Silja Vöneky, Philipp Kellmeyer, Christiane Miethge

The session will start with a video showing parts of the web documentary "Homo Digitalis". The panelists will then discuss, together with the audience, the ethical, legal and social implications of the convergence of consumer neurotechnology with big data and advanced machine learning.

After all, the brain is not any old organ: it is the seat of our feelings, desires, personality, attitude, creativity and thoughts. Gaining access to this rich trove of highly personal biometric data via advanced neurotechnology may be an enticing prospect for companies that want to harness this data for potentially unprecedented levels of personalization of their services, e.g. targeted advertising. Yet, thus far, there is no wide ranging public disocurse or deliberation of the potential threats of this development for the privileged privacy and the freedom of our thoughts, feelings and other mental states. Do existing regimens for protecting biomedical data suffice to manage this potential flood of Big Brain Data? Can technology, such as blockchain, federated learning or differential privacy, protect users' brain data from unwarranted access and commercial exploitation? Who will decide over the priorities for research and applications as experts in data science and machine learning systematically move from public research institutions to the private sector?

In the first part of the session, we will present the benefits and risks of this scenario from a medical, scientific, legal and neuroethical perspective. In the second part, we will engage the audience in discussing and deliberating about possible solutions for these ethical, legal and social challenges.

Christoph Boecken

Das IoT wird sich über kurz oder lang durchsetzen, trotzdem geht damit ein Sicherheitsrisiko einher, da wir uns einerseits abhängig vom Hersteller machen, die wiederum mit den Daten missbräuchlich umgehen oder sich erst gar nicht um die Sicherheit ihrer Hardware kümmern. Nutzte man früher für Botnetze noch anfällige Rechner, so sind es heute eben Drucker, Getränkeautomaten oder Leuchtmittel. Und gerade bei Dingen wie z.B. Autos oder Ampeln kann es hier auch mitunter lebensgefährlich werden. Der Vortrag ist kurzweilig und stellt in einer Präsentation ein paar der absurdesten Beispiele vor. Er soll ganz klar unterhalten, ohne dabei die ernsthafte Message zu vergessen.

Shermin Voshmgir, Ricardo Ferrer Rivero

Bitcoin wird nicht das neue Zahlungsmittel – dafür ist das Programm zu träge und verbraucht zu viel Energie. Aber die Technologie dahinter, die Blockchain, hat große Hoffnungen geweckt. Neue Anwendungsideen und Lösungen überschwemmen den Markt. Vier Trends fallen dabei auf:

1. Viele treibt die Gier. Im Netz versprechen selbsternannte Krypto-Experten und Trading-Gruppen das schnelle Geld. Mittlerweile kann man sogar auf den Kurs von Bitcoin wetten. Das treibt den Preis. Statt eines Tauschmittels sind Bitcoin und Co zur vermeintlichen Geldanlage geworden. 

2. Das Ziel scheint keine allgemeingültige, digitale Währung mehr zu sein, sondern die Neuordnung einzelner Branchen. Krypto-Unternehmen wollen den Musikmarkt umkrempeln, die Stromvergütung neu ordnen oder den Kauf von Cannabis vereinfachen. Dafür schaffen sie immer neue, digitale Tauschmittel – "Tokens". 

3. Blender haben leichtes Spiel. Offenbar reicht es, den Begriff Blockchain an eine Idee zu binden, schon stecken Menschen Millionen in Unternehmen. Immer wieder laufen Nutzer betrügerischen Drittanbietern auf.

4. Staaten wissen nicht, wie sie mit all dem umgehen sollen: Die einen verbieten Kryptowährungen, die anderen wollen sie stärker regulieren oder ihre eigenen entwickeln.

Darauf aufbauend möchten wir in einem Gespräch herausfinden, was aus der eigentlichen Idee hinter Bitcoin geworden ist. Wer verfolgt sie noch? Kann sie nach heutigem Stand überleben oder hat sie unser System schon verschluckt? Welche Zukunft hat die "Token-Ökonomie"? Und was muss passieren, damit „Kryptopia“ doch noch Wirklichkeit wird?

 

supported by T-Labs

Joseph Cox, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

This talk covers two areas: the inner workings of the consumer spyware industry, and how that industry has been repeatedly linked to cases of domestic and sexual violence, rape, and murder.

The first is based on a slew of internal spreadsheets, financial documents, customer records, and even live intercepts captured by malware which activist hackers stole and provided to us as journalists. This data shows the popularity of consumer spyware, how some companies explicitly market their products to jealous or paranoid lovers to spy on their spouses, and even some connections to the same companies that provide malware for authoritarian regimes. But our talk also offers the behind-the-scenes of an investigation that relied heavily on information provided by criminal hackers: how do journalists verify that data, and how do they handle intensely private information? And we explain why we purchased the malware ourselves to give readers a deeper understanding of how exactly it worked.

The second part brings together interviews with sexual violence victims, domestic violence researchers, and concrete evidence of malware being used to facilitate abuse. This malware may require physical access to install, but to ignore this issue would be to miss the point: in an abusive relationship, the attacker often stays in the same building, room, or even bed as the target. This scenario presents a complicated melding of physical and digital security that the infosec community may want to pay more attention to.

Manuella Cunha Brito

Society is at a crossroads, facing two “singularities”. This means we will see events where the depth of changes around us become exponential and thus our current way of thinking does not apply anymore — like the effects of gravity in a black hole.

First, is the intensifying system crisis : climate change, food and water insecurity, extreme economic, social and gender inequality. The UN made a framework to help us fight those big challenges, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals we need to tackle before 2030.

Second, is the technological acceleration driven by exponential technologies: synthetic biology, machine learning, robotics or blockchains. The WEF states that we are living the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. This brings many promises, but also grand challenges: what is the future of work when automation is everywhere? How do we ensure that the benefits reaped are fairly distributed across society? Will our consumption of natural resources be exponential too, or will circular economy principles prevail? How do we guarantee the safety of these technologies?

The question is: can we harness this second singularity, to prevent the first one, and regenerate society and the planet? What are the signs of hope, and the challenges that lie ahead?

Answering these questions is the work of the Good Tech Lab, which will be presented by Manuella Cunha Brito in this session.

Matthew Stender, Adam Harvey

Biometric sensors are used by governments, corporations and even NGOs to perceive unique identifiers for individual humans. This session will parse the distinction between two types of biometric traits (hard and soft) - those that we possess and those that we perform - and discuss how both are increasingly being used as unique identifiers to catalogue our whereabouts, categorize our actions and customize our experiences.

These automated biometric systems, created by humans are increasing religating humanity ‘out of the loop’. Simultaneously, humans are unable to hide or escape from the view of machines. Without oversight or accountability, humans changes the way they operate in the physical space, eroding their agency. The ethnographic and anthropological implications  of the biometric shape more than individual behavior and can even lead to a “flattening of culture.” From data modeling leads to replication of discrimination to biometric product design doesn’t account for non-able bodied persons, technology will increasingly leave its fingerprint on human society. Finally, forced participation in these systems brings up philosophical questions as to what constitutes human rights in the 21st century.

Beyond traditional access control mechanisms (like an undergoing an eye scan to enter into a secure facility), collective biometrics now give those in power the capacity for predictive analysis through future modeling. Micromovements can now be disambiguated to tell stories about our human bodies that we ourselves may be unaware of.

Frederike Kaltheuner, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, Ravi Naik

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is about campaign financing, possible law breaking and Brexit. It’s also about money in politics. It’s about the continuing irresponsibility of platforms like Facebook. It’s about the systemic problem of data exploitation and surveillance capitalism. It’s about targeted advertising, persuasion and manipulation.

