Big Tech Podcast Announces Season 4’s First Guest

Nov. 25 – 2:00 p.m. EST (UTC–05:00): Later this week, moderator Suzie Dunn and Florencia Goldsman, contributors to CIGI’s research project Supporting a Safer Internet: Global Survey of Gender-Based Violence Online, will be discussing the flawed policies of social networks requiring more accountability and to hear how women and LGBTQ+ groups have adopted strategies to protect themselves online.

Online abuse targeting marginalized groups has real-world consequences, including silencing voices and exacerbating existing inequalities in society.

You can learn more about the event and register to attend here.

This latest report from CIGI’s Reimagining a Canadian National Security Strategy series outlines priorities for Canadian border management policy.

Neil Desai and Cathy Munroe detail four domains where adjustments need to be made — border management’s role in safeguarding health security against epidemic disease; climate change’s likely effects on border security; opportunities and problems arising from novel technologies; and the emergence of non-traditional threats and challenges of today’s geopolitical environment — and make tangible policy recommendations to address them.

In 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took control of Playpen, a darknet child pornography site. The FBI resorted to an extraordinary measure to identify those producing and consuming the site’s content. Using this operation as a case study, Michael Chertoff and Eric Jardine explore the implications, in relation to long-standing legal principles, of using hacking to police the dark web.

The rules-based international order, crafted for a bricks-and-mortar world, urgently requires an update for the new digital reality. In a speech to the International Monetary Fund three years ago, CIGI Chair and founder Jim Balsillie argued that this historic challenge demands a digital Bretton Woods moment. Here is a selection of CIGI experts’ analysis on this topic.

Human rights activists and journalists depend on the internet and mobile phones to do their work. Yet, as Marie Lamensch writes, they have few resources to protect themselves against spyware deployed by powerful governments. The risks they face, enabled by tools created by the surveillance technology industry purportedly for national security, are real — sometimes a matter of life and death.

Watchdogs have warned that social media companies’ lack of content moderators fluent in local dialects makes it impossible to effectively police extremist content and disinformation in Africa. And these problems extend to all the dimensions of disinformation — be it hate speech, voter manipulation or incitement to violence for political gain — as Idayat Hassan and Kyle Hiebert explain.

Dec. 7 – 9:30 a.m. EST (UTC–05:00): CIGI is pleased to host His Excellency Cong Peiwu, China’s Ambassador to Canada, for a conversation with CIGI President Rohinton P. Medhora about China’s role in the global economy. In the wake of the G20 leaders’ summit and the WTO Ministerial Conference, this conversation will explore China’s role and influence in issues preoccupying governments worldwide, such as technology, trade, investment, climate change, and cyber and data governance. A Q&A period moderated by Medhora will follow.

To join us online on December 7, please register here.