About the Topic: The cyber security landscape has seen dramatic changes in recent years with the advent and evolution of new, growing, and ever-present adversaries. As targeted attacks and advanced adversaries continue to evolve and become increasingly sophisticated, it becomes difficult to keep pace and stay protected. Existing security technologies are incapable of identifying determined adversaries and protecting your intellectual property. Enterprises must combat these threats with targeted attack detection, prevention, and monitoring. By leveraging big data technologies and security intelligence, companies can proactively respond to advanced threats while also gaining the ability to hunt, query, and gain insight into all activity across the enterprise.

About the Speaker: Serial entrepreneur George Kurtz co-founded CrowdStrike, a cutting-edge, big data, security technology company focused on helping enterprises and governments protect their most sensitive intellectual property and national security information. Kurtz is an internationally recognized security expert, author, entrepreneur, and speaker. He has more than 20 years of experience in the security space, including extensive experience driving revenue growth and scaling small and large organizations. His entrepreneurial background and ability to commercialize nascent technologies has enabled him to drive innovation throughout his career by identifying market trends and correlating them with customer feedback, resulting in rapid growth for the businesses he has run.

His prior roles at McAfee, a $3-billion security company, include Worldwide Chief Technology O­cer and GM, as well as SVP of Enterprise. Prior to joining McAfee, Kurtz started Foundstone in October 1999 as the founder and CEO responsible for recruiting the other six founding team members. Foundstone, a world wide security products and services company, had one of the leading incident response practices in the industry, and was acquired by McAFee in October of 2004. He also authored the best-selling security book of all time, Hacking Exposed: Network Security Secrets & Solutions.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: James Cameron, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-14, completed his PhD in July 2013 at the University of Cambridge. James is very interested in the contribution history can make to informing today’s debates on nuclear strategy and U.S.-Russian relations. After completing his master’s in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, he was a business consultant specializing in the former Soviet Union. 

His dissertation, “The Development of United States Anti-Ballistic Missile Policy, 1961-1972”, used the transformation of the American anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program from John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon as a prism through which to examine changing patterns of presidential nuclear leadership during this period. Employing both new American and Russian sources, the thesis shows how successive occupants of the Oval Office and their most trusted advisers managed the tension between their publicly articulated nuclear strategies and their inner convictions regarding the utility of nuclear weapons during this pivotal decade of the Cold War.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Richard Nixon did not believe in mutual assured destruction. Yet he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, which enshrined MAD as a central fact of the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear balance. Conversely his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, publicly defended American nuclear superiority and pushed ahead with ABM, despite their private skepticism regarding the utility of both and desire to moderate the arms race. Employing newly available evidence from declassified telephone recordings and documents, this paper attempts to account for this contradiction. It does so by placing the perpetual presidential struggle to reconcile private convictions with public demands at the center of the emergence of assured destruction and the limitation of ABM as elements of U.S.-Soviet détente through strategic arms control.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Rachel Gillum is a PhD student in Political Science at Stanford University, and joined CISAC as a predoctoral fellow in September of 2013. She is also a fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS) and is affiliated with Stanford’s Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Rachel’s research focuses on the Muslim-American community and examines the determinants of a variety of political beliefs and behaviors towards the American government, from full integration and identification with the United States, to support for violent extremism.

Rachel previously served as a graduate associate researcher at the RAND Corporation’s International Policy Center, where she conducted in-depth analysis on terrorist recruitment strategies and presented policy suggestions to U.S. government clients. From 2010-2012, she served as the chief editor and head research assistant under Prof. Martha Crenshaw on the Mapping Militants Project, where she oversaw and helped devise the design of an online tool for the analysis of terrorist networks. Rachel has also worked as a consultant for the Gallup Organization and a research assistant at the Department of Defense’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: How do Muslim-Americans form beliefs about the treatment they expect to receive from US law enforcement? The results of an original, nationally-representative survey of Muslim-Americans suggest two key findings. First, expectations of fairness on the part of Muslim immigrants are shaped, in part, by the level of institutional corruption in their country of origin. Immigrants coming from less corrupt countries hold more optimistic views about expected treatment by US law enforcement. Second, Muslim immigrants who have been naturalized are less trusting in the government than newcomers, and Muslims who were born and raised in the United States are least likely to believe that law enforcement will deal with Muslims fairly. These results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of control variables. Ethnographic evidence drawn from interviews with Muslims-Americans suggests that Muslims update their expectations through interactions and familiarity with American institutions. US-born Muslims expect violations of their rights by the government and are politically concerned about such issues. Foreign-born Muslims, while aware of the controversies regarding US government surveillance and profiling of Muslim communities, tend to be less focused on issues related to citizen rights and more focused on the day-to-day concerns common to immigrants everywhere.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Niccolò Petrelli is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research focuses on reassessing the theory and practice of counterinsurgency. Incorporating insights from the contiguous fields of study of "civil wars" and "peacekeeping operations" and employing critical historical analysis of case studies, the research aims to analyze the features, limits and influence of the theory of Counterinsurgency. Before joining CISAC in 2013, Niccolò was a military research fellow at the Military Center for Strategic Studies (Ce.Mi.S.S.) within the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (CASD) in Rome, Italy, and a research assistant at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) in Herzliya. Niccolò received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Roma Tre in 2013. In his dissertation, he examined the impact of strategic culture on the Israeli approach to counterinsurgency.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: In "Counterinsurgency: A Conceptual Reassessment," Niccolò Petrelli will address unresolved issues in the study of counterinsurgency (COIN). The talk will focus on three main questions: How did COIN theory emerge and which are its intellectual sources? To what extent has COIN practice been informed by theory? Is the population-centric COIN paradigm prevalent in scholarly studies and in the contemporary professional discourse historically accurate? In order to answer these questions, the talk will first outline a critical historical analysis of the development of COIN theory, tracing its intellectual roots and fundamental assumptions. Subsequently, it will reassess practice through the qualitative comparative analysis of several case studies of COIN campaigns.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: In his talk, Jack Goldsmith will explain why he is skeptical about significant cybersecurity cooperation among military rivals, especially at the treaty level. He will, however, argue that the Snowden revelations make such cooperation more, not less, likely.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Jack Goldsmith is Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard University, where he specializes in national security law, international law, internet law, and presidential power. Goldsmith is the author of five books and numerous articles covering these topics. His recent books include: Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11 (W.W. Norton, 2012); The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (W.W. Norton, 2007); Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford Press, 2006, with Tim Wu); and The Limits of International Law (Oxford Press, 2005, with Eric Posner). Prior to his time at Harvard, Goldsmith was Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 to July 2004 and Special Counsel to the General Counsel to the Department of Defense from September 2002 through June 2003.