The Road from Ford to Obama: Forty Years of US Information Security
- 13:00 3rd June 2013 ( week 7, Trinity Term 2013 )Oxford Internet Institute, 1 St Giles'
Aggressive intelligence acquisition has been one of the main strategies employed by the United States in its fight against terrorism following the attacks on 9/11. Whistleblowers and court records reveal that the US government uses telecommunications and internet intelligence to identify targets for drones, pursue court cases against captured terrorist suspects and intervene in plots before they unfold. This surveillance strategy was not invented in the days following 9/11. Rather it is the natural outgrowth of a line of technological policy stretching back to the end of the Cold War and implemented by some of the same men involved in its original creation. Using archival records, this research connects the origin of US telecommunications and information policy at the end of the Cold War to the intelligence strategy employed against global terror networks. It also shows how cooperation between telecommunications companies and the intelligence community developed during the Cold War only to be reinforced by the war on terror. It also notes how the government has attempted to stay abreast of current technology in a rapidly changing environment. Finally, it questions the wisdom of employing historical information security strategies for dealing with a superpower to their reapplication to a new medium, a new enemy, and a new historical mome.
Speaker bio
John Laprise is an Assistant Professor in Residence at Northwestern University in Qatar and serves as a Consulting Scholar to ictQatar. He has written and lectured widely on technology, society, and war. After receiving bachelor’s degrees in history, religion, and interdisciplinary studies, Laprise went on to study Arabic language at the Arabic Language Institute at the American University in Cairo and received a master’s degree in war studies from King’s College London. He received his PhD in media, technology and society from Northwestern University for his interdisciplinary research examining the relationship between computer adoption, information policy and national security in the White House at the end of the Cold War. Prior to attending Northwestern, he worked for more than ten years in the private sector as a research consultant to Fortune 500 companies. While serving as a Visiting Fellow at OII, Laprise will be working on a variety of projects including coordinating with OII researchers on the World Internet Project as Northwestern University in Qatar joins. He also will be revising a case study on early Internet history and a monograph examining the relationship between computers and national security in the White House at the end of the Cold War.Share this:
