Governments around the world. Her book is the information trade. Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming. I am the editor of the outlook section of the Washington Post which is our home for ideas and essays and criticism including Nonfiction Book coverage, and im very lucky and you are very lucky to be here tonight with alexis wichowski, who is the author of the information trade, how big tech conquerors, challenges rights and transforms the world. Can you hear me without the microphone . No. Okay. Can you hear me with the microphone . Also, know in the back. Yeah. Alexis wichowski is the deputy y cto of new york city where she runs basically the policy Experiment Lab trying to get the others to compete for who can devise the best programs to improve the social warfare of the citizens of new york. Shes an adjunct professor of the communications of Columbia University and spent a couple of decades studying the issues then as a member of the staff in the un mission, state department, and also just speaking very deeply which is very clear from the book that i admire so a quick round of applause for alexis. Mosco [applause] to jump right in, this book is about what you call back to the states. Maybe you want to tell us what those are and why you thought we needed a new category for them. Thank you all for coming. Its wonderful to see you c all here. I think the best way to describe is to talk about how i came upon the idea to write this book in the first place. Back in 2015, there were a number of talks ended november 2015, there was the largest which killed over 130 people and it was found out aftere the fact that a lot of these were carried out and organized on social media. So, social Media Companies got involved in working with these different agencies to try to figure out how do we stop the proliferation on our platforms. How do we keep them from organizing attacks like this on the platforms and its a kind of rough start in the beginning. One of the people that are thoughtful for the attacks and captured another six months later despite the fact for the entireth time so there was a few years later facebook, google, youtube, amazon and a few others came together for a Global Internet for him to tal forum tw to fight terrorism, and for the Tech Industry there wasnt a lot of cooperation in the government. Then skipping forward a few more months, we saw hurricanes in the u. S. , Hurricane Maria hit puerto rico and they really didnt show up google showed up and provided internet and communications coverage. They are getting way outside of the mission and areas that needed to be the responsibility of government. There had to be a better way to talk about them. He they seem to have a role to play in geopolitics so the problem is the nonstate actors. Someone think of him as a terrorist. I just did some research and even as recently as 2010 and sometime around 2012 or 2013 you started to see this be used with reference to our qaeda in the areaareasthat used to be the doe and the infrastructure services. I wrote the article in 2015. People that read it said i think that there is a little bit of a stretch and i put it on the shelf for two years, and after the hurricane i thought i felt like there was something to this and thats when i put the article out there and why are published and then it turned into this book. What is the difference. I do put tesla in this category which might be surprising in some ways and the reason i was looking at how the Tech Companies are expanding outside of the Digital Services and into these domains that used to be the territory of the governments. You dont see uber getting involved in this at the moment. Microsoft is very deeply involved in diplomacy. You dont think of cisco as having a stake in the national treaties. So, this is sort of the differentiation between the two. And also often people have asked me about other international companies. We have cocacola but operates globally and mcdonalds. But neither one of them are opening up the counterterrorism department. There is a larger and it doesnt seem all that strange that the word, so this is one of the reasons that i thought its worth paying attention to. Google, amazon, facebook, microsoft, and you anticipated my question, tesla. One of the things i looked at in the book is not just how the Tech Companies are expanding into the inter governmental campaigns but how they are expanding into real life, physical infrastructure services. And this is something that tesla and elon musk and many of the Sister Companies are doing in some ways more than anyone else. They are pursuing partnerships to provide electricity. He is now moving into space. There is a lot of end after where they are looking at the products and services and they are changing the way we think about the public infrastructure, so for instance they are producing highspeed rail in chicago. That is a mechanism key objects to. One of the questions is if we have now privatesector companies who are in charge of our public infrastructure, what happens when they decide they dont necessarily want to make it available for all and this is one of the reasons i talk about. They stepped in at a time when puerto rico needed somebody to step in tha but they are not unr an obligation to stay to provide equally and fairly access to services. You write in the book, what they mean by thado you mean by t other beliefs . Large enough contingent driven in some ways i do believe that it should be used for good. We see this in the case of google they worked with the department of defense on a very small contract called project maven looking at how to apply to the Recognition Technology and this was a small contract, about a handful of people working on it but when people found out that this was happening, a number of people