Technology, Society, and Public Policy Lecture Series

Rice University's "Technology, Society, and Public Policy" Lecture Series focuses on social, political, and legal issues that have emerged from the information revolution. Information technology already touches most aspects of our daily lives; it has transformed workplaces, classrooms, and homes, and changed the way we learn, communicate, entertain, and govern. Increasingly, however, the transforming power of ubiquitous computing, networking, and data is impacting our notion of individual rights, civil liberties, social problems, national security, and social responsibility. This lecture series aims to highlight the challenges we face as our cyber-society matures, with an eye toward issues related to impact, ownership, use, control, and management of information and information technology in society. The series is sponsored by the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology (K2I), the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the Office of the Vice Provost and University Librarian. Speakers in the series have been:

Abstract and speaker bios can be found by clicking on their name.

Archived webcasts can be found by clicking on the title of the talk. 

Pamela Samuelson, Professor, Berkeley Law School & School of Information, University of California at Berkeley
Brilliant but Evil? Why the Google Book Settlement Must Be Rejected 

Ben Shneiderman, Founding Director HCIL & Computer Science Professor, University of Maryland
A National Initiative for Technology-Mediated Social Participation (Technology, Society & Public Policy)

Cindy Cohn, Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Your World Delivered to the NSA: Warantless Domestic Wiretapping

Charles Nesson, Harvard Law School
The Future of University

De Lange Conference VI: Emerging Libraries
Synopsis

Bruce Schnier, Founder and CTO Counterpane Internet Security Inc.
The Future of Privacy - Rethinking Security Trade-Offs

Hal Abelson, MIT
Universities, the Internet, and the Information Commons

Dan Wallach, Rice University
The Risks of Electronic Voting

David Dill, Stanford University
The Battle for Accountable Voting Systems

Professor, Berkeley Law School & School of Information, University of California at Berkeley
Brilliant but Evil? Why the Google Book Settlement Must Be Rejected 
April 4, 2011

Abstract
The proposed settlement of the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit is an audacious effort to use a class action settlement to remake the market for digital books. The Authors Guild charged Google with copyright infringement because it scanned books for purposes of indexing them and displaying snippets of their contents, which Google argued was fair use.

The settlement will not resolve the legal issue in that case, although it would give Google a right to scan millions of books and to commercialize all out of print books (unless the rights holder specifically says not to).

There is much to be said in favor of the settlement, but much to be said against it as well. Some provisions seem anti-competitive, some seem harmful to authors' interests, and some pose risks of privacy and censorship. Perhaps the biggest concern raised by the settlement, though, is that it misuses the class action procedure by taking the occasion of litigation on one particular issue and using it as a mechanism to restructure the market for books and to reallocate rights under copyright law. If the deal is as good as its proponents believe, they should take it to Congress for approval, but would Congress give Google alone a monopoly of this extent? I doubt it.

About the Speaker
Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman ’74 Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California at Berkeley and a Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Contributing Editor of Communications of the ACM, a past Fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and an Honorary Professor of the University of Amsterdam. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as a Fellow of the Center for Democracy & Technology. She has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1996, and prior to that, with the University of Pittsburgh Law School. She has visited at Columbia, Cornell, Emory and Harvard Law Schools.

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Founding Director HCIL & Computer Science Professor, University of Maryland
A National Initiative for Technology-Mediated Social Participation (Technology, Society & Public Policy)
November 2, 2009
 
Abstract
Technology-mediated social participation is generated when social networking tools (such as Facebook), blogs and microblogs (Twitter), user-generated content sites (YouTube), discussion groups, problem reporting, recommendation systems, and other social media are applied to national priorities such as health, energy, education, disaster response, environmental protection, business innovation, cultural heritage, or community safety.

Fire, earthquake, storm, fraud, or crime reporting sites provide information to civic authorities, AmberAlert has more than 7 million users who help with information on child abductions, Peer-to-Patent provides valuable information for patent examiners, and the SERVE.GOV enables citizens to volunteer for national parks, museums and other institutions. These early attempts hint at the vast potential for technology-mediated social participation, but substantial research is needed to scale up, raise motivation, control malicious attacks, limit misguided rumors, and protect privacy (http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com).

As national initiatives are launched in several countries to dramatically increase research and education on social media, a coordinated approach will be helpful. Clearly stated research challenges should have three key elements: (1) close linkage to compelling national priorities (2) scientific foundation based on established theories and well-defined research questions (privacy, reciprocity, trust, motivation, recognition, etc.), and (3) computer science research challenges (security, privacy protection, scalability, visualization, end-user development, distributed data handling for massive user-generated content, network analysis of community evolution, cross network comparison, etc.).

Potential short-term interventions include:
-universities changing course content, adding courses, and offering new degree programs
-industry helping researchers by providing access to data and platforms for testing
-government agencies applying these strategies in pilot studies related to national priorities

About the Speaker
Ben Shneiderman is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and Member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press, 2002) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction: Fifth Edition Addison-Wesley, 2009).
Speaker website.

