Abstract
Telecommunications carriers and service providers now play an essential role in facilitating modern surveillance by law enforcement agencies. The police merely select the individuals to be monitored, while the actual surveillance is performed by third parties: often the same email providers, search engines and telephone companies to whom consumers have entrusted their private data.

 Although assisting Big Brother has become a routine part of business, the true scale of law enforcement surveillance has long been shielded from the general public, Congress, and the courts. However, recent disclosures by wireless communications carriers reveal that the companies now receive approximately one and a half million requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies per year.

When automated, industrial-scale surveillance is increasingly the norm, is communications privacy a thing of the past? For those of us who'd like to keep our private information out of government databases, what options exist, and which tools and services are the best?

 Christopher Soghoian is the Principal Technologist and a Senior Policy Analyst with the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. He is also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project.

He completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2012, which focused on the role that third party service providers play in facilitating law enforcement surveillance of their customers. His research has appeared in publications including the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and been cited by several federal courts, including the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Between 2009 and 2010, he was the first ever in-house technologist at the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, where he worked on investigations of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Netflix. Prior to joining the FTC, he co-created the Do Not Track privacy anti-tracking mechanism now adopted by all of the major web browsers.

Abstract:
Centralized digital infrastructure has created a dangerous environment for both activist movements and consumers. Intermediation impacts the character of conversation and limits innovation throughout countless ecosystems. Decentralized alternatives could address many of these problems, but most have failed to gain widespread adoption.

I will survey the recent history of these technologies and reasons for their failures, discuss the possibilities in a world where decentralization was the norm, and introduce Tent, an open protocol, which makes many of these possibilities a reality today.

Daniel Siders is a software architect and one of the architects of the Tent protocol. An eighteen year veteran of the software industry, he later studied gender, social science, and emergent norms in disaster environments. Prior to his work on Tent he consulted for large brands and media agencies on the appropriate analysis and application of consumer data in targeting campaigns and storage of such data in closed corporate networks. Since creating Tent he runs the organization the maintains the protocol and co-founded the first Tent hosting company.

Abstract:
Azerbaijan has a unique approach to Internet regulation that represents a ‘middle path’ between  open access and censorship. Because the Internet is both unpredictable and a prime venue of unsanctioned content, it threatens what the Azerbaijani government values most: power through consistency, consistency through power.

There are three generations of Internet control that a government can use. The first generation is  widespread filtering and direct censorship. Second generation controls manipulate regulations on  acceptable content and change the "use of defamation, slander, and ‘veracity’ laws, to deter bloggers and independent media from posting material critical of the government or specific  government officials, however benignly (including humor)". The third generation competes with Internet freedom "through effective counter information campaigns that overwhelm, discredit or demoralize opponents".

While Azerbaijan does little first generation control (although it has sporadically filtered  opposition news sources, especially before elections), it instead discourages technology use in  three ways: media framing (third generation), monitoring (third generation) and arrests (second and  third generation). Together these have created psychological barriers that impacts Azerbaijani technology use.

Despite this, the Azerbaijani government repeatedly claims that "there is Internet freedom in Azerbaijan." By electing to define Internet freedom in the strictest sense of the word, the government uses a semantic shift to deflect criticism.

A mixed-methods nationally representative study of Azerbaijani Internet use will demonstrate the detrimental effect Azerbaijani government efforts to dissuade Internet use has on Internet use and free expression.

Katy E. Pearce is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and holds an affiliation with the Ellison Center for Russian East European, and Central Asian Studies. She specializes in technology and media use in the Former Soviet Union. Her research focuses on social and political uses of technologies and digital content in the transitioning democracies and semi-authoritarian states of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, but primarily Armenia and Azerbaijan. She has a BA (2001) in Armenian Studies and Soviet Studies from the University of Michigan, an MA (2006) in International Studies from the University of London School for Oriental and African Studies, and a PhD (2011) in Communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a Fulbright scholar (Armenia 2007-2008).

Abstract:

Political parties that represent old regime interests in moments of democratization are normally thought exclusively to play a "negative" role, blocking democracy and only conceding it when sufficiently challenged. Summarizing research for a book on the historical rise of democracy in Europe, this presentation will focus on British and German democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make the case that under certain conditions, old regime conservative parties play a decisive and counter-intuitive role that makes democratization more settled over the long run.

