The second annual Congressional Cyber Boot Camp will be held at Stanford University August 17-19. A bipartisan group of thirty senior Senate and House staffers will participate in the three-day workshop hosted by the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
“Cybersecurity threats are growing more serious and evolving rapidly. Stanford is in a unique position to bring academic, industry, and policy leaders together to develop new ideas to tackle these challenges,” said Amy Zegart, the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-director of CISAC. “We look forward to building on the success of last year’s program to shape the future of cybersecurity.”
The boot camp, which began last year, seeks to provide cybersecurity staffers in Congress with a better understanding of the technical, economic, organizational, political, legal, and psychological dimensions of cybersecurity. It also aims to help congressional staffers build new expert networks and better access to the research and data they need to help craft effective policy.
The boot camp will feature academic experts from Stanford and other leading universities as well as senior leaders in the business and policy communities. Former secretary of state and Hoover senior fellow Condoleezza Rice and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman will give a keynote address. Other speakers include Amy Zegart; Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia; Herb Lin, research fellow at Hoover and CISAC senior research scholar; Jane Holl Lute, former deputy secretary of Homeland Security; and CISAC faculty members Dan Boneh and John Mitchell, professors of computer science and electrical engineering, respectively. Participants will visit the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park and take part in a simulation exercise in which they work as executives in a large corporation responding to a major cyber attack.
"The boot camp is an invaluable experience that brought congressional staff together to deliberate the complex cyber policy issues we’re facing on Capitol Hill and to hear from across academic disciplines different ways to think about these tough problems. Last year’s boot camp provided critical knowledge that has since empowered us to make more well-informed cyber policy decisions and directly supported Congress coming together last December to pass five foundational pieces of cyber security legislation,” said past participant Brett DeWitt, staff director of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies.
Although the cyber workshop is by invitation only, Hoover, Stanford, and CISAC will provide live updates on Twitter throughout the event. Follow the conversation at #StanfordCyber. The boot camp is co-sponsored by the Stanford Cyber Initiative.
For more information about the Congressional Cyber Boot Camp, visit the event page on Hoover’s website where you can download the event program; see the coverage of the event on the CISAC and Stanford News websites.