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Cindy Chon
Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Your World Delivered to the NSA: Warrantless Domestic Wiretapping
March 31, 2009

Abstract
One of the biggest questions facing the Obama Administration is what it should do with the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. The U.S. Government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has been engaging in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans. EFF has been leading the fight against this domestic surveillance. In Hepting v. AT&T, EFF filed the first case against a telecom for violating its customers' privacy. In response to EFF's initial success in the case, and the filing of dozens of other cases across the country that attempted to hold law breaking telecoms accountable, the Bush Administration and the telecommunications carriers bullied Congress into passing a statute that allows the Attorney General to seek retroactive immunity for the telecommunications carriers. EFF is currently working to challenge this law. In addition, EFF is representing victims of the illegal surveillance program in Jewel v. NSA, a lawsuit filed in September 2008 against the government seeking to stop the warrantless wiretapping and hold the government officials behind the program accountable.

The warrantless wiretapping cases present profound questions about the use and misuse of government secrecy and the state secrets privilege, the extent of unilateral presidential authority and the role of intermediaries like telecommunications companies and internet service providers in protecting our privacy and assisting law enforcement. They also present questions about the balance between the constitutional and statutory rights of ordinary Americans to be free of general searches and the use of the tremendous datamining and semantic analysis capabilities of modern technologies in an effort to combat terrorism and criminal behavior.

About the Speaker
Cindy Cohn is the Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as its General Counsel. She is responsible for overseeing the EFF's overall legal strategy and supervising EFF's 9 staff attorneys. Ms. Cohn first became involved with the EFF in 1995, when the EFF asked her to serve as the lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. Outside the Courts, Ms. Cohn has testified before Congress, been featured in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere for her work on cyberspace issue. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2006 for "rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online." In 2007 the Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America.

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Charles Nesson
Harvard Law School
The Future University
April 7, 2008

Abstract
Professor Nesson discusses the following: • University In Cyberspace; • University As Internet Service Provider; • Internet As University Service Provider; • Net Neutrality; • The Dead Hand Of Transactional Copyright; • The Potential For Open Education; • The Excitement Of Teaching Strategic Games And Their Metaphors In Real And Second Life

About the Speaker
As an undergraduate I took a course on the Univac One, 1958. The final assignment was to program the machine to sort a list or words alphabetically . This was before silicon chips and computer language. The Univac was built with stacks of vacuum tubes that occupied a large room and looked just like the stacks in a library, except the shelves were filled with vacuum tubes instead of books. We controlled the machine from a separate control room that looked like the deck of the Starship Enterprise. We wrote our instructions to the machine in strings of one's and zero's. For our exam, we had twenty minutes at the controls to debug our program and run it on a test list. Our grade depended, first, on whether our program worked, and then, second, on our program's elegance, measured by the time our program took to sort the list. My next real engagement with computers came in 1981, when, on my first sabbatical, I moved my family to the seashore of Long Island, accompanied by one of the first edition IBM PC's. In my spare time there I wrote a computer program in BASIC that played an excellent game of five-card draw jacks-or-better poker, the rights to which I sold for a pile of money to a company which, I am sad to say, was subsequently indicted for manufacturing illegal gambling equipment. The BASIC language, circa 1981, included the word "SORT" among its verbs. Coming upon it was like meeting an old friend, now part of a whole useful language built of ones and zeros. If I could make a word from digits, and a generation later use such words to program a computer that could bluff me out, then, perhaps in a future generation, I would be able to use the power of the new language to liven up my classes.
Speaker website.

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Monday-Wednesday, March 5-7, 2007

Rice University’s 2007 De Lange Conference
Aims to Describe How Knowledge Will Be Accessed, Discovered, and Disseminated in the Age of Digital Information

The traditional concept of a library has been rendered obsolescent by the unprecedented confluence of the Internet, changes in scholarly publication models, increasing alliances between the humanities and the sciences, and the rise of large-scale digital library projects. The old ways of organizing and preserving knowledge to transmit our cultural and intellectual heritage have converged with the most advanced technologies of science and engineering and research methodologies. Such rapid and overwhelming changes to a millennia-old tradition pose significant challenges not only to university research libraries, but to every citizen. If the traditional library is undergoing a profound metamorphosis, it is not clear what new model will take its place. More information has been produced in the last several years than in the entire previous history of humanity, and most of this has been in digital format. Libraries are not storage places any more; they are less and less a place. The critical issues now include: How can that information be efficiently accessed and used? How do we extract knowledge from such an abundance of often poorly organized information? How might these enormous digital resources affect our concept of identity, our privacy, and the way we conduct business in the new century? Insight from many disciplines and perspectives is requisite to begin to understand this phenomenon to identify ways to help chart a future course.

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Bruce Schnier
Founder and CTO Counterpane Internet Security Inc
The Future of Privacy - Rethinking Security Trade-Offs
Wednesday, February 8, 2006

Abstract
Since 9/11, we have the Patriot Act, tighter screening at airports, a proposed national ID card system, a color- coded national alert system, irradiated mail, and a Department of Homeland Security, but do all of these things really make us any less vulnerable to another terrorist attack?

