Signature Talks:

• Your Data’s for Sale: The Modern Data Broker Industry. What are data brokers? How did they come to be? Why should we care—especially if we have “nothing to hide”? This topic covers the data broker industry, the data it collects and sells on people around the world, the harms, and where it’s all headed—no technical background required.

• Digital Force Protection: How do countries fight wars and conduct espionage in an era when every government employee has a smartphone and a social media account? How do nation-states protect their personnel when so much open-source and commercial data is available on those individuals’ beliefs, purchases, movements, and more? This topic covers the intersection of privacy and national security—and how it is changing modern security and conflict.

• Russia’s Cyber Nesting Doll: How does the Russian government and the Putin regime use hacking to enhance domestic repression, project power overseas, and pursue the security of the ruling powers? This topic covers the history and arc of Russia’s modern cyber ecosystem, the actors within it, their operations, and their impacts.

• Russian Internet Control: Why is the Kremlin endorsing a privately developed messaging app for Russians? If China and Iran cracked down on the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, why did Russia’s internet censorship really begin in the 2010s? And what does Russian Covid-19 tracking have to do with metro AI surveillance? This topic covers how the Russian government uses technology at home for repression, censorship, and surveillance, why it provides a different model than other countries (like China), and what can be done about it.

• From Cables to the Cloud: How do submarine cables power the global internet? Will mobile cell service from satellites disrupt modern communications as we know it? Why is cloud computing such a flashpoint for modern geopolitics—a focal point of sanctions and a target for armed UAV strikes? This topic covers the physical infrastructure underpinning the modern internet, the major players, nation-state efforts to control and infiltrate the infrastructure, and how the future of its security and resilience will evolve in a contested world.

• Securing the AI Data Supply Chain: How do organizations at the frontier of AI R&D secure their data—and their competitive edge? Where do existing security frameworks succeed on training data, testing data, model weights, models themselves, AI APIs, and more, and where do they fail? This topic covers the data in the supply chain underpinning modern AI and machine learning technologies, threats to its privacy and security, and ways to bolster protections.

Past venues include: