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Profs and Pints presents: “Digital-Age Democracy,” with Joshua A. Geltzer, founding executive director and visiting professor of law at Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.
Democracy in the digital age is full of new opportunities–and new risks. On the eve of Election Day, we’ll explore emerging cybersecurity threats to pillars of American democracy such as the 2020 Census, which allocates critical votes in federal elections for a decade to come.
The Internet holds the possibility of making our census more accurate, more inclusive, and cheaper, but today’s technologies pose threats, too. America’s 2020 Census will be the first electronic census in our nation’s history. How might hostile actors at home and abroad exploit cyber-vulnerabilities to undermine confidence in the critical census results?
Such cybersecurity concerns are emerging across our democracy. President Trump’s now-defunct “Voter Fraud Commission” partially succeeded in acquiring sensitive data on American voters from across the country, then stored all of that information in a single database. Its doing so raised serious cybersecurity concerns in an era when hostile foreign actors have demonstrated their eagerness to access information on American voters to micro-target them. The 2020 Census similarly raises questions about how information on American voters from across the country will be securely acquired, transmitted, and stored.
Join Professor Joshua Geltzer of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection to discuss the emerging landscape for democracy in the digital age. He’ll discuss a range of opportunities and challenges at the intersection of new technologies and democracy, as well as what our government and our citizenry can do to adapt.
