Security Theater Seminar, Sun 1/Jan/2012 at 14:00 - When Technology is Bad for Democracy (tari tari!)
Yossef Oren
Electrical Engineering Labs Building (חשמל מעבדות), Room 146 Join us virtually!
Sunday, January 1, 2:00pm
Marriage from Hell: On the Secret Love Affair Between Dictators and Western Technology Companies
Abstract: While it's old news that authoritarian regimes regularly rely on censorship and surveillance technology supplied to them by Western companies, 2011 was a year (thanks, in part, to the Arab Spring) when it became a hot issue in the public debate. While politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have recently committed to ban the sale of such technologies to dictators, it's not clear whether such measures would prove effective (or merely drive the sale of such technologies underground) or simply stimulate the growth of Chinese, Russian and Indian companies. More disturbingly, there is still very little awareness – at least among the general public – that many of the tools that are currently exported to authoritarian states have been designed to help fight "The Global War On Terror" and are thus inextricably linked to domestic policies of Western states.
This keynote talk will provide an overview of companies and technologies involved (with a focus on the Middle East and former Soviet Union), trace the evolution of dictators' strategies, speculate on the future of trade in surveillance and censorship tools, and address the shortcomings in the "containment" strategies put together by the US and EU
Speaker Bio: Evgeny Morozov is the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. Morozov is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University and a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and Boston Review. He was formerly a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and a fellow at George Soros's Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Before moving to the US, Morozov was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a Prague-based media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc.
Morozov's writings have appeared in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Globe and Mail, The New Republic, Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, The Sunday Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, Le Monde, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Review, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate, Dissent and many other publications.
Recorded at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress (28C3), Berlin Germany, on September 28, 2011 (tari tari!) http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4897.en.html
For more information about the Security Theater, please visit: http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~consel/SecurityTheater