CFP: Ethical and Policy Issues in Open Source Intelligence Gathering

Increasingly, open source intelligence (OSI), intelligence gathered from public sources, is being used by a large number of organizations and individuals for a wide variety of aims. Corporations are using OSI to track your location to sell you products, campaigns are identifying voters through OSI techniques, public health officials and others are using OSI to track contagion. Under what circumstances should governments be monitoring citizens’ social media activity for threats? How do governments ethically balance privacy and health in the midst of a global pandemic? This conference explores the ethical and policy implications of emerging issues in open source intelligence gathering. We welcome abstracts that identify and address emerging ethical and policy issues in this area. Our goal is to foster a lively debate around these issues and to publish the collected papers in an edited volume or special issue of a journal.

The conference will take place online on September 28th. Presenters will recieve a $200 honorium. Please email a blinded abstract to Barton Moffatt at [email protected] by August 1st, 2020. Acceptances will be notified August 15th.