Podcasts about technology and democracy

Panel 3: Privacy Chair: Dr Daniel Wilson (CRASSH, Cambridge) Dr Nóra Ní Loideain (Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London) Dr Anil Madhavapeddy (Computer Lab, Cambridge) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

Panel 2: Security Chair: Professor John Naughton (CRASSH, Cambridge) Dr Chris Doran (Director of Research Collaborations, ARM) Professor Jon Crowcroft (Computer Lab, Cambridge) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

Panel 1: Geo(politics) Chair: Professor David Runciman (POLIS, Cambridge) Professor Ross Anderson (Computer Lab, Cambridge) Dr Bill Janeway (Pembroke College and Warburg Pincus) Professor John Naughton (CRASSH, Cambridge) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

‘Pax Technica’ Keynote Address: Professor Philip Howard (Oxford) In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are: * The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War) * The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments * Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will create * The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for society * The IoT looks like an unstoppable juggernaut, so we should learn from our experience with earlier incarnations of the Internet to try and ensure that history does not repeat itself Pax Technica is an ambitious and far-reaching book, and like all such volumes, it raises almost as many questions — about international and national politics, governance, security and privacy — as it answers. The Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH seeks to use the book as a jumping-off point for exploring some of these questions. We will do this in a major one-day public event in Cambridge on 24 November 2017, featuring Professor Howard and invited experts from a number of relevant disciplines. The event will open with a keynote address, after which three panels of invited experts will discuss specific implications of a hyper-connected world. This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

A workshop at CRASSH on the uses of number, in and against the public interest: past, present and future. Session Two - Liz McFall, Jonathan Gray and Frank Pasquale This event is organised by the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project and will bring historical and contemporary perspectives to bear on the question of how the public interest is to be determined in a world increasingly under the rule of number, data and quantification. Speakers: Will Davies (Goldsmiths) Glen O'Hara (Oxford Brookes) Liz McFall (OU) Jonathan Gray (Bath) Frank Pasquale (Maryland) Collecting information about the public has often caused controversy, but it has usually been understood as a form of exchange. As this information takes increasingly numerical form, the nature of this quid pro quo – who gets what from the exchange – has become more and more opaque. Who has the right to collect and organise public information, to control access to it now and into the future? As a greater number of private entities accumulate statistical information, this workshop aims to investigate the shifting boundary of the public and the private spheres. We will ask how the processes of counting and enumerating people have helped to produce specific political forms of government and economic forms of business. And specifically, we will examine the ways in which claims of a public interest have been used to justify the collection of such information, from censuses to digital data trails. Panellists, speakers and respondents will approach the question using case studies from the history of insurance and medical surveillance, neoliberalism and official statistics, as well as electoral political strategies.

A workshop at CRASSH on the uses of number, in and against the public interest: past, present and future. Session One - Will Davies and Glen O'Hara This event is organised by the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project and will bring historical and contemporary perspectives to bear on the question of how the public interest is to be determined in a world increasingly under the rule of number, data and quantification. Speakers: Will Davies (Goldsmiths) Glen O'Hara (Oxford Brookes) Liz McFall (OU) Jonathan Gray (Bath) Frank Pasquale (Maryland) Collecting information about the public has often caused controversy, but it has usually been understood as a form of exchange. As this information takes increasingly numerical form, the nature of this quid pro quo – who gets what from the exchange – has become more and more opaque. Who has the right to collect and organise public information, to control access to it now and into the future? As a greater number of private entities accumulate statistical information, this workshop aims to investigate the shifting boundary of the public and the private spheres. We will ask how the processes of counting and enumerating people have helped to produce specific political forms of government and economic forms of business. And specifically, we will examine the ways in which claims of a public interest have been used to justify the collection of such information, from censuses to digital data trails. Panellists, speakers and respondents will approach the question using case studies from the history of insurance and medical surveillance, neoliberalism and official statistics, as well as electoral political strategies.

