Surveillance Along the Electronic Silk Road: China and the United States

Date: April 29, 2014 (Tuesday)

Time: 5:00pm-6:30pm

Venue: 2/F, Moot Court, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Speaker: Professor Anupam Chander, Faculty of Law, University of California, Davis

Abstract: Fears of surveillance across borders are driving nations to cut off their countries with Berlin Walls for data, threatening to break apart the World Wide Web. While many have critiqued the laws governing surveillance of Americans by the United States, little attention has been paid to the laws governing surveillance by the United States abroad. How will surveillance affect the Internet enterprises of China and the United States? How does mass surveillance undermine the promise of the Electronic Silk Road? Will erecting barriers to the free flow of data across the Internet help or harm privacy?

About the speaker: Anupam Chander is Director of the California International Law Center and Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Yale, Chicago, and Cornell. He is the recipient of two Google Research Awards. He has published widely in the nation’s leading law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the NYU Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the California Law Review. His new book, The Electronic Silk Road: How the Web Binds the World Together in Commerce, was published by Yale University Press in 2013.