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2007 Conference on Interdisciplinary Studies in Information Privacy and Security
May 22, 2007 Rutgers University, New Brunswick |
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Speakers and Sponsors
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When the United States was founded, the people who were later to become its citizens assembled to discuss ideas which eventually lead to a revolution. One of the striking features of the United States is that, having accomplished this revolution, its founders wrote into the country’s constitution the right to freely assemble and to freely speak. In the information age, these rights must be translated and updated into rights to freely communicate by electronic means. As has always been the case for potentially violent groups which are meeting in real space, that nation, and any nation, has a legitimate interest in being aware of their activities, and in intervening, when discussion moves on to deadly action. The same national need persists in this new world, where assembly may take place in cyberspace rather than in physical space. A pressing question then is how to accommodate both the national and collective need for security, and the collective and shared ideal of free assembly and speech. The question clearly has both technological and social dimensions. Answers will be sought in the fields of law, and social or political science; and also in the fields of engineering and computer sciences. The goal of this workshop is to bring together people who are active in these arenas, to generate an informative and stimulating discussion of the potentials and the limitations of both technological methods and legal or social policies. It is well known that technology is changing at an accelerated pace. Hence, one must consider not only the current situation but also future possibilities, when balancing the need for privacy and the need to prevent terrorism. We must consider now whether the need to capture dangerous conversations occurring in cyberspace will collide dramatically with the desire to protect the right of free assembly and free speech in cyberspace; or whether the need to gather information about certain individuals to prevent terrorist activities will enter in conflict with the citizen's right to privacy. These problems will not go away. In fact, their terms and scope will change regularly as technology and the world’s situation change. The relation between privacy and security is the central theme of this workshop. The one-day workshop will start and end with plenary discussions. These will frame and summarize parallel discussions on two related tracks. 1) Technical Track: What, exactly, can new analytic technologies do and not do? In which ways can these technologies contribute to counterterrorism tasks? What can be expected of such contributions? What is the minimal amount of information needed by these technologies? Is it possible to bound, in advance, the data that technologies based on data analysis will require in order to produce results? What technologies can ensure privacy? Is the task of ensuring privacy a technical task, at least in part? Can analytic technologies help in counterterrorism while maintaining privacy? 2) Legal and Ethical Track: What legal aspects are raised by the use of new technologies? What is the current position of the U.S. legal system, the U.S. government and the U.S. Intelligence Community with respect to those aspects? Are there general principles that can be used to adapt the laws as the technological situation changes? How might the situation be compared and contrasted with voluntary surrender of private information, for economic convenience? This conference invites participation by those interested in the fields of computer science and information science, the law, and the community of those with operational responsibility for protecting either privacy or security, including the Department of Homeland Security and other U.S. federal agencies. The goal is to provide a forum for informed, objective discussion among experts in all the aspects involved. Proposals for cross-disciplinary panels are particularly welcome.
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