What do self-driving cars, on-demand services, AI, and income inequality have in common? They are telling us, loud and clear, that we’re in for massive changes in work, business, and the economy. We are heading pell-mell towards a world being shaped by technology in ways that we don’t understand and have many reasons to fear. Just about everyone’s asking WTF? (“What the F*?”) but also, more charitably “What’s the future?”. Where is technology taking us? Is it going to fill us with astonishment or dismay? And most importantly, what is our role in deciding that future? How do we make choices today that will result in a world we want to live in? What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to workers, and what happens to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? What’s the future of business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional universities in keeping skills up to date? We are at a very dangerous moment in history. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a global elite is eroding the power and sovereignty of nation-states at the same time as globe-spanning technology platforms are enabling algorithmic control of firms, institutions, and societies, shaping what billions of people see and understand and how the economic pie is divided. At the same time, income inequality and the pace of technology change are leading to a populist backlash featuring opposition to science, distrust of our governing institutions, and fear of the future, making it ever more difficult to solve the problems we have created. The biggest changes are still ahead. Every industry and every organization will have to transform itself in the next decades, in multiple ways, or fade away. We need to ask ourselves whether the fundamental social safety nets of the developed world will survive the transition, and more importantly, what we will replace them with. We need a focused, high-level conversation about the deep ways in which global computer networks and platforms are transforming how we do business, how we work, and how we live. This talk frames that conversation. Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc. He publishes books, runs conferences, invests in early-stage startups, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators. Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early-stage venture firm, and is on the boards of Code for America, Maker Media, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox. Over the years, Tim has built a culture where sustainable innovation is a key tenet of business philosophy. His active engagement with technology communities both drives the company’s product development and informs its marketing. He graduated from Harvard in 1975 with a degree in Classics. He began working as a technical writer, and soon began writing and publishing his own books on technology topics. Since 1978, O’Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, honing in on the most significant technology trends and galvanising their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from tech innovators. His company is publisher of the iconic “animal books” for software developers, creator of the first commercial website (GNN), organiser of the summit meeting that gave the open source software movement its name, and he was a key figure in the “Web 2.0” renaissance after the original dot-com bubble burst. In 2009, with his “Gov 2.0 Summit,” he framed a conversation about the modernization of government technology that has shaped policy and spawned initiatives at the Federal, State, and local level, and around the world. He has now turned his attention to the implications of AI, the on-demand economy, and other technologies that are transforming the nature of work and the future shape of the business world.

We are being told a simple story about the future of work: if a machine can record and imitate what you do, you will be replaced by it. Christened a “fourth industrial revolution,” a narrative of mass unemployment is now gripping policymakers. It envisions human workers rendered superfluous by ever-more-powerful software, robots, and predictive analytics. Substituting robots for workers may seem like an impossibly grandiose ambition. But its main problem is not impracticality—rather, it is not nearly grand enough. It is a vision of society built on a narrow consumerism. We don’t exist simply to be served. We want to serve others, to make a contribution, and to find some meaning in our daily activities. Another approach is possible—indeed, plausible. It is a future of robots and software complementing work, to make it better. I call technology that improves workers’ skills and opportunities “humane automation,” to be distinguished from other forms of technical advance that are indifferent to—or undermine—workers’ skills and wages. Fortunately, forms of humane automation are already taking root in many fields. As consumers and citizens, we can encourage this more inclusive and sustainable path. Enlightened policymakers and professionals can also re-channel the flow of commerce to respect, rather than replace, human initiative. Frank Pasquale, JD, MPhil is an expert on the law and policy of big data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. He has advised government and business leaders on the health care, internet, and finance industries, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, the Council of Institutional Investors, the Capitol Forum, and the European Commission. He has spoken on his book, The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015) at academic and policy venues around the world, including law, computer science, humanities, and social science departments. His work has recently been translated into Chinese, French, German, Korean, Hungarian, and Serbian, and he is routinely quoted in global media outlets. He has been recognised as one of the ten most-cited health law scholars in the United States. His current book project is tentatively titled Laws of Robotics: Revitalizing the Professions in an Era of Automation (under contract to Harvard University Press). He is a currently a Visiting Fellow on the Technology and Democracy Project in CRASSH , an affiliate fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and a fellow at the New Economy Law Center. He has served as a visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Panel Three: State Power Discussants: Ross Anderson (Cambridge), Lawrence Quill (San Jose) & Ron Deibert (Toronto) Ross Anderson is Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge and a leading expert on the technology, economics and psychology of computer security. He was awarded the 2016 Lovelace Medal—given to “individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the understanding or advancement of computer science”. Lawrence Quill is Professor of Political Science at San Jose State University. His books include Secrets and Democracy: From Arcana Imperii to WikiLeaks and he is a Visiting Fellow on Technology and Democracy project. Ronald Deibert is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Black Code and a leading scholar on the intersection of digital technologies, global security and human rights. Chair: Nora Ni Loideain (Cambridge)

