Digital Deception

Surveillance Technologies and Information Manipulation

11-12 June, 2026

The Chip Era and Digital Governance Forum 11

📌Date and Time: January 30, 2026, from 14:00 to 16:30, Taipei Time (GMT+8)
📌Format: Online
📌Online meeting Link: https://meet.google.com/qzz-pn…
📌Forum Language: English

📌Synopsis

Digital technologies reshape the governance techniques as well as social patterns and habits. The recent promotion of smart cities or safe cities as an obvious step in the creation of a safer, more just, sustainable, and convenient future seems an ideal and obvious choice for the states.

However, urban surveillance technologies, a part of smart cities, are endorsed under the premise of fighting crime and making a safer environment. While certainly there is an element of perceived safety due to the omnipresence of the public surveillance cameras, the features such as facial recognition technology and data collection are often not mentioned to the public. Additionally, the technological cooperations among countries generate possibilities for expansion of foreign geopolitical and socio-economic implications, including those around privacy, national sovereignty, and citizens’ rights. The withholding of certain information regarding the architecture of digital technologies and their origin could be interpreted as information manipulation.

Why are certain pieces of information withheld from the public? What are the risks of global technological cooperation and the digital expansion of foreign countries in various regions? Do smart cities with surveillance technologies protect citizens or give the state more control? These are just some of the issues that we hope to address.

📌Speakers

Who’s Watching? Digital Surveillance in Governance and How It Affects Us

💬Jonas Lund-Tønnesen

Researcher, Department of Government, University of Bergen, Norway

Jonas Lund-Tønnesen holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Oslo, Norway. His research focuses on digitalization of the public sector, including artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, and digital changes in organizations. Lund-Tønnesen’s recent work explores the role of digital surveillance in governance, and the effects surveillance has on citizens’ behavior and attitudes in different settings, such as during a crisis and in the workplace.

Surveillance Creep in South Africa’s ‘Not-So-Safe’ Cities

💬Heidi Swart

Investigative Journalist, South African

Heidi Swart is a South African freelance investigative journalist. She writes about espionage, security, surveillance, and data privacy issues in both the public and private spheres. She’s written extensively about illegal government surveillance, interception technologies, cyberspying and cybersecurity, risks to critical communications infrastructure, social media monitoring, data mining, video surveillance, artificial intelligence in surveillance, biometrics, and the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on surveillance practices.

Synthetic Lies: How Deepfakes Reshape Power, Participation, and Public Trust in Democratic Systems

💬Maria Pawelec

Research Associate, International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW), University of Tübingen, Germany

Maria Pawelec is a Research Associate at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities (IZEW) at the University of Tübingen. She has a background in political science and works on technology and media ethics. Her research interests include new technologies and democracy, AI ethics, deepfakes, disinformation, technology and platform governance.

📌Organizer
International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS), National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University
Subproject II: The Chip Era and Digital Governance (Principal Investigator: Joyce C.H. Liu)

📌Funding Source
Higher Education Sprout Project, Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan
MOE-SPROUT 2.0, Conflict, Justice, Decolonization: Asia in Transition in the 21st Century

ICCS Director and Principal Investigator: Joyce C.H. Liu

✴️Research Cluster｜Sub-project 2: The Chip Era and Digital Governance

✴️Principal Investigator｜Joyce C.H. Liu