Cyber Policy Challenges

Lance J. Hoffman
Distinguished Professor
Department of Computer Science
George Washington University

12:00noon–1pm
Friday, April 24, 2020
remotely via WebEx: umbc.webex.com/meet/sherman

Abstract:

System attackers and defenders operate on a constantly changing battlefield, and some of the more serious conflicts involving nation-states could be considered acts of war, though we are still in the early stages of defining war in cyberspace. Policies for security and privacy can vary wildly, and have important personal, national, and global consequences for privacy, free speech, censorship, and other issues. Things get even more complicated with the advent of the Internet of Things, where (mostly unsophisticated) users may think they have more control than they actually do and can make bad mistakes. Various ethical issues related to the development of these systems, including bias in artificial intelligence and what harm to choose when harm is unavoidable have only started to be examined. This talk will provide both historical context and some discussion of topical issues such as Zoombombing and the security of electronic voting systems as compared to mail ballots and traditional voting.

About the Speaker:

Professor Lance J. Hoffman is the author or editor of numerous articles and five books on computer security and privacy. He developed the first regularly offered course on computer security at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Cyber Security Hall of Fame, Dr. Hoffman institutionalized the ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. He has served on a number of Advisory Committees including those of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Homeland Security and has testified before Congress on security and privacy-related issues. He is the principal investigator of the CyberCorps program at GWU.

Dr. Hoffman earned his Ph. D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, after a B.S. in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.

E-mail: lanceh@gwu.edu

URL: https://www.cs.seas.gwu.edu/lance-j-hoffman

Host:

Alan T. Sherman, sherman@umbc.edu

Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681.