Date: April 27, 2026 (Monday)
Time: 2pm – 3pm
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower,The University of Hong Kong
Today, states, companies, and extremist actors are increasingly weaponizing surveillance, law, censorship, and technology to chill, manipulate, and repress us. And as the Trump administration’s deeply chilling recent actions demonstrate, it is not only surveillance capitalism or overreaching national security driving these threats: the aim is often to chill critics, dissenting speech, democratic opposition, and victimize disfavored groups. But conventional approaches to this challenge are deeply flawed. In his new book, Penney advances a new theory and understanding of the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power, and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and tomorrow.
“…couldn’t be more vital and timely…”
Daniel J. Solove, George Washington University Law School
“… one of the most important books on privacy and civil liberties written this decade….”
Neil Richards, Washington University Law School
“A masterclass on the social force and meaning of chilling effects at the behest of governments, companies, and cyber-mobs.”
Danielle Keats Citron, University of Virginia School of Law
“…lights a path from today’s narrow legal doctrines towards more comprehensive protection for our hard won personal freedoms…”
Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law School
About the author: Jonathon Penney is Associate Professor and York Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, Data Governance, and the Law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University and Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His award-winning research on privacy, technology, and human rights has received national and international attention, including coverage in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters International, The Guardian, and Le Monde, among others, and has been profiled in WIRED and Harvard Magazine.
Chair: Ryan Whalen, Associate Professor & Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=105588.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.