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Mar 20, 2018

techpolicypodcast_washingtech_hankgreely

Bio

 Henry T. Greely (@HankGreelyLSJU) is the Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences; and Professor (by courtesy) of Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine. He is also the Chair of Stanford’s Steering Committee of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and the Director of Stanford’s Program in Neuroscience and Society.

Hank specializes in the ethical, legal, and social implications of new biomedical technologies, particularly those related to neuroscience, genetics, or stem cell research. He frequently serves as an advisor on California, national, and international policy issues. He is chair of California’s Human Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee, a member of the Advisory Council of the NIH’s National Institute for General Medical Sciences, a member of the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law of the National Academies, a member of the Neuroscience Forum of the Institute of Medicine, and served from 2007-2010 as co-director of the Law and Neuroscience Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. In 2007 Professor Greely was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1985, Greely was a partner at Tuttle & Taylor, served as a staff assistant to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, and as special assistant to the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense. He served as a law clerk to Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

He received Stanford University’s Richard W. Lyman Prize in 2013.

 Resources

Stanford University Center for Law and the Biosciences

War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy

News Roundup

N.Y. Times: Data Firm with links to Trump Campaign Exploited Facebook User Data 

The New York Times dropped a bombshell story on Sunday and it has sent Washington and the stock market into a tailspin. The Dow dropped more than 1%, or by over 300 points, Facebook lost some $37 billion in value, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw his net worth decline by $5 billion. In addition,  Congressional leaders including Dianne Feinstein, Amy Klobuchar, John Thune, Adam Schiff, Mark Warner and Chuck Grassley are just HAMMERING Facebook at this moment and I wouldn’t want to be in Zukerberg’s shoes right now.

The New York Times investigation alleges that a London-based company called Cambridge Analytica, with deep ties to Republican donor Robert Mercer, who invested $15 million in Cambridge Analytica, Mercer’s daughter who’s on the board of Cambridge Analytica, and none other than Steve Bannon, who allegedly named the company, exploited Facebook user data to influence the 2016 presidential election to target users based on their psychographic profiles—things like religion, life statisfaction, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Of course, it’s illegal under U.S. election laws to employ foreigners in political campaigns. So, The Times alleges, Cambridge set up a shell corporation and hired a Russian-American front man, Alexander Kogan, who was a researcher with the University of Cambridge. Kogan then created a Facebook personality quiz that paid users to share their private information and download the app. Some 50 million users were affected. This quiz allegedly scraped their information, and Cambridge Analytica gave him $800,000 for it. A former Cambridge Analytica employee, Christopher Wylie, was the whistleblower in all this.

Facebook says it would suspend working with Cambridge Analytica and conduct an internal review, including the hiring of a forensics team. Channel 4 News London reported in an internal investigation that Cambridge Analytica uses bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians.

This is just the surface. Summarizing every detail of this is way above my pay grade. But it’s just layers upon layers of deception and bullshittery. You can find summaries and analysis in The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Trump administration issues new Russian sanctions on same day it reveals attacks on power plants

Russia has stepped its capability with regard to cyberattacks on nuclear power plans, water, and electric systems, according to U.S. intelligence officials.The country now has moved from having the ability to surveil American power plants to having the ability to disable them anytime tensions escalate, and in a similar manner with which it disabled power in the Ukraine on two separate occasions in 2015 and 2016. The accusations came on the same day the Trump administration imposed new economic sanctions against Russia for its role in hacking the 2016 presidential election. Sanctions include freezing assets and prohibiting business deals from being transacted with two-dozen Russian individuals and entities. Nicole Perlroth and David Sanger report in the New York Times and Jonathan Easley reports in The Hill.

First pedestrian casualty for self-driving cars

Ali Breland reports in the Hill that a 49-year-old woman was struck and killed by an Uber fully self-driving car while she was walking through a crosswalk in Tempe, Arizona on Monday. The state attracted Uber because of its deregulatory approach to self-driving vehicle technology. The National Transportation Safety Board announced that it would be investigating. Uber has suspended its testing of self-driving cars in Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

Walmart whistleblower sues after reporting e-commerce cheating

A former Walmart executive has sued the world’s largest retailer for firing him after he reported that the company was fudging its e-commerce results to show better numbers against Amazon. The complaint alleges that Walmart mislabeled products and deliberately failed to properly process returns in order to inflate sales numbers. Jonathan Stempel and Nandita Bose report in Reuters.

Japanese regulators raid Amazon

Ali Breland reports for the Hill that Japanese regulators raided Amazon last week. Japan’s Fair Trade Commission may be concerned about Amazon’s alleged practice of strong-arming suppliers to show cheaper prices on Amazon as compared to their competitors in Japan.

Amazon recalls portable chargers 

Amazon is recalling 260,000 AmazonBasics portable chargers after it received 53 complaints that they were overheating. One person reported being burned by the charger’s battery acid. Four others reported fire and smoke. Kate Gibson reports for CBS.

Google introduces wheelchair accessibility in Maps

Google released Thursday a new wheelchair-friendly maps navigation feature. The feature will include accessible routes and information on accommodations in public transportation. Josh Delk reports in the Hill.

Google bans Bitcoin ads

 Google has decided to ban ads for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Facebook had previously initiated a similar ban. The company did not state why it decided to make the policy change. However, it comes as many in the policy community have expressed concern that online ads could be used to promote cryptocurrency scams. Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for The New York Times.

Microsoft logs 200 discrimination, harassment complaints over 6 years

Ali Breland reported in the Hill that, according to court filings filed by women suing Microsoft for gender pay and promotion discrimination, women working at the company lodged some 238 gender discrimination or harassment complaints between 2010 and 2016. Of the 118 that were gender discrimination complaints, Microsoft found only one to be “founded”. According to Natasha Bach at Fortune, Microsoft has changed the way it addresses harassment complaints by banning forced arbitration agreements. The question, of course, is whether that’s enough.

Conservative forms bogus company to lure tech workers

Finally, Gizmodo reports that James O’Keefe—the undercover conservative activist— created a fake company and sent in employees of his Project Veritas organization to pose as recruiters. These fake recruiters then reached out to employees at major tech companies like Twitter to interview them and record their responses. In one case, an employee stated that Twitter hired few conservatives and secretly hid content posted by conservative users in a practice called “shadow banning”. Project Veritas then allegedly posted the videos as evidence of an anti-conservative bias at Twitter. Twitter has denied in Congressional testimony that it engages in shadow banning activities.