LGBT community by providing general information and the proper Farsi vocabulary to discuss LGBT issues in a non-derogatory fashion.

Through Small Media, Ms. Robertson works to counter Iran’s efforts to block websites and censor information. Small Media spends much of its time working on creating new and innovative ways to make the internet safe and useful for Iranians. The group holds numerous online training sessions in personal online security, citizen journalism, and general information. They also report on related issues such as cultural censorship in Iran, Iranian women sports, and struggles faced by Iranian Bloggers. Recently, the group held an awareness raising workshop to demonstrate the challenges faced by Iranians using the internet under oppression.

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Setting the Record Straight

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In this piece for Huffington Post, Jeremy Weinstein defends Ambassador Susan Rice's career, saying that the potential candidate for Secretary of State is "uniquely qualified" for the position and hopes that President Obama will nominate her to the position. Her career has been subjected to intense partisan and media scrutiny, which Weinstein says is unwarranted. 

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War and Democratic Constraint: Parties, the Press, and Public Influence on Decisions of War and Peace

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About the Topic: Media outlets in multi-party electoral systems tend to report on a wider range of policy issues and present more competing policy frames than media in two-party systems. This suggests we should observe more challenges to governments’ preferred framing of foreign policy in multi-party democracies. Citizens in multi-party democracies are better equipped to hold their leaders accountable, relative to their counterparts in two-party democracies. This, in turn, ought to result in greater caution when leaders consider the prospect of employing military force abroad. By analyzing the news coverage of interventions in Iraq and Libya, as well as public support for war and joining multinational coalitions that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, Baum proposes a mechanism through which leaders can be constrained in decisions concerning war and peace. 

 

About the Speaker: Matthew Baum is the Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communication and professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His research focuses on delineating the effects of mass media and public opinion on international conflict and cooperation and on American foreign policy, as well as on the role of the mass media and public opinion in contemporary American politics. He has published in over a dozen leading scholarly journals, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and International Organization. He is also author of Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age and co-authored, War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views of War. Baum received his PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego in 2000.

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Matthew Baum Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communication; Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Speaker
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Predictability of Human Behavior

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     Vast resources are devoted to predicting human behavior in domains such as economics, popular culture, and national security, but the quality of such predictions is usually poor. It is tempting to conclude that this inability to make good predictions is a consequence of some fundamental lack of predictability on the part of humans. However, our recent work offers evidence that the failure of standard prediction methods does not indicate an absence of human predictability but instead reflects: 1.) misunderstandings regarding which features of human dynamics actually possess predictive power, and 2.) the fact that, until recently, it has not been possible to measure these predictive features in real world settings.
 
     This talk introduces some of the science behind this basic observation and demonstrates its utility through three case studies. We begin by considering social groups in which individuals are influ- enced by the behavior of others; in these situations, social influence is known to decrease the ex ante predictability of the ensuing social dynamics. We show that, interestingly, these same social forces can increase the extent to which the outcome of a social process can be predicted in its very early stages. This finding is then leveraged to design prediction methods which outperform existing techniques for predicting social group dynamics.
 
     The second case study involves analysis of the predictability of adversary behavior in the coevo- lutionary “arms races” that exist between attackers and defenders in many domains, including cyber security, counterterrorism, fraud prevention, and various markets. Our analysis reveals that conventional wisdom regarding these coevolving systems is incomplete, and provides insights which enable the development of proactive cyber defense methods that are much more effective than standard techniques. Finally, we consider the task of predicting human behavior at the level of individuals. In particular, we show that a given individual’s mobility patterns can be predicted with surprising accuracy, and conversely that knowledge of even a small portion of a person’s travel patterns permits reliable identification of that individual. 
About the speaker: Rich Colbaugh received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 1986. He presently holds a joint appointment with the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, where he is Chief Scientist of ICASA and a Professor in both the Mechanical Engineering and Management Departments, and Sandia National Laboratories, where he is a member of the Analytics and Cryptography Department. His research activities have focused on the modeling, analysis, and control of dynamical systems of importance in nature and society. Much of this work involves the study of very large, complex networks, including those of relevance to national security, socioeconomic systems, advanced technology, and biology.
 
Dr. Colbaugh spent 2001-2006 with the U.S. Intelligence Community in Washington DC advising senior leadership on counterterrorism and counterproliferation programs. Since 2007 he has concentrated his research and development efforts on social media analytics, attracting support for this program from agencies such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.

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Rich Colbaugh Sandia National Laboratory; Chief Scientist, Institute for Complex and Adaptive Systems, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology Speaker
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Exposure to Low-­‐Dose Radiation: We Need Social Discussion for Risk Judgment

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For a copy of the original article in Japanese, please contact Toshihiro Higuchi at th233@stanford.edu.

At the end of last year, the expert panel established by the Cabinet Office submitted a report on the effects of low-level and chronic radiation exposure. It is a Herculean task to tackle the difficulty challenge of risk management within such a short period. Risk management regarding the type of radiation exposure at issue, however, is not a matter of pure science to be left solely with scientific experts. It is essential for each of us to judge the degree of its danger and work out social consensus as to solutions.

Our past experience offers a lesson worth noting. In March 1954, the U.S. hydrogen bomb test showered an enormous amount of deadly fallout on a Japanese tuna fishing boat. The specter of “radioactive tuna” terrified consumers, and reports of cesium and strontium in brown rice and vegetables continued. As public opinion against nuclear tests was boiling, the U.S. government claimed that health damage from them was negligible and asked the scientific committee established by the United Nations to investigate this problem.

Accurate estimates of the health damage caused by low-level radiation exposure, however, proved extremely difficult. A fierce debate inevitably broke out over the validity of the findings, and people began to feel even more insecure. The claim that the damage from pollution was small also turned out to be relative in comparison to the security value of nuclear weapons, the scale of X-rays, natural background and other radiation hazards, and such commonly accepted dangers as smoking cigarettes or driving a car. In reality, however, the world was deeply divided over the merits of nuclear armaments. Moreover, the essential character of fallout hazards differed from our everyday risks in that we could neither avoid the danger of fallout nor expect due compensation for it. As a result, all prerequisites for comparative analysis quickly eroded in the case of radioactive contamination. In August 1958, the United Nations Scientific Committee reported its conclusion that there was no reason to tolerate the risks of radioactive fallout from nuclear tests. In the end, the U.S. government’s claim lost its ground.

Our society has a wide diversity of values. It is simply impossible to seek a universal answer as to how much radiation dose is acceptable to all stakeholders. Even if those in charge of risk management unilaterally determine the “acceptable” dose, it will be meaningless unless people at risk accept such decision. It will rather saw a seed of distrust and make risk management even more difficult.

Our next task is to listen to the voices of people at risk through regular field visits and social media such as Internet, and to explore a point of social consensus as to the risks associated with nuclear power. 

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