Technology & Ethics Seminar: George Lucas, Naval Postgraduate School
Privacy, Anonymity, and Cyber Security in the Aftermath of Edward Snowden’s Revelations
Speaker: GEORGE R. LUCAS, JR., recently retired from the “Distinguished Chair in Ethics” in the Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy, is currently Professor of Ethics and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He has taught at Georgetown University, Emory University, Randolph-Macon College, the French Military Academy (Saint-Cyr), and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. His main areas of interest are applied moral philosophy and military ethics, and he has written on such topics as: irregular and hybrid warfare, cyber conflict, military and professional ethics, and ethical challenges of emerging military technologies. His most recent book is Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (AltaMira Press, 2009), and he has a commissioned work on military ethics in preparation for Oxford University Press, and is currently editing the Routledge Handbook on Military Ethics for publication in 2015. Other publications include: “Industrial Challenges of Military Robotics,” Journal of Military Ethics (December 2011); “The Strategy of Graceful Decline,” Ethics & International Affairs (Summer 2011); “Postmodern War,” the introduction for a special issue of Journal of Military Ethics (2010) devoted to ethics and emerging military technologies.
Abstract: Snowden’s decision to blow the whistle on his contract employer and NSA rested in a conviction that the surveillance practices of this agency were seriously eroding Americans’ privacy. Discussion of the techniques used, however, suggest that it was anonymity in most cases, rather than privacy that was routinely threatened. Privacy is an important basic human right. I will argue that anonymity is not, and explore the differences and discuss with attendees the threats posed to both in the name of security.
Open to the public.