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Ziblatt is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has been named a Sage Publications Fellow for a project on "Conservative Political Parties and Democratization in Europe" and in 2012-2013 is on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His research and teaching interests include democratization, state-building, development, comparative politics and comparative historical analysis, with a particular interest in Europe. He is the author of Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 2006), the winner of three prizes from the American Political Science Association, including the 2007 Prize for the Best Book published on European Politics. He is co-editor of a 2010 special double issue of Comparative Political Studies entitled "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies." Recent papers have appeared in American Poiltical Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and World Politics.  His most recent papers have received APSA's 2011 Mary Parker Follett Prize from the Politics and History Section of APSA, APSA's  2009 Luebbert Prize for the best paper published  in comparative politics, the 2008 Sage prize for best paper presented in comparative politics at the APSA meeting, and two  prizes in 2010 from the Comparative Democratization Section of APSA.  Ziblatt has been a DAAD Fellow in Berlin, an Alexander von Humboldt visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and the University of Konstanz, Germany, and visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris in 2010. He is currently completing a new book entitled Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe, 1848-1950 (Cambridge University Press) that offers a new interpretation of the historical democratization of Europe.

Richard Steinberg is Professor of Law at UCLA and the Director of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Project. In addition to his UCLA appointment, Professor Steinberg is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Department of Political Science.

Professor Steinberg has written over forty articles on international law. His most recent books are Assessing the Legacy of the ICTY (forthcoming 2010, Martinus Nijhoff), International Institutions (co-edited, 2009, SAGE), International Law and International Relations (co-edited, 2007, Cambridge University Press), and The Evolution of the Trade Regime: Economics, Law, and Politics of the GATT/WTO (co-authored, 2006, Princeton University Press).

Helen Stacy is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and Director of the Program on Human Rights at CDDRL

As a scholar of international and comparative law, legal philosophy, and human rights, Helen Stacy has produced works analyzing the efficacy of regional courts in promoting human rights, differences in the legal systems of neighboring countries, and the impact of postmodernism on legal thinking. Her recent scholarship has focused on how international and regional human rights courts can improve human rights standards while also honoring social, cultural, and religious values.

Abstract:

The World Bank and IFC's Doing Business project has used indicators capturing important dimensions of the business environment to catalyze reforms in a large number of countries. In its tenth year of operation, this talk will focus on the methodological underpinnings of the project, the results obtained on the ground, the challenges ahead and why this matters for the goal of poverty reduction and economic convergence. For more information, please visit: www.doingbusiness.org

Speaker Bio:

Augusto Lopez-Claros became the director of global indicators and analysis in the World Bank–IFC Financial and Private Sector Development Vice Presidency in March 2011. Previously he was chief economist and director of the Global Competitiveness Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, where he was the editor of the Global Competitiveness Report, the Forum’s flagship publication, as well as a number of regional economic reports.

Before joining the Forum he was an executive director with Lehman Brothers (London) and a senior international economist. He was the International Monetary Fund’s resident representative in the Russian Federation during 1992–95. Before joining the IMF, Lopez-Claros was a professor of economics at the University of Chile in Santiago. He was educated in England and the United States, receiving a diploma in mathematical statistics from Cambridge University and a PhD in economics from Duke University. He is a much-sought-after international speaker, having lectured in the last several years at some of the world’s leading universities and think tanks. In 2007 he was a coeditor of The International Monetary System, the IMF, and the G-20: A Great Transformation in the Making? and The Humanitarian Response Index: Measuring Commitment to Best Practice, both published by Palgrave. He was the editor of The Innovation for Development Report 2009–2010: Strengthening Innovation for the Prosperity of Nations, published by Palgrave in November 2009.

Abstract:

Marking the publication of Lina Khatib's latest book Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle, this seminar focuses on the evolution of political expression in the Middle East over the past decade, highlighting the visual dimension of power struggles between citizens and leaders in Lebanon, Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria.

About the speaker:

Lina Khatib is a co-founder and Program Manager of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Lina is a founding co-editor of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, a multidisciplinary journal concerned with politics, culture and communication in the region, and in 2009 co-edited (with Klaus Dodds) a special issue of the journal on geopolitics, public diplomacy and soft power in the Middle East. She also edited the Journal of Media Practice from 2007-2010. She is one of the core authors of the forthcoming Arab Human Development Report (2012) published by the UNDP.

She has written two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (IB Tauris 2006), which is a study of the link between international relations and film, focusing on 25 years of cinematic representation of politics in the region (1980-2005), from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the Gulf War to Islamic fundamentalism, and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (IB Tauris 2008). The book takes a socio-political approach to the study of Lebanese cinema over the last thirty years, focusing on the issues of Lebanese national identity, history, sectarian conflict, and memory of the Civil War.

Lina has recently finished writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle for IB Tauris. The book examines the power struggles among states, other political actors, and citizens in the region that are expressed through visuals, and focuses on case studies from Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Iran, with a focus on the role of the image as a political tool in the Arab Spring. She has also recently led a multidisciplinary research project on US public diplomacy in the digital age, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the University of Wolverhampton, the outcome of which will appear in the Middle East Journal in 2012.

Before joining the academic field, Lina worked in broadcast journalism in Lebanon. She is a frequent commentator on the Middle East in the media with appearances on Al-Jazeera (Arabic and English), CNN, BBC, Sky News and other media outlets across the globe.