Also number alexis is deputy ceo of new york city where she runs basically a policy Experiment Lab trying to get vendors to compete for who can devise the best programs to improve social welfare of the citizens of new york. She is the adjunct professor of tech media and communications at Columbia University and she spent a couple decades studying these issues extremely intensively as a student and then as a member of the staff at the un mission. Of the state department, and also just thinking very deeply about them which is so clear from this book which i really admire. So quick round of applause for alexis. [applause] this book is about what you call met states, maybe you want to start by taking a minute and showing us what those are and why you felt like we needed a new category for them. Thank you for coming, its wonderful to see you here and i think the best way to describe what it is is to talk about how icame upon the idea to write this book in the first place. Back in 2015, there were a number of terrorist attacks across france and in november 2015 there was the largest terrorist attack which killed over 130 people and it was found out after the fact that a lot of these attacks were carried out and organized on social media. Those social Media Companies got involved in working with defense agencies to try to figure out how to we stop the proliferation of terrorists on our platforms,how do we keep them from organizing, attacks like this on our platforms. And it was a kind of rough start in the beginning. One of the people who was responsible for the attacks was captured about six months later, despite the fact he been actively posting on facebook the entire time. There wasnt a lot of cooperation to governments and Tech Companies at the time. A few days later facebook, google, youtube, amazon and a few others came together for a Global Internet forum to talk about how to fight terrorism explicitly. And ghthis was something that was just organized by the Tech Industry and for the Tech Industry read wasnt again a lot of cooperation with government. Then usskip forward a few more months, we saw a series of d hurricanes in the us. Hurricane maria hit puerto rico and wiped out their power grid. Wiped out cell phone coverage and who showed up . Tesla came forward to rebuild their electric grid. Google showed up with project move which are these balloons that provide internet and telecommuting patients coverage and it was this at this time i thought okay, what is going on with the Tech Industry. Theyre not justmaking spreadsheets and calendars , they are getting involved in areas that are way outside of our core mission in areas that use to be the sole responsibility of government area with diplomacy, counterterrorism, defense, infrastructure building, Citizen Services and i thought there had to be some better way to talk about them and just tech. They seemed to have a role to play in geopolitics area so the problem was the term nonstate actor kind of had already involved in to just bad guy so i started studying where this term happened. Although someone think of Mark Zuckerberg as a terrorist. Theres definitely some people that think of Tech Companies as the bad guy. I did research and even as recently as 2010 the dictionary of social science defines nonstate actors as good examples like the un and nato so even then they were not considered terrorists. It was sometime around 2012, 2013 you started seeing this term be used in reference to al qaeda and then eventually with isys. So nonstate actor was taken with bad guys but clearly Companies Work nationstates either so i thought maybe there needs to be another way to talk about them so i introduced this concept of internet states. InterNet Companies, based Companies Working outside of their Core Technology mission in areas that use to be the domain of nationstates like defense, diplomacy, infrastructure and Citizen Services and i wrote the article in 2015. People who read it said i think this is a little bit of a stretch. I put it on the shelf for 2 years and after Hurricane Maria i thought i really feel like theres something to this and thats when i put the article out there. Wired published it and then it turned into this book. Whats the difference between netscapes and other big Tech Companies who might have philosophical concerns like donating money or volunteering or whatever, sisco and uber. In the book i dont put twitter in this category but i do do what tesla in this category which is surprising in some ways and the reason is im looking at the way Tech Companies are out expanding outside of Digital Services and into these domains that use to be