resigned in protest. There was a letter circulating saying we dont believe they should be in the business and google backed down and let it expire. So is this a good portion of the drive of the people that work in these organizations that want to see the tests being used to do good. So that isnt totally unlike the government constituting the constituent parks. This is something that i think one of the interesting features of these particular companies that i comment on is of course youre interested in their bottom line and making sure that they can be successful businesses, but you do hear about the internal entity protest when they dont think in line with these core beliefs that it should be used for good, and i think that its one of the challenges within the dynamic we dont have a role as citizens to directly influence the process. I think that is another thing that makes us a unique phenomenon. And then basically toward experience and i want to talk about the government relationships in data space. Let me ask you to recount this episode you have in the book where i havent read about it before a bunch of the social Media Companies in the Justice Department in the interference before the election and how that went. There have been attempts by the Tech Industry up to about 2018 as referenced in the book to reach out to Law Enforcement and a big federal agencies and try to partner with them and work with them about figuring out how we meet these challenges that we all face together. The Government Entities have been a little slow to respond. There was a meeting that was held in which the key player google, facebook and others invited members from the department of Homeland Security and offer a lot of information about their own strategies to deal with the emerging misInformation Campaign. And in response they were sort of met with violence is the next time they convened they didnt invite anybody from the table. I think in 2020 we are seeing a shift a little bu bit especially from the Defense Sector starting to reach out to the companys very aggressively to get them to work with them. But i think that they putted really well and said you know, a local Police Department may be really hard working and strong, but we wouldnt ask the local Police Department to defend against an invading army we are looking at them to stand up their own units and not really providing the support they need. As a disengagement after that episode and maybe before this cycle is an interesting parable in the book about the risks of the government standoffishness and if the federal government cant get its act together to participate, and companies are just going to do whatever they want to do, which i thought was a valuable point. At the same time it presents a bit of a problem because we know that especially in congress and the executive branch it does not and cannot keep up and we had all of these that insurance or car sales were medicine and the law but they showed zero Grassroots Technology to tell these people to be better and hide the staffers or whatever but fundamentally i wonder if you felt how the government could be smarter about the relationship with the people in charge of overseeing the agencys and what to ask for. Theres a couple of ways we need to think about it. One we need to make sure we are putting people in congress to do understand the importance of engaging in technology, not just from the ancillary locale from the power player both in domestic and geopolitically. So more globally. But i also think that the people that are currently in office, it isnt a surprise that Technology Companies are impacting our daily lives. This understanding and if they dont grasp all the details, they certainly have access to the resources that they can learn or help inform themselves better about what to do. Its hard to be passionate if you can grasp. Talk about the work of those that are staffing up on counterterrorism and these prejudice groups. I wonder what you think about the balance that exists between the work here and abroad and if it presents the precedence about the regulations to do lots of things more easily. I was talking with someone earlier about the fact that they have robust walls but we dont have anything like the First Amendment and i was looking at him in this way thinking wouldnt it be better if we were somehow able to find a middle ground. I think there needs to be some sort of movement from people that are extreme in these things. There is no mistaking this for anything other than what it is. Its the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater. It is extremely egregious examples of the hateful content. If we cant regulate them in some way we can at least put pressure on the companies to be more aggressive about labeling it is not taking them down. Its something weve seen with facebook and youtube and google, labeling the content that is problematic. It is being labeled as this fact and this is one way to get at making sure consumers are more informed about what they are seeing without turning away from it completely. Do you have any thoughts about whether that is working or can work . I think it is still the early days and it is a start. Its better than nothing. I remember the ceo of google at the time the fog was about whether they took a heavyhanded and he said we dont censor anything so that it doesnt come up first so they are sort of chipping away behind the scenes and again this comes up with a discussion of the fact that we dont necessarily have visibility into these actions, so i think one of the things that makes the country is interesting from the citizens perspective is the absence of transparency. We are not really in the position to say revealed to us your algorithms that show who. We just see the results and hope that they are doing a good job. I have more questions about that but we want to cover ground before we take some questions from the audience. I wonder where you come down on the idea that a la the Law Enforcement needs a way around so they can unlock them during investigation or a terrorist event. A big fighit excited right nowee attorney general and Silicon Valley. Is a really difficult question and its something that i recently have had some people coming in to talk about this exact issue because i thought lets hear from the experts what they are up against and there is a sense of frustration from the Law Enforcement sector that they dont have the tools that they need to pursue people that are engaging in criminal activities in a way that they would without this kind of technology. On the other hand, you can see from a company like apple one of the selling points is that its secure and unless you choose to do otherwise with it. Understanding the perspective to say why would we begin the product that has such good security. There has to be some sort of an agreement with Law Enforcement if they have all of the proper approvals in place to find some sort of a solution to access content. I was thinking about the case with heavy san bernardino. There was an incident where there was no question about whether the person the right to actually sort of the property of someone committed a terrorist act. There was nothing that Law Enforcement could do. There was no access. So, i think that there are enough smart people working on these issues but there could be a middle ground solution we havent yet identified. Or a new piece of legislation. Or a piece of legislation. One of the reasons i didnt suggest that as it seems at every turn over the last several years the Tech Companies with the willing to take up the regulations were any regulatio regulations. But i think that i feel a little bit more confident about the tech sector stepping forward in the climate. I feel like i am especially steeped in the dangers of time and you know you really force us to confront a lot. In 2018 at Police Department instituted a Pilot Project using experimental facial Recognition Software and over 3,000 missing children were located. There were two teenage boys rescued off the waters within 70 seconds which would have taken six minutes from a swimmer. She talks about an apple watch that depicted a womans heart rate when she went into kidney failure and she was able to get to the hospital. Excuse me for just a second while i reach for the rest of my notes. At the same time, you do not flinch from the bad stuff and i wonder what your disposition is towards the sort of pessimist with people like Jacob Silverman who say that they are fundamentally untrustworthy and have aerobically taking our power and a society either achieve the way worse. I would ask first of all, whether any of them do use a smartphone or google or publish their ideas about how it isnt working for us on the platform. But even people who are sick of the absence of control of our data will not live off the grid in a cabin somewhere they are still using these tools were just would be more productive conversation that if that is problematic but they give up so much lets not throw out that attempt just to get the data piece under control. But with that conversation we have privacy and trade and platform services. I think a lot of people didnt realize they were making that trade and by the time they realized the cost was unwinding it was so grave there is a lot of complacency. Even i who focus on these things and work at a place has not spent much time adjusting all the privacy dials on my whatever. And so do think its possible to fight back and still have those conveniences. So that you cant use the badge and you cant use the services if you look at someplace like the Washington Post you already own Microsoft Outlook is near impossible while being a member of society. Talking about the six Major Companies with hundreds and hundreds of other companies for instance maybe not aware that microsoft owns linkedin. So in modern society beside the big Tech Companies and the integrated system they may not be aware so what we can do is and to see who gets that calibration maybe not perfectly but a little bit better. I use microsoft as the example in the book because it has been quite progressive to establish some type of protection with a complaint one dash with a gdpr but intimate data protections available in the eu we should make them available for microsoft users worldwide. They created that option and now over 2 million americans have signed up more than people in the eu. In my conversation to be responsible with this move there is a lot of pessimism that we are just too far gone to give away our data to give away anything but we see Companies Like microsoft taking proactive steps for user data we should celebrate that. And then you want all of us of which Tech Companies at large are doing the right thing and then you conclude the book that we have the system in the us to hold accountable but how do we advocate for ourselves in a climate where shareholders and to praise the good, what are the options . Its a tough one because there isnt an organized movement right now to sign on to to say we will use the collective will and action to move away from one platform and onto another. For instance but what people get outrage on mine and mobilize with a unifying cohesive way, it is possible to hold people to account. Not in this room necessarily but as a country or even larger decided we would note that because without us are without users the platforms are ghost towns. They will have content or the energy that fuels them or the data in the people there and they cannot collect more data. So that is part of it is the lack of the organizing principl principle.