It’s also about a shady company that has possibly broken data protection laws (together with political campaigns, and other data analytics firms). It’s about neo-colonialims and global inequalities. It’s also about foreign interference in elections and government propaganda (not just by Russia). It’s  about GDPR and compliance - competition law and consumer protection. 

In other words: this is complicated.

Sean Bonner

In 2008 I spoke at re:publica about citizen journalism and specifically how blogs were filling gaps left by traditional media outlets that lacked in-depth coverage of some topics and markets because of their reactionary nature, and how journalism wasn't inherently better or worse because of a degree the author might have held.

10 years later I'll follow on from with a focus on Safecast and crowd sourcing environmental data and citizen sensing. Popular Mechanics recently said that "Safecast has revolutionized Citizen Science" - In this talk I'll discuss the how and why, as well as show again how the people can often do a better job than the professionals, and illustrate how without the trust of the community it doesn't matter how accurate published readings might be. How independent and trusted data can be used to verify official data and vice versa, and why it's important for communities to proactively measure things themselves rather than assuming governments or corporations are doing it for them, and everyone benefits from more open data.

Simon David Hirsbrunner, Lila Warszawski, Tobias Geiger, Toralf Staud

Using scientific expertise, supercomputers and big data, researchers are able to broaden our understanding of the past and present of our climate system. By drawing on knowledge of our natural and social worlds, they can go even further, envisioning possible impacts, risks, and solutions for a future with climate change. These scenarios of the future don’t just define abstract quantities, like average global temperatures, they describe future worlds that are relevant for policy makers, stakeholders, and for a curious and knowledge-hungry public.

The web has no shortage of open data, visualizations, photos, videos and blogs describing climate change and its impacts. To put it bluntly, we have more than enough information available to understand and act on climate change. However, for researchers and non-scientists alike, the challenge is to match informational needs with the scientific data and knowledge available. It’s time-consuming work searching through all these web sources, and most citizen scientists give up, before they find what they’re looking for. Quite often a certain level of expertise is required to realize the answer has been staring you in the face all along! We’ve come to think that open data is still a long way from truly open science.  During the last couple of months, we’ve been wading through the sea of climate information available on websites, information portals, and social media platforms. Based on this work, we will take a closer look at the ‘openness’ of information on climate impacts together with interested rp18 participants. The discussions' premise is that openness is not a stable state, but always requires work: ‘data’ doesn’t talk on its own, it is constantly being translated, situated, and put into new perspectives. If so, what’s the role of open data scientists in the digital society? How to deal with the fact that “looking at big data” has become a mundane element of our contemporary digital culture - not just in science, but in everyday life?

Dorothee Klaus, Stevens Le Blond, Massimo Marelli, Nathaniel A. Raymond

Civil society, governmental and private sector partners are increasingly engaged in and reliant on digital data and ICTs for the delivery of public services and support to vulnerable populations. However, emerging and related cyber- and data-reliant risks threaten the human security and human rights of these populations, undermining their development potential.  

The proliferation of ICTs among affected populations and humanitarian and development actors alike exposes critical, unaddressed gaps in the legal, ethical and technological frameworks that have traditionally defined and governed humanitarians’ professional conduct. These gaps are an open secret, as is the lack of professionalization around data protection and ICT use. Increasingly, they are a disaster waiting to happen. As evidenced by the recent security breach of a software platform used by aid agencies to store the data of vulnerable people, the risk of such ICT- and data-related disasters is very real and far-reaching in the humanitarian and development sectors.

In the face of these evermore complex threats, the need for capacity development for digital security and cyber resilience is increasingly recognized in the international humanitarian and development communities as critical. Unfortunately, an effective approach for such capacity development is lacking.   

In this panel discussion convened by the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the École polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), speakers from a diverse set of backgrounds will explore and debate the major challenges and opportunities of digital security and cyber resilience in the 21st century.

Through the unique experience and perspectives of the speakers, the panel will bring theory and practice together to frame a critical narrative and agenda for ensuring that ethics and human rights are central to global and national debates around digital security and cyber resilience.

supported by BMZ