Seminar: Cybersecuring U.S. Elections 2016-2022

We are much honored to invite Adam Clayton Powell III, the Senior Fellow & Executive Director of USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative to give us a speech on the topic of “cybersecuring U.S. Elections 2016-2022: Challenges, Opportunities, and Comparisons with Other Democracies” on March 8th. Special thanks also go to Prof. Jesse Chien-Chih Lu for being the Emcee, Prof. Tsung-Jen Shih, Office of International Cooperation, and the University of South California for organizing the seminar.

The USC Election Cybersecurity Initiative is a new non-partisan independent project, supported by Google, to help safeguard campaigns and elections. With the core concepts of “Democracy is not just another ideology and Our candidate is Democracy.” Adam Powell and the organization have been working hard to raise awareness of cybersecurity and protect the security of the elections. Tools and Information to Protect U.S. Campaigns and Elections from cyber attacks are offered by them. They have held numerous cybersecurity workshops across the USA's 50 states as well.

Many significant subjects and instances were presented in this speech. The Election Security and Information Project was first introduced by Mr. Adam Powell, who then discussed the cybersecurity issues and challenges the United States encountered regarding politics, how they worked to address them, and from their work over the previous year, how the United States' cybersecurity measures compare with other countries, and what they have learned from other countries. In particular, he specifically praised Taiwan's excellent internal communications and transparent election procedure while referring to the electoral process.

Great interaction occurred between the writer and the audience. Discussion topics included how secure a Google auto-generated password is, and how USC combats the issue of misinformation and disinformation. The first-year IMICS student, Schawink shared his thought about the speech, “It's a really nice thing to have such an esteemed professor come to give a lecture about quite a specialized topic here at NCCU. I learned a lot about the importance of cybersecurity in protecting the public interest, and I personally hope to see more technology-based lectures like this in the future! ”