Presenters: Professor Ben Goold

Over the last twenty years, we have all become subjects of increasingly pervasive and intense surveillance. Every time we go online, our activities are monitored and our personal information is collected, stored, and potentially shared. Our mobile phones track our movements, surveillance cameras watch us as we pass through public and semi-private spaces, and increasingly government agencies and private organizations asks us to provide more and more information about ourselves. How has this intensification of surveillance changed the way we think about identity? How do we reconcile the stories we tell about ourselves – our personal narratives – with the digital, categorical identities that have become an inescapable aspect of modern life? What happens when our narrative identity and our categorical identities collide or contradict each other?

This lecture seeks to explore these issues through the lens of privacy, and suggests that we need to reconsider many of our ideas of identity and private space in order to make sense of a world in which identity is increasingly determined by the routine surveillance activities that now dominate our everyday lives.

The National Centre for Antimicrobial Stewardship (NCAS) will hold its first annual forum at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity on the 9th November.

NCAS is the first One Health NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence working in the Health Services stream to improve practice and policy around antimicrobial prescribing in humans and animals across hospitals, primary care, aged care, companion and livestock animals.

The day will commence at 09:30 with presentations from the Director, Professor Karin Thursky and senior co-investigators providing a comprehensive overview of the status of antimicrobial use in Australia, the risk of multidrug resistant pathogens, and the challenges of using data to effect change.

After lunch NCAS PhD students will present their research projects together with their primary supervisor.

The day will finish at 16:30.

Attendance at the Forum is free for all delegates.

A light lunch will be served, so RSVPs are essential for catering purposes. Please use the registration link.

Presenters: Mr David Cochrane, Mr Jon Lawrence, Ms Julianne Brennan, Dr Adam Molnar, Dr Suelette Dreyfus

The Office of the Commissioner for Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) is hosting its annual Privacy Awareness Week (PAW) in May. For 2017 CPDP has planned a range of events under the theme Trust and Transparency.

Privacy Awareness Week is an initiative of the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities forum. It is held each year to promote and raise awareness of privacy issues and the importance of protecting personal information.

Together with the University of Melbourne, CPDP is holding a public forum on surveillance. A panel of speakers from a range of backgrounds will debate the tension between privacy, civil liberties and national security in the surveillance state.

Presenters: Professor Svetha Venkatesh

This lecture will explore the prediction of rare events, and what can be done when current predictions for these events are poor. It will argue that, instead of rare event classification, the focus should be on identifying the riskiest events with minimal error – as such events are likely precursors to outliers of interest.

Professor Svetha Venkatesh is the Director of the Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics at Deakin University. Her work on outlier detection is used in surveillance and has been tested at Barwon Health to predict suicide risk.

Presenters: Professor Joseph Cannataci Head of the Department of Information Policy & Governance at the Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences of the University of Malta.

Most people are leaving hundreds, sometimes thousands, of digital footprints and fingerprints in cyberspace every day. What sometimes seems to be an unholy alliance of state entities and commercial corporations are extremely busy harvesting this data, building extremely detailed individual profiles of each and every one of us or, at the very least, retaining the capacity to do so at short notice. Some of this is done within the boundaries of national law but a lot of this privacy-intrusive activity takes place across national borders often in grey areas which are not satisfactorily covered by international law especially when it comes to issues like jurisdiction.

Yet, in an Internet without borders, how can the individual citizen enjoy safeguards without borders and have remedies capable of going across border? The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy, Professor Joe Cannataci, in his March 2018 address to the UN Human Rights Council, called upon Member States to work together to address the gaps at the international level in respecting and protecting the right to privacy in cyberspace. Professor Cannataci believes the global community needs to undertake urgent action to effectively respect and implement article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by developing a clear and comprehensive legal framework on privacy and surveillance in cyberspace, and to operationalise the right to privacy, domestically and across borders.

Hear Professor Cannataci set out his reasons for developing, with multiple stakeholders, an international instrument to respect and protect the right to privacy in cyberspace and why recent developments like the USA's CLOUD Act can, at best, only offer a partial and very interim solution until a truly international mechanism is created.

This public lecture marks the official launch of the Cybersecurity and Democracy Network at the University of Melbourne and is supported by the Networked Society Institute and Melbourne Law School's Centre for Media and Communications Law.

Presenters: Richard de Rozario

Digital Politics seminar series

For the last two years, the SWARM Project has been designing and testing a platform to improve the quality of reasoning in intelligence analysis. The research coincidentally discovered that there are many people outside intelligence organisations that are willing and able to conduct intelligence analysis. In this seminar Dr Richard de Rozario will discuss the ways citizens participate in intelligence analysis, which was previously the domain of government and corporates.

Presenters: Dr Tyne Sumner

Over the course of the 20th century, the Federal Bureau of Investigation developed an obsession with the content, form and authors of modern American poetry. At the same time, poetry underwent a series of radical changes in the ways that it communicated ideas of privacy, observation and the self.

The inextricability of poetry and surveillance during this period offers a new and productive framework for theorising our current techno-political crisis. In this lecture, Dr Tyne Daile Sumner will discuss how the deceptively simple arena of poetry became a source of intense focus for the FBI and, subsequently, a crucial site for seeing, watching, evaluating and surveilling.