Ballots & Bots: Democracy in the Age of Data

About the conference

A one-day public conference held at the Locatelli Center, Santa Clara University, co-organized by Amer with Jane Leftwich Curry (Professor of Political Science) — a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the two departments addressing the past, present, and future of information control and democracy. With rising concerns about cybersecurity, the influence of social media, and disinformation, the conference brought together technologists, social scientists, and political practitioners across three sessions:

• The Past — Lessons from the Cold War: a panel on Western radio broadcasts during the Cold War and their lessons for today, with A. Ross Johnson (former Director, Radio Free Europe) and Gene Parta (retired Director of Audience and Opinion Research, RFE/RL), moderated by Jane Leftwich Curry.
• The Present — Featured talks on Russian hacking and the Arab Spring: Ahmed Said (IT and civil-society leader during the Egyptian revolution) on social media’s role in the Arab Spring, and Donald Jensen (Russia expert) on Russian hacking and interference in democratic politics.
• The Future — Securing our democracies in a digital world: a panel on cybersecurity and society featuring Aleatha Parker-Wood (Symantec), Thomas M. Kroeger (Sandia National Laboratories), Yonatan Zunger (then of Google), and Neil Chase (Executive Editor, The Mercury News and East Bay Times) on press freedom and the Trust Project.

The conference closed with a reflection from Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia from 2006–2016 — whose country endured some of the first and most aggressive state-sponsored anti-democracy cyberattacks of the modern digital age (the 2007 Estonia cyberattacks) — drawing on Estonia’s own experience as the first country with e-government.

Formats

Cite as

@misc{amer2018ballotsandbots,
  author       = {Amer, Ahmed},
  title        = {Ballots \& Bots: Democracy in the Age of Data},
  year         = {2018},
  month        = oct,
  day          = {26},
  howpublished = {Conference (co-organizer, with Jane Leftwich Curry), Santa Clara University},
  note         = {One-day public conference on technology and democracy, closing with a reflection by Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia 2006--2016.},
  address      = {Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA},
  url          = {http://ballotsnbots.org/}
}