Panel Four: Algorithmic Power Discussants: Malte Ziewitz (Cornell), Ariel Ezrachi (Oxford) & Seda Guerses (Ku Leuven) Malte Ziewitz is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University with a graduate field appointment in Information Science. Recently he was guest editor of a Special Issue of the journal Science, Technology and Human Values (vol 41.1: 2016) entitled ‘Governing Algorithms’. Ariel Ezrachi is Slaughter and May Professor of Competition Law, University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Competition Law and Policy. He is co-author (with Maurice Stucke) of ”Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy”:(http://amzn.to/2izYRNK) (2016). Seda Guerses is a post-doctoral fellow at Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) in the Privacy Technologies Team at the Department of Electrical Engineering University of Leuven, and an associate fellow at the Center for Information Technology and Policy at Princeton University. Chair: Julia Powles (Cambridge)

Panel Two: Media Power Discussants: John Naughton (Cambridge) & Martin Moore (King's College London) John Naughton is a Senior Research Fellow at CRASSH, co-director of the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project and the Observer’s technology columnist. His most recent book is From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the Internet. Martin Moore is Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power, and a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London. He is the author of Tech Giants and Civic Power (2016). Chair: David Runciman

Panel One: Corporate Power Discussants: Siva Vaidhyanathan (Virginia), Mireille Hildebrandt (Brussels) & Ellen Goodman (Rutgers) Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Modern Media Studies, University of Virginia, author of The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) and numerous other works. Mireille Hildebrandt holds the chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and since October 2015 she is a Research Professor at the research group for Law Science Technology and Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Ellen P. Goodman is Professor of Law at Rutgers University and co-founder of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law (RIIPL). She is also a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication and has been a Senior Visiting Scholar at the Federal Communications Commission. Ellen has written on digital platforms, the Internet of Things, spectrum and net neutrality policy, free expression and advertising law, and public media, and is currently working on data transparency and civic tech projects. Chair: Daniel Wilson (Cambridge)

In this talk, Dr Christena Nippert-Eng will present work in the early stages of development, that will be her focus while being a visiting Fellow at CRASSH over the next two weeks. The work will build on her interests in privacy and security, social behaviour across species, and the current U.S. political landscape. She will begin the talk by introducing her efforts to date in developing a grammar of camouflage behaviours, motivations, and intentions across species. Moving from the face-to-face realm, she will then examine camouflage behaviours online, zeroing in more specifically on the foundational assumptions and practices that foster the success of fake news and false facts. Like all camouflage behaviours, these depend not only on how well engineered the deception is but also on the target’s need/desire to believe and (immediately or eventually) act on what is perceived. She will conclude with some thoughts on digital deception – and perhaps its exposure -- as a relatively new source of socio-political-economic power. Dr Christena Nippert-Eng is a sociologist and Professor of Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington. Her scholarly interests include cognitive and formal sociology, everyday life, privacy, culture, technology, user-centered design, and multi-species research.

