Technology and Democracy

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