Why politics needs computer scientists

Speaker: Ian Brown

2nd December 2003 , 14:30 , Room 519 Claremont Tower

Abstract

Nobody would question that lawyers or economists can make a valuable contribution to the development of public policy. Yet curiously for our "information society", very few computer scientists are involved at a senior level in politics or the civil service. The result is often policy that is ignorant of the most fundamental technical realities.

The Foundation for Information Policy Research was founded in 1998 to attempt to redress this problem. Initially it focused on legislation that would have required private cryptographic keys in the UK to be lodged with "Trusted Third Parties". This eventually became the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which FIPR had a major impact in improving. Since then FIPR has continued to work on surveillance issues, and has also had successes in the fields of intellectual property, e-voting, medical privacy and ID cards.

In this seminar, Ian Brown will describe some of these policy battles in more detail, and attempt to demonstrate that the introduction of a little computer science into politics goes a long way!

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Ian Brown is director of the Foundation for Information Policy Research. He has spoken and written extensively on communications and medical privacy, copyright and e-voting. Dr Brown is an honorary research fellow at University College London, from where he received a computer science PhD in the field of communications security. He is advising the US government on the security of their next-generation emergency communications systems, and is the co-author of a recent Kluwer book on this subject. Brown has consulted for other large organisations such as the BBC, JP Morgan and Credit Suisse. He is also a trustee of Privacy International.