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Next week's Stanford cybersecurity symposium to include high-profile names

Articles on cybersecurity and hacking have been making the news increasingly frequently in the past few years, with high-profile victims including the U. S. Army, the Federal Reserve, Facebook and the New York Times.

An upcoming Stanford Journal of International Law symposium on cybersecurity, "The Virtual Battlefield: Securing Cyberspace in a World Without Borders," has several presentations and panels with cybersecurity experts to discuss how international law may or may not address these issues.

Panelists will include New York Times technology reporter Nicole Perlroth, former US Cybersecurity Coordinator for President Obama Howard Schmidt, and Lookout Mobile Security Co-Founder and CTO Kevin Mahaffey.

"As the tools of Internet manipulation become widely available for not only state actors but non-state actors, there needs to be a serious conversation about the role of international law in establishing ground rules or not establishing rules," said James Wigginton, the Editor-in-Chief of the Stanford Journal of International Law.

The two-day symposium is being sponsored by CALinnovates and will have a keynote speech on Apr. 11 by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré, who presided last December over the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT).

Expert panels will speak on Apr. 12 regarding the different kinds of cyberthreats and how public and private actors can respond to them, with particular concerns over sovereignty and the legality of retaliatory hacking.

According to Wigginton, the conference was proposed after a meeting gathered in November 2012, prior to WCIT. Speakers at that meeting, brought together by CALinnovates Executive Director Mike Montgomery, included former Vice President of Global Government Affairs for Hewlett-Packard Larry Irving, Larry Downes from the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, Patrick Ryan, Public Policy & Government Relations Counsel, Free expression and International Relations at Google and Ambassador David Gross.

"CALinnovates was excited about continuing the discussion, so they generously sponsored this symposium," Wigginton said. "We’ve been working closely with CALinnovates to coordinate good topics and try to help people know about the event and come to the event."

The symposium will take place on Apr. 11-12 at Stanford University. Registration is free and open to the public, and is available at http://www.stanford.edu/group/sjil/virtual-battlefield.fb.