Ethics in the Digital Society, David Wright

Join us for a lecture from David Wright, sponsored by the Civic Media Lab.

David Wright will first identify the various actors who have turned the Internet into a danger zone, including state-sponsored attackers, governments and companies engaged in social surveillance, oligarchs manipulating public opinion, organized crime, terrorists, trolls and others. He outlines the differences between conventional war and cyber war. He gives examples of technologies that amplify the danger zone, including deepfake technologies and facial recognition. Second, he will consider various countermeasure strategies for addressing attackers. Third, he will discuss whether ethics can deter some of the attackers on the Internet and how ethics might influence our countermeasures strategies. 

About the speaker

David Wright is Director of Trilateral Research, a London-based research company, which he founded in 2004. He has been a partner in more than 50 projects funded by the European Union involving privacy, surveillance, risk, security and ethics. 

David has been a member of the DG Research Trust-at-Risk foresight group and of four expert groups of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). He is also a member of the European Foresight Monitoring Network.

He has published more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals. His most recent book, Enforcing Privacy, published by Springer, appeared in print in 2016. His previous book was Surveillance in Europe, published by Routledge in 2014.