Censorship of online communications threatens principles of openness and freedom of information on which the Internet was founded. In the interest of transparency and accountability, and more broadly to develop scientific rigour in the field, we need methodologies to measure and characterize Internet censorship. Such studies will not only help users make informed choices about information access, but also illuminate entities involved in or affected by censorship; informing the development of policy and enquiries into the ethics and legality of such practices. However, many issues around Internet censorship remain poorly understood because of the inherently adversarial and opaque landscape in which it operates. As details about mechanisms and targets of censorship are usually undisclosed, it is hard to define exactly what comprises censorship, and how it operates in different contexts. My research aims to help fill this gap by developing methodologies to derive censorship ground truth using active and passive data analysis techniques, which I apply to real-world datasets to uncover entities involved in censorship, the targets of censorship, and the effects of such practices on different stakeholders. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my work on Internet censorship from multiple perspectives: (i) measurement of the Great Firewall of China that shows that inference of the censor’s traffic analysis model can enable systematic identification of evasion opportunities that users can exploit to access restricted content, (ii) analysis of network logs collected at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Pakistan over a period of escalating censorship to study how censorship affects users’ browsing habits with respect to circumvention, and its economic effects on content providers and ISPs, and (iii) investigation of differential treatment—an emerging class of censorship where websites (rather than the government) block requests of users they don’t like—in the context of Tor anonymity network and users of adblocking software. Shehar Bano is a postdoctoral researcher at University College London. Her research interests centre on networked systems, particularly in the context of security and measurement. Currently, she is working on: the DECODE platform—a distributed, privacy aware, and trusted architecture based on blockchain technology for decentralized data governance and identity management, characterizing churn in the availability of IP addresses and Internet services over time and across different geographic locations in Internet-wide scans,and understanding emerging forms of censorship such as conspiracy theories and propaganda in online media. She completed her Ph.D. from Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. Jon Crowcroft (and co-supervised by Dr. Steven Murdoch, Prof. Vern Paxson, and Prof. Ross Anderson) where she was an Honorary Cambridge Trust Scholar, and was awarded the Mary Bradburn Scholarship by the British Federation of Women Graduates for her research work. Her thesis contributes novel measurement methodologies to identify instances of Internet censorship, and large-scale characterizations of such practices to shed light on how it’s done, how it can be stopped, what its effects are, and the evolving shape of the ecosystem of government/policy-based censorship. Previously she worked on Intrusion Detection Systems, and wrote an open-source software for botnet detection. Her work has been published in the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, the Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and other well-respected venues.

Charles Arthur: Has the Public Been Well Served by Technology Journalism? Amid the rise of Google, Facebook and Apple - at the same time that the "traditional media" has been under greater financial and attention pressure than ever before - are we being sufficiently informed, in the right way, about the companies which can influence our lives? Panellists: Andrew Brown (Guardian), Carole Cadwalldr (The Observer), Ingrid Lunden (Techcrunch) Chair: Charles Arthur, Freelance Tech Journalist and Visiting Fellow at the Technology and Democracy project at CRASSH (formerly Technology Editor at the Guardian)

