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Events

Rainer Rehak

05.06.2019

14:00 Uhr - 16:00 Uhr | Weizenbaum Institute, Hardenbergstraße 32, 10623 Berlin, Room A103 – A105

Six years after Snowden – A summary of lessons learned and lessons lost for the networked society

In his presentation Rainer Rehak will talk about the so called "Snowden Revelations" and will summarise important revelations and outline technical and political advances in IT security, privacy and data protection.

Starting on 5 June 2013 thousands of secret documents were published, later known as "the Snowden Revelations". Journalists got those from former NSA employee and whistleblower Edward Snowden. They proved the comprehensive global hacking and surveillance practices of the "Five Eyes", mainly by the US-american NSA and the british GCHQ. Many tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Apple and standardisation bodies like the NIST directly cooperated with the NSA. Targets included the EU, SWIFT, the UN, the IAEA, the WTO, the G20 and the COP15. The practices focussed on digital dominance by using mass surveillance as well as targeted political and industrial espionage.

Rainer Rehak will summarise important revelations, put technical details in context and outline technical and political advances in IT security, privacy and data protection. He will discuss necessary technical and political efforts and trade-offs to counteract related negative developments and vulnerabilities of the networked society. The revelations still hold much value for assessing the current state of digitalisation in Germany and globally.

Rainer Rehak is a computer scientist and doctoral candidate in the research group 18: "Quantification and Social Regulation” of the Weizenbaum Institute.

  • The slides of the presentation can be downloaded here.
  • The sound recording you can find here.