Kim Lane Scheppele: Democracy at risk – The autocrat’s spyware?
The event will be held in English and simultaneously interpreted into German. This lecture is also the opening keynote address to the conference “AI & warfare“. In addition, the lecture will be broadcast live from 6 pm. The recorded video will be uploaded to this website a few days after the event.
When dictatorships of the 20th century fell, a set of legal barriers was established to prevent the recurrence of their specific horrors. But the world is now witnessing attacks on democratic systems from new autocrats. They circumvent those barriers to consolidate power in novel ways, aided by technology that was unavailable to last century’s dictators.
Spyware – software that infiltrates users’ devices such as smartphones, laptops or routers to report information back to the software’s deployer – is now in common use by both democratic and autocratic governments. In democracies, police and intelligence services find spyware useful because it is a relatively unobtrusive and targeted way to fight terrorism and crime. In the hands of autocrats, however, spyware can be used to keep track of political opponents, gathering information that may be used to compromise these democratic campaigners if they gain traction with the public. Because democratic governments defend legitimate uses of spyware, they are reluctant to sign onto regulations to curb the use of spyware in autocratic governments.
In this talk, Kim Lane Scheppele lays out the increasing evidence that spyware is being used to undermine democracy inside the EU and national legal carve-outs and discusses the barriers – both political and legal – to regulating it.
Kim Lane Scheppele: Democracy at risk – The autocrat’s spyware?
Wednesday, 16. October 2024 | 6 pm | Admission 5:30 pm
AUDIF Auditorium Friedrichstraße | Friedrichstraße 180, 10117 Berlin
Speaker
Kim Lane Scheppele is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2005 to 2015, she served as the Director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and previously directed the Princeton University Program in Law and Public Affairs. Before that, she spent nearly a decade on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where she held the John O’Brien Professorship in Comparative Law and a Professorship in Sociology. Since 1989, her research has focused on the transformation of former Soviet states into constitutional democracies, as well as the impact of international “counterterrorism” efforts on global constitutional protections post-9/11.
Agenda
| 5:30 pm | Admission |
| 6:00 pm | Welcome and introduction by Tobi Müller |
| 6:10 pm | Lecture by Kim Lane Scheppele |
| 6:50 pm | Discussion between Kim Lane Scheppele and Jeanette Hofmann …(followed by Q&A with the audience) |
| 7:30 pm | Get-Together |
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