2025: Year of Quantum
How physics at the smallest scales impacts materials, human health, computing, communications and more
“Public interest technologists and the battle for privacy in the quantum age”
Presented by Sascha Meinrath
Palmer Chair in Telecommunications in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State and director of X-Lab
January 25, 2025
100 Thomas Building
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Ben Franklin presciently warned: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The Internet has created unprecedented communications opportunities, as well as myriad and growing worries over privacy-invasive and data-exfiltration practices by hackers, corporations, and law enforcement. These concerns have proven prescient, as exemplified by the October 2024 report by the Wall Street Journal that the surveillance system used by US law enforcement had itself been compromised. This hack -- potentially the largest in U.S. history – likely surveilles the communications of hundreds of millions of Americans, covering e-mail, phone calls, text messages, and much more. Nicknamed "Salt Typhoon," the hack has proven intractable; and, in December 2024, the FBI took the unprecedented step of issuing a public warning that Americans should encrypt their communications to prevent active surveillance by foreign powers. However, this "solution" may itself be a momentary salve, with quantum computing likely to break standard encryption as the technology matures.
This talk explains how contemporary technological crises have been borne of a persistent myopia that, along with the lack of consumer protection law and rampant corporate surveillance practices, have made Americans less safe over time. As we enter the quantum era, the combination of a lack of technological expertise among policy-makers, no meaningful regulatory oversight, negligible corporate accountability, and rampant law enforcement surveillance, are creating a series of ever-escalating risks that will detrimentally impact Americans into the future. As we will explore, solving these problems before they metastasize will be the singularly important job of this next generation's public interest technologists.
Sascha Meinrath is the Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State and director of X-Lab, an innovative think tank focusing on the intersection of vanguard technologies and public policy. He is a renowned technology policy expert and is internationally recognized for his work over the past quarter century as a community internet pioneer, social entrepreneur, and angel investor. Meinrath’s research focuses on broadband connectivity, distributed communications, Digital Feudalism, Digital Craftsmanship, telecommunications and spectrum policy, cybersecurity and privacy, and the impacts of disruptive technology.
Prior to creating the X-Lab, Meinrath was vice president of the New America Foundation, where he founded the Open Technology Institute in 2008 and built it into one of the largest public interest tech policy organizations in Washington, D.C. He also founded the Commotion Wireless Project, which works around the globe to strengthen communities by providing tools to build their own local communications infrastructures, and co-founded Measurement Lab, a global online platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools that empower the public and key decision-makers with useful information about broadband connectivity.
Meinrath was elected as an Ashoka Fellow for Social Entrepreneurship in 2012 and has been named to the Time Magazine “Tech 40” as one of the most influential figures in technology, to the “Top 100” in Newsweek’s Digital Power Index, and is a recipient of the Public Knowledge IP3 Award for excellence in public interest advocacy.