Security expert Bruce Schneier looks at the systems we have in place post-9/11, revealing which of them actually work and which ones are simply "security theater" against "movie-plot threats." He discusses the non- security motivations for much of our nation's security, and explains how future technological developments will leave us less safe, and not more. The security vs. privacy dichotomy is a false one; the true trade-off is liberty vs. control.

About the Speaker
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security expert. He is the author of eight books -- including the best sellers Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World, Secrets and Lies, and Applied Cryptography -- as well as the Blowfish and Twofish encryption algorithms. His influential newsletter, Crypto-Gram, is read by more than 120,000 people. Schneier is regularly quoted in the press, and his essays have appeared in national and international newspapers and magazines. He has been interviewed on television and radio about security issues, has testified before Congress, and is a frequent writer and lecturer on issues surrounding security and privacy.

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Hal Abelson
MIT
Universities, the Internet, and the Information Commons
Thursday, March 24, 2005

Abstract
Universities have a mission to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. In addressing that mission, we should take care to preserve and strengthen the information commons, that shared wellspring of ideas and innovation from which all may freely draw.
Today, the information commons and the university community that rely upon it are confronting stresses from both within and outside of the university, stresses such as squabbles over who owns academic work, technologies for restricting the dissemination of knowledge, and the impact of increasingly stringent and far-reaching intellectual property laws.

This talk describes initiatives aimed at bolstering the information commons, at MIT and elsewhere. These include OpenCourseWare enterprise that publishes the materials of all MIT courses for free use worldwide, the iCampus project to promote university sharing of educational technology, the DSpace Federation of institutional publication archives, and the Creative Commons initiative to create legal and technical tools that support balance and moderation in the control of digital information.

About the Speaker
Hal Abelson is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is co-director of the MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology and co-head of the MIT Council on Educational Technology. He was a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, and is a director of Creative Commons and of Public Knowledge, three organizations devoted to strengthening our intellectual commons.
Abelson was winner of the IEEE Computer Society's Booth Award, cited for his continued contributions to the pedagogy and teaching of introductory computer science. Together with Gerald Sussman, Abelson developed MIT's introductory computer science subject, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," this work has had a world-wide impact on university computer-science education. His current research is in the area of "amorphous computing", an effort to create new programming technologies for harnessing the power of the new computing substrates that are emerging from advances in microfabrication and molecular biology.

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Dan Wallach
Rice University
The Risks of Electronic Voting
Thursday, September 16, 2004

Abstract
Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. Although computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and reliability. Many municipalities have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising. For these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the results of any third-party certification analyses have been available for the general population to study, because vendors claim that secrecy is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently, however, the source code for a voting system from Diebold, a major manufacturer, appeared on the Internet. Diebold's systems were used in Georgia's state-wide elections in 2002, and the company recently announced that the state of Maryland awarded them an order for about $55 million to deliver touch-screen voting systems.

This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting system source code demonstrates the fallacy of the closed-source argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.

About the Speaker
Dan Wallach is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research involves computer security and the issues of building secure and robust software systems for the Internet. Wallach, along with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, co-authored a groundbreaking study that revealed significant flaws in Diebold's AccuVote-TS electronic voting system. He has testified about voting security issues before government bodies in Texas, Ohio, and the European Union.

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David Dill
Stanford University
The Battle for Accountable Voting Systems
February 25, 2004

Abstract
Democracy rests on the public accepting the results of elections. But why should they? In general, trustworthiness stems from accountability. The ability to independently check the performance of a person, institution, or system allows errors to be caught and corrected, and, more importantly, deters errors.

Touch-screen voting machines store records of cast votes in internal memory, where the voter cannot check them. Because of our system of secret ballots, once the voter leaves the polling place there is no way anyone can determine whether the vote captured was what the voter intended. This system lacks accountability. Last December, I drafted a “Resolution on Electronic Voting” stating that every voting system should have a “voter verifiable audit trail,” which is a permanent record of the vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter, and which is saved for a recount if it is required. I posted the page in January with endorsements from many prominent computer scientists. At that point, I became embroiled in a lively debate that continues today. We still don’t have an answer for why we should trust electronic voting machines, but a lot of evidence has emerged for why we should not.

I will discuss some principles, the basic technical issues with electronic voting, and describe some of what has happened over the last year. This talk is intended for general audiences.

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Bob Stein, dean of social sciences and Dan Wallach, assistant professor of computer science, both of Rice, Adina Levin of Electronic Frontier Foundation Austin, State Representative Scott Hochberg of District 137, and Bill Stotesbery, vice president of marketing for Hart Intercivic, the company that provides Harris County’s electronic voting machines.

About the Speaker
David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty since 1987. He received his M.S and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University (1982 and 1987). His primary research interests relate to the theory and application of formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware, protocols, and software. He was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001 for his contributions to verification of circuits and systems. Recently, Dill entered the debate on electronic voting with the “Resolution on Electronic Voting,” which has been endorsed by many computer technologists, as well as political scientists, lawyers, and other individuals. He served on the California Secretary of State’s Ad Hoc Committee on Touch Screen Voting, he is a member of the IEEE P1583 voting standards committee, and of the DRE Citizen’s Oversight Committee for Santa Clara County, California.