Cambridge conference to discuss developing international cyberbehavior ethics

(April 28th, 2016) The Boston Global Forum (BGF) will host a May 9th Conference titled “Building Ethics Norms for Cyberbehavior’’. This conference (time, place and speakers below) is in part a follow-up to the recent creation of the BGF’s “Ethics Code of Conduct for Cyber Peace and Security,’’ which has been informed by BGF online dialogues with cyberexperts from several countries.

It is part of The Boston Global Forum’s BGF-G7 Summit Initiative, in which the BGF has convened leading scholars and business, technology and government leadersto seek solutions to pressing global issues involving peace, security and development. This BGF group has been working with Japanese officials to draft proposals to present to the national leaders meeting at the G7 Summit on May 26-27 in Japan.

The BGF’s biggest priority leading up to the summit is developing  what it calls “Strategies for Combating Cyberterrorism’’.

The May 9 event:

Time: 7 p.m. (EDT) May 9, 2015

Venue: Room 2, Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138

To be live-streamed at www.bostonglobalforum.org

The conference will be directly linked with participants in Tokyo and Bonn.

For further information, including on attending the conference, please send queries to: Office@BostonGlobalForum.org.

The conference will be moderated by:

• Former Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis, Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum.

Speakers:

• Prof.  Jose Barroso, former President of the European Union.
• President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, former President of Latvia, President of Club de Madrid.
• Prof. Thomas E. Patterson, Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Member of Editorial Board, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School.
• Prof.  Joseph Nye, Member of the BGF Board of Thinkers; University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.
• Prof.  Koichi Hamada, Special Adviser to  Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
• Prof. Thomas E. Patterson.
• Nguyen Anh Tuan, Co-Founder and CEO, Boston Global Forum; Chair, International Advisory Committee, the UNESCO-UCLA  program on Global Citizenship Education.
• Prof. John Savage, An Wang Professor of Computer Science, Brown University.
• Ryan Maness, Visiting Fellow of Security and Resilience Studies, Department of Political Science, Northeastern University.
• Tomomi Inada, Chairman of Policy Research Council of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and a Member of the Japanese House of Representatives.
• Prof.  Nazli Choucri, Professor of Political Science, MIT; Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD).
• Prof. Chris Demchak, RADM Grace M. Hopper Chair of Cybersecurity and Co-Director of the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies, at the U.S. Naval War College.

Watch Boston's nascent international think tank

  Do think tanks really think? It's not that these organizations -- mostly centered in Washington, D.C., but also scattered across America – don't harbor some fine minds among their scholars and fellows, but the problem is that we know what they think -- and have often known for a long time. The rest is articulation.

Among Washington think tanks, we know what to expect from the Brookings Institution: earnest, slightly left-of-center analysis of major issues. Likewise, we know that the Center for Strategic and International Studies will do the same job with a right-of-center shading, and a greater emphasis on defense and geopolitics.

What the tanks provide is support for political and policy views; detailed argument in favor of a known point of view. By and large, the verdict is in before the trial has begun.

There a few exceptions, house contrarians. The most notable is Norman Ornstein, who goes his own way at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (##aei). Ornstein, hugely respected as an analyst and historian of Congress, often expresses opinions in articles and books  that seem to be wildly at odds with the orthodoxy of AEI.

A less-celebrated role of the thinks tanks is as resting places for the political elite when their party is out of power. Former  U.S. Ambassador  to the United Nations John Bolton, rumored to be favored as a future Republican secretary of state, is hosted at AEI. National Security Adviser Susan Rice was comfortable at Brookings between service in the Clinton and he Obama administrations. At any time, dozens of possible office holders reside at the Washington think tanks, building reputations and waiting.

My interest in think tanks and their thinkers has led me to what might be developing into a think tank, although it's too early to say. It's so early that it has no headquarters, secretariat or paid staff. But this nascent think tank has gathered a loose faculty from a coterie of public intellectuals, mainly in and around Boston, and abroad in Hanoi, Tokyo and Berlin.

It's called the Boston Global Forum. Formed in 2012, it's led by two very different but, apparently, compatible men: Michael Dukakis, former Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential nominee, and Nguyen Anh Tuan, who founded a successful internet company in Vietnam and now lives in Boston.

The concept of the forum is to study and discuss a single topic for a year. Last year, in forums and internet hookups between Boston and Asian and European cities, the topic was security in the South and East China seas, where war could easily erupt over territorial disputes. After a year of discussion, the participants concluded that a framework for peace in the region needs to be established and that current international arrangements and organizations don’t go far enough in that direction. This year’s topic is cybersecurity.

The Boston Global Forum has strong ties to the faculties at Harvard and Northeastern University, where Dukakis is a professor. Most forum meetings take place on the Harvard campus. Two of the forum's most conspicuous champions are Harvard Professors Joseph Nye and Tom Patterson. Patterson’s office at the John F. Kennedy School of Government serves as a kind of de facto headquarters.

This new entrant into the think tank cohort is very East Coast-tony, and very energetic. This year it has plans for meetings in Vietnam, Tokyo and somewhere in Europe, and has attracted  such media heavyweights as David Sanger, of The New York Times, and Charles Sennott, one of the founders of the online GlobalPost.

As the Boston Global Forum is a new think tank, questions abound: Will it get funding? Will it find premises and staff ? Will it get public recognition?

The big question about anything that looks like a think tank is, will thinking happen there? Will the Boston Global Forum be a crucible for big ideas? Or will it, like other think tanks, develop its own binding ideology?

Will the Boston Global Forum become, like so many, a smooth propaganda machine? Or will it be a place where the outlandish can live with the orthodox?

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of  “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.

Linda Gasparello