Dear all: The newly founded Cam Univy Society for Ethics in Maths hosts this talk next Tues on a topic of concern to us all... Best, Jeremy B ------ Jeremy Butterfield: Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ: Tel: 07557-668413 (mobile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Butterfield Visit the journal, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13552198 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2017 11:01:21 +0000 From: A. Carlotti <[email protected]> To: [email protected], [email protected] Subject: CUEIMS talk next Tuesday: Ross Anderson
On Tuesday 7th March, at 5:30pm, Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Society will host a talk by Prof. Ross Andrerson (FRS FREng), in MR2. Keys Under Doormats: What's wrong with requiring government access to all data and communications? The FBI Director Jim Comey and the US Attorney General Jeff Sessions want government access to stored data, to communications and to the cryptographic keys used to protect them. In Britain, the Investigatory Powers Act, slipped through parliament in the post-Brexit chaos, gives the Home Secretary wide powers to order such access (though much of what the UK agencies want is on US servers). The revelations by Ed Snowden revealed significant abuses by the NSA and GCHQ of the access they already had, and Brexit makes it likely that EU governments and courts will be very wary of letting British firms process data on EU nationals. The scene is set for serious tussles over privacy between governments, the IT industry and others. How are we to make sense of all this? We have been here before. In the "Crypto Wars" of the 1990s, the US government tried repeatedly to grab control of civilian uses of cryptography using export controls, the Clipper chip, and attempts to license the "trusted third parties" in electronic commerce. Some other governments, including Britain's, joined in. Eventually, industry saw them off, supported by academia, NGOs and the European Commission. Mathematicians suddenly found ourselves in the trenches in a battle that set freedom against state control, law enforcement against privacy, enterprise against regulation and countries against each other. We won Crypto War I in 1999 when the EU passed the Electronic Signatures Directive and Al Gore abandoned the fight to control crypto in the USA in the hope of getting elected President. What are our chances in Crypto War II? Ross Anderson FRS FREng did maths as an undergraduate and a PhD in computing. He is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge, and leads the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, which collects and analyses data about online wickedness. He was one of the designers of the international standards for prepayment electricity metering and powerline communications; one of the inventors of the AES finalist encryption algorithm Serpent; a pioneer of peer-to-peer systems, hardware tamper-resistance and API security; and one of the founders of the discipline of security economics. He wrote the standard textbook "Security Engineering A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Physics, and a winner of the Lovelace Medal the UK's top award in computing. All are welcome, and admission is free. I hope to see some of you there, Andrew Carlotti ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Cambridge University Ethics in Mathematics Society was founded in 2016, and aims to discuss and promote awareness of ethical issues faced by Mathematicians and Mathematics graduates in their working life. _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
