Events

Speaker: Nadiya Kostyuk, Predoctoral Fellow, Cyber Security Project

This seminar examines conditions under which publicly observable "institutional change," which broadcast a state's rising or extensive cyber capabilities, can deter a country's adversaries from attacking it. The "use-and-lose" nature of cyber operations and difficulty of cyber attribution make such operations more effective in achieving tactical surprise than in deterring opponents. However, merely establishing a cyber unit and disclosing its estimated budget and personnel may increase the credibility of a state's threat and signal to multiple audiences, including its adversaries, that a country has, or is in the process of developing, its "power to hurt." 

The speaker's research demonstrates that even though the cases in which institutional change will influence a strong adversary's choice to attack are limited, states tend to sub-optimally overinvest resources in publicly observable institutional changes. Weak states overinvest to make adversaries believe they are strong whereas strong states overinvest because they do not want adversaries to believe that they are weak states, pretending to be strong. The speaker's focus on the strategic logic of institutional change as a deterrent represents a departure from existing literature, which largely examines deterrence using cyber operations and other statecraft tools.

Please join us! Coffee and tea provided. Everyone is welcome, but admittance will be on a first come–first served basis.

The Cyber Security Project will host a lunch with Chris Jay Hoofnagle, UC Berkeley School of Information and School of Law, on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's cybersecurity. 

Lunch provided on a first come, first served basis. All lunches are off the record. 

Dr. Miriam E. Sweeney (University of Alabama) and Dr. Melissa Villa-Nicholas (University of Rhode Island) join us for a conversation on virtual assistants; and how virtual agents are increasingly integrated as ‘user-friendly’ interfaces for e-government and commercial services.

This research investigates the case study of the virtual assistant, ‘Emma’, that is integrated into the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website. This research has implications for how citizen-consumers are made informationally ‘legible’ to the state through their engagement with digital technologies for government services.

This presentation introduces the Emma interface in the context of USCIS services, and explores the cultural affordances of Latina identity as a strategic design choice that extends citizenship and nation-building projects for the state, while masking underlying information and data gathering capabilities.

IOP Resident Fellow, S’14 and Belfer Fellow Farah Pandith, Anti-Defamation League George Selim, Harvard Kennedy School’s Eric Rosenbach, and Juliette Kayyem '91 consider how to combat domestic and international extremism.

A seminar with Cameron Tracy, Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Security Program and Project on Managing the Atom.

The Belfer Center will host a lunch with the Matt Olsen, Chief Trust and Security Officer at Uber in the Belfer Center Library (L369).

AI, robotics, digital platforms, and other technologies are reshaping our economies, societies, and the nature of work. Will new technologies lead to increased unemployment? Does automation make rising inequality economy? How should we regulate competition in a seemingly winner-take-all digital economy? Will different approaches to privacy and data balkanize the internet?  (study group is currently full for spring 2019)

Korea Working Group Speakers Series Event with Michael Greenwald to discuss "Pyongyang's Bankers: Tackling Loopholes in the Chinese Financial System".

A seminar with Avital Livny, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A seminar with Alexandra Stark, Research Fellow, Middle East Initiative and Ph.D. Candidate, Georgetown University.