We’re at a critical juncture right now where the benefits from technological advances are increasingly counterbalanced by harmful applications and perilous consequences. Cyberattacks are crippling hospitals and threatening public health, governments are using malware and online propaganda to undermine elections and democracies and widespread surveillance to violate human rights, while consumer privacy has become a casualty of unchecked corporate greed. To address these issues we need the critical thinking, creativity, and passion that ethical hackers and technologists use to strengthen cybersecurity applied to social causes and protecting the public interest.
In this panel, security technologist Bruce Schneier, Mozilla Fellow and Graphika Chief Innovation Officer Camille Francois and EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin will discuss specific examples where public interest technologists are most needed to ensure an open, positive and safe digital society and provide suggestions for what hackers and security-forward companies can do to solve some of the biggest social problems we have and make a difference.
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by the Economist. He is the author of 14 books -- including the New York Times best-seller "Click Here to Kill Everybody" -- as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram" and blog "Schneier on Security" are read by over 250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org.
Camille Francois works on cyber conflict and digital rights online. She is the Chief Innovation Officer at Graphika, where she leads the company’s work to detect and mitigate disinformation, media manipulation and harassment. Francois was previously the Principal Researcher at Jigsaw, an innovation unit at Google that builds technology to address global security challenges and protect vulnerable users. Francois has advised governments and parliamentary committees on both sides of the Atlantic on policy issues related to cybersecurity and digital rights. She served as a special advisor to the Chief Technology Officer of France in the Prime Minister's office, working on France’s first Open Government roadmap. Francois is a Mozilla Fellow, a Berkman-Klein Center affiliate, and a Fulbright scholar. She holds a masters degree in human rights from the French Institute of Political Sciences (Sciences-Po) and a masters degree in international security from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Francois’ work has been featured in various publications, including the New York Times, WIRED, Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, Globo and Le Monde.
Eva Galperin is EFF's Director of Cybersecurity and the head of EFF's Threat Lab. Prior to 2007, when she came to work for EFF, Eva worked in security and IT in Silicon Valley and earned degrees in Political Science and International Relations from SFSU. Her work is primarily focused on providing privacy and security for vulnerable populations around the world. To that end, she has applied the combination of her political science and technical background to everything from organizing EFF's Tor Relay Challenge, to writing privacy and security training materials (including Surveillance Self Defense,the Digital First Aid Kit, and the Security Education Companion), and publishing research on malware in Syria, Vietnam, Kazakhstan. When she is not collecting new and exotic malware, she practices aerial circus arts and learning new languages.