Keeping the Wrong Secrets: The Rise of Private Data

First MaxPo seminar of the new academic year on Wednesday, 21 September 2022 at 13:00, co-organized with Sciences Po's Law School, with Professor Oona Hathaway, Yale University.

Oona Hathaway, the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, Professor of International Law and Area Studies at the Yale University MacMillan Center, Professor of the Yale University Department of Political Science, and Director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges.

With discussion by Beatriz Botero Arcila, Assistant Professor of Law at Sciences Po and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.

>The current U.S. national security system was designed to protect twentieth-century secrets. At the time the system was created, most important national security information was in the government’s hands. It made sense to design a system devoted almost entirely to keeping spies from obtaining that information and preventing insiders from disclosing it. Today, however, government information has been eclipsed by private information. We are living in a moment when private capacity to collect, aggregate, and analyze data is eclipsing the capacity of governments. Clearview AI claims that it is on track to collect 100 billion photos—enough to ensure “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable”—in its database within a year. Meanwhile there is an estimated $12 billion market centered on the location data on mobile phones. Six companies claim that they have more than a billion devices in their data. And these companies are far from alone. There are 4000 data brokerage companies in the world, 87 percent of them located in the United States. Advocates of regulating the collection of private data have long focused on the civil liberty and privacy concerns raised by data collection. But the national security costs are only just beginning to come into view—troves of personal data, much of it readily available, that can be exploited by foreign powers. Each piece of information, taken on its own, is relatively unimportant. But when placed together, they can be used to construct a mosaic that gives foreign adversaries unprecedented insight into the personal lives of most Americans—as well as those whose data flows through the U.S. It also offers unprecedented opportunities to manipulate public opinion in ways that deeply undermine democratic governance.

Invitation only.