Discussants: John Naughton, David Vincent, Julian Huppert, Nora Ni Loideain Chair: Daniel Wilson On 16 November 2016, both Houses of Parliament completed their examination and review of the Investigatory Powers Bill and it will become law before the end of 2016. When it was first published in draft form a year ago, the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, promised that the Bill would establish a “world-leading oversight regime” with “powers fit for the digital age” that would be “clear and understandable”. Nevertheless, the Bill has since been the subject of considerable controversy. Advocates, including, Professor Sir David Omand (a former Director of GCHQ ), stress that the importance of the new statute cannot be overestimated as it puts the secret surveillance activities of the State “under the rule of law” for the first time in 500 years and makes such powers “comprehensible to the citizen”. Critics, however, argue that the new law provides the State with unprecedented powers that are “more suited to a dictatorship than a democracy” (Jim Killock, Executive Director, Open Rights Group). Civil society organisations have described the law as a “Snooper’s Charter”. Of particular concern is the scope of powers provided under the law which will enable public authorities “to indiscriminately hack, intercept, record, and monitor the communications and internet use of the entire population” (Bella Sankey, Policy Director, Liberty). In its final event of the Technology and Democracy Project’s 2016 seminar series, an interdisciplinary panel of speakers will address the political, historical, technological and human rights implications posed by this divisive new legislative framework. Please join us for a discussion of what kind of precedent this significant new law represents for technology and democracy both within and beyond the UK.

Internet Jurisdiction, Extraterritoriality and Law Enforcement: Unclaimed Territories in the Cloud - where are the Limits to Internet Jurisdiction? Speaker - Professor Julia Hörnle (Queen Mary, University of London) Discussant - Dr Findlay Stark (Faculty of Law, Cambridge) The Internet is a technology that continues to transform society, thereby inevitably shaping the extent to which the laws of countries can operate outside of their jurisdiction across the world. While there are those who regard the extraterritorial application of some laws positively as a mechanism for protecting the fundamental rights of individuals from threats outside the jurisdiction, it can be also be viewed as an improper intrusion of foreign states on domestic interests. As examined in a previous Technology and Democracy Project seminar, one such example would be the 2015 landmark decision of the highest court in the EU which clearly established that EU data protection law applies to US law governing State surveillance on the basis that the US must provide adequate protection for the processing of personal data that is transferred from the EU to the US. Hence, the significant but also novel implications posed to the rule of law, due process and privacy by the increasing levels of data processing across national borders by governments and the private sector in the cloud of the Internet makes this area of great interest to the Technology and Democracy Project. To address the challenges posed by this increasingly important and complex legal area for technology and democracy in the era of Big Data and the Internet of Things, we have brought together Professor of Internet Law Julia Hörnle (QMUL) who will present on this topic and Dr Findlay Stark (Cambridge University Lecturer in Criminal Law and Deputy Director, Cambridge Centre for Criminal Justice), the seminar’s discussant and chair.

Speaker - Helen Margetts, OII Respondent - Sharath Srinivasan, POLIS, Cambridge The last few years have seen increasingly frenzied speculation about the role of social media in political mobilisation. In an important recent book Helen Margetts and her colleagues report on research drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events to show how mobilisations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable and often unsustainable. To reach a better understanding of this unruly force in the political world, the researchers have used experiments that test how social media influence citizens when they are deciding whether or not to participate. They conclude that a new kind of “chaotic pluralism” is the model of democracy that is emerging in our networked environment. Helen Margetts is the Director of the OII , and Professor of Society and the Internet at Oxford. She is a political scientist specialising in digital era governance and politics, investigating political behaviour, digital government and government-citizen interactions in the age of the internet, social media and big data. She has published over a hundred books, articles and major research reports in this area, including Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (with Peter John, scott Hale and Taha Yasseri, 2015); Paradoxes of Modernization (with Perri 6 and Christopher Hood, 2010); Digital Era Governance (with Patrick Dunleavy, 2006); and The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (with Christopher Hood, 2007). In 2003 she and Patrick Dunleavy won the ‘Political Scientists Making a Difference’ award from the UK Political Studies Association, in part for a series of policy reports on Government on the Internet for the UK National Audit Office (1999, 2002 and 2007), and she continues working to maximise the policy impact of her research. She sits on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government and is editor-in-chief of the journal Policy and Internet. She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. From 2011- 2014 she held the ESRC professorial fellowship ‘The Internet, Political Science and Public policy: Re-examining Collective Action, Governance and Citizen-Governance Interactions in the Digital Era’. Professor Margetts joined the OII in 2004 from University College London where she was a Professor in Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy. She began her career as a computer programmer and systems analyst with Rank Xerox after receiving her BSc in mathematics from the University of Bristol. She returned to studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1989, completing an MSc in Politics and Public Policy in 1990 and a PhD in Government in 1996. She worked as a researcher at LSE from 1991 to 1994 and a lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London from 1994 to 1999.

Panel 3: The Business of Privacy; Commerce and the Private Sector Chair: Stephanie Palmer (University of Cambridge) Ian Brown (Oxford Internet Institute) Mary Aiken (CyberPsychology Research Centre): "The cyberpsychology of privacy" Reuben Binns (University of Oxford): "Privacy as property"

Panel 4: Reflections and Lessons Chair and roundup: David Runciman (University of Cambridge) All speakers

Panel 4: Reflections and Lessons Chair and roundup: David Runciman (University of Cambridge) All speakers

Panel 2: The Private Life; The State and Public Sphere Chair: Nora Ni Loideain (University of Cambridge) David Vincent (Open University): "Privacy and the crisis of the liberal State" Karlin Lillington (Irish Times): "Privacy & page one; the challenge of engaging readers ... and editors" Simon Rice (Information Commissioner's Office)

Panel 2: The Private Life; The State and Public Sphere Chair: Nora Ni Loideain (University of Cambridge) David Vincent (Open University): "Privacy and the crisis of the liberal State" Karlin Lillington (Irish Times): "Privacy & page one; the challenge of engaging readers ... and editors" Simon Rice (Information Commissioner's Office)

Panel 1: The Private Life; Individual Privacy, Self and Subject Chair: Daniel Wilson (University of Cambridge) David Feldman (University of Cambridge): "One lawyer's view of private life" Barbara Taylor (Queen Mary, University of London): "Why not solitude?" Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths, University of London): "The privacy of the self in an age of exposure"

Panel 1: The Private Life; Individual Privacy, Self and Subject Chair: Daniel Wilson (University of Cambridge) David Feldman (University of Cambridge): "One lawyer's view of private life" Barbara Taylor (Queen Mary, University of London): "Why not solitude?" Josh Cohen (Goldsmiths, University of London): "The privacy of the self in an age of exposure"

Keynote address: "Why Privacy?" Chair: John Naughton (University of Cambridge) Keynote speaker: Christena Nippert-Eng (Indiana University)

Keynote address: "Why Privacy?" Chair: John Naughton (University of Cambridge) Keynote speaker: Christena Nippert-Eng (Indiana University)

Chair: Julia Powles Speakers: Julian Huppert and Adrian Kennard

Chair: David Erdos Speakers: David Vincent, Nora Ni Loideain and Andrew Murray

Chair: Nora Ni Loideain Speakers: Ross Anderson and Ian Walden

Chair: John Naughton Speakers: Richard Clayton, Lorna Woods and Ray Corrigan

Panel 1: Oversight and Control 5 February 2016 Chair: David Runciman Speakers: Conor Gearty and Judith Townend

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable. At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project. To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue. Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP) Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable. At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project. To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue. Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP) Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable. At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project. To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue. Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP) Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable. At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project. To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue. Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP) Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable. At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project. To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue. Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP) Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

In recent years, the debate about automation and employment has taken a new turn. What has re-ignited the debate is the realisation that the process of ‘combinatorial innovation’ in digital technology—the combination of massive increases in processing power, big data analytics, sensor technology, digital mapping and machine learning—has opened up the possibility that large numbers of non-repetitive jobs which require some cognitive skills may become amenable to automation in the foreseeable future. This kind of work—classically defined as ‘white collar’ jobs in the UK (‘middle-class’ in the US)—represents a significant proportion of current industrial and commercial employment, and significant displacement of it by technology would be a major development for societies. Estimates of the potential disruption vary, but the best-known study (by Frey and Osborne) estimates that fully 47 per cent of the 702 job categories identified by the US Bureau of Labor could now be vulnerable. At this stage, there is no way of determining whether the sceptics or the predictions are correct. This uncertainty, however, should not be the end of the discussion, but the beginning. The possibility that a significant proportion of middle-class work could be mechanised at the pace we have seen in other areas affected by digital technology is an eventuality that needs to be taken seriously, even if the probability of it happening is lower than evangelists believe. The existence of a stable middle class is a prerequisite for a viable democracy, and the prospect of it being destabilised is therefore of great interest to our Technology and Democracy project. To discuss it we have brought together four speakers, each of whom brings a different perspective to the issue. Robert Madelin is Senior Adviser for Innovation in the European Commission Daniel Susskind is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford and co-author of The Future of the Professions (OUP) Willy Brown is Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Cambridge and former Master of Darwin College Gerard de Vries is Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy, the think tank of the Dutch government for long-term policy issues This talk is part of the Technology and Democracy Events series.

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is Director of Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics. He has [been] author/editor of five books on various aspects of political communication, journalism, and news media, including the award-winning “Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns”, and has published widely in both academic and general interest publications.

Paul Mason, Economics Editor at Channel 4 News, will speak on his book 'Postcapitalism'.

A lunchtime workshop of the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project In a landmark judgment on October 7 the European Court of Justice has ruled that the Safe Harbour framework governing the transfer of EU citizens’ personal data to the US does not comply with the requirements of EU Data Protection law in light of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and is therefore invalid under EU law. The Safe Harbour framework stemmed from a decision of the European Commission in 2000 (2000/520/EC) that the US afforded an adequate level of protection of personal data transferred to the US from the EU. This decision was made long before the EU Charter became part of EU law and more than a decade prior to the Edward Snowden revelations. The ECJ’s judgment thus invalidates arrangements that for 15 years have allowed Internet companies to transfer the personal data of European users to server farms in the US and elsewhere. It has very wide-ranging implications — not just for data-protection law, but also for the economics of Internet companies and for international relations. This workshop will discuss some of those implications. Panel: David Runciman (chair), John Naughton, Ross Anderson, Nora Ni Loideain

A lunchtime workshop of the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project In a landmark judgment on October 7 the European Court of Justice has ruled that the Safe Harbour framework governing the transfer of EU citizens’ personal data to the US does not comply with the requirements of EU Data Protection law in light of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and is therefore invalid under EU law. The Safe Harbour framework stemmed from a decision of the European Commission in 2000 (2000/520/EC) that the US afforded an adequate level of protection of personal data transferred to the US from the EU. This decision was made long before the EU Charter became part of EU law and more than a decade prior to the Edward Snowden revelations. The ECJ’s judgment thus invalidates arrangements that for 15 years have allowed Internet companies to transfer the personal data of European users to server farms in the US and elsewhere. It has very wide-ranging implications — not just for data-protection law, but also for the economics of Internet companies and for international relations. This workshop will discuss some of those implications. Panel: David Runciman (chair), John Naughton, Ross Anderson, Nora Ni Loideain

The political economy has morphed throughout recent decades into a digitally-structured capitalism. The lecture locates some primary features of this historical process in patterns of corporate capital investment in ICTs. It goes on to sketch the development of the politics of digitization, between the 1970s and today. A foremost conclusion is that, in contrast to the unabashed triumphalism that greeted the rise of the Internet as a pole of growth during the 1990s, today we are living amid both persistent economic stagnation and escalating political contention over the structure and control of the world’s information infrastructure. Dan Schiller, Professor Emeritus of Library & Information Science and of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an historian of information and communications in the context of the five-hundred year development of the capitalist political economy. He has held Chairs at UCSD , UCLA and Temple Universities and is the author of several books including Digital Capitalism: networking the global market system (MIT Press, 1999) and, most recently, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (University of Illinois Press, 2014). He writes about the Internet and other communications systems for Le Monde Diplomatique. Presently, he is conducting archival research for a longstanding project on the history of US telecommunications and is visiting the Technology and Democracy project in CRASSH .

Dan Schiller in conversation with John Naughton and David Runciman Part of the Technology and Democracy Research Project http://www.techdem.crassh.cam.ac.uk

Abstract Two aspects of ‘power’ are important in a networked world. One is the coercive, surveillance and other power exercised by states. The other is that wielded by the handful of large digital corporations that have come to dominate the Internet over the last two decades. Corporate power is the main focus of this talk, which explores a number of interrelated questions: What exactly is the nature of the power wielded by digital corporations? How does it differ from the kinds of power wielded by other, non-digital corporations? In what ways is it—or might it be—problematic? And are the legislative tools possessed by states for the regulation of corporate power fit for purpose in a digital era? Speaker John Naughton is a Senior Research Fellow in CRASSH , Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University and the technology columnist of The Observer. He is (with Sir Richard Evans and David Runciman) co-director of the Leverhulme ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’ research project, and (with David Runciman) co-director of the ‘Technology and Democracy’ project in the Centre for Digital Knowledge in CRASSH . His most recent book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: what you really need to know about the Internet is published by Quercus.

Geoffrey Stone Edward H Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School How did American intelligence agencies respond to the threats posed after 9/11? Professor Geoffrey R. Stone, who served on president Obama’s five-person Review Group that was charged with evaluating the nation’s foreign intelligence programs after the Snowden revelations, will offer a behind-the-scenes peek into the secret world of US national security surveillance. He will discuss both the merits and dangers of some of the nation’s most controversial foreign intelligence programs and he will outline some of the ways in which those programs can be reformed to strike a better balance between liberty and security in the future. Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and the author or co-author of many books on US constitutional law, including Top Secret: When Our Government Keeps Us in the Dark (2007), War and Liberty: An American Dilemma (2007), and Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (2004). Perilous Times received eight national book awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Book of the Year in History. In the 2013, Mr. Stone served on the five-member Review Group appointed by President Obama to make recommendations concerning NSA surveillance and related issues. Mr. Stone currently serves as a Member of the Senior Advisory Group to the Director of National Intelligence.

For decades economists, technologists, policy-makers and politicians have argued about whether automation destroys or creates jobs. And up to now the general consensus has been that while some jobs are eliminated by automation, more new jobs have, in general, been created. But recently, advances in computing power, machine learning and AI, software, sensor technology and data analytics have brought the "automation" question to the fore again. People are asking if a radical disruption is under way. Are we heading into a "second machine age" in which advanced robotics and intelligent computing make occupational categories that were hitherto reserved for humans vulnerable to automation? One of the most penetrating attempts to answer this question was the research conducted by Oxford scholars Michael Osborne and Carl Frey which resulted in a path-breaking report arguing that 47 per cent of US job categories might be vulnerable to computerisation in the next two decades. In this Seminar, the first in the new Technology & Democracy project's series, Michael Osborne discusses his research and its implications. Michael A Osborne is an expert in the development of machine intelligence in sympathy with societal needs. His work on robust and scalable inference algorithms in Machine Learning has been successfully applied in diverse and challenging contexts, from aiding the detection of planets in distant solar systems to enabling self-driving cars to determine when their maps may have changed due to roadworks. Dr Osborne also has deep interests in the broader societal consequences of machine learning and robotics, and has analysed how intelligent algorithms might soon substitute for human workers. Dr Osborne is an Associate Professor in Machine Learning, a co-director of the Oxford Martin programme on Technology and Employment, an Official Fellow of Exeter College, and a Faculty Member of the Oxford-Man Institute for Quantitative Finance, all at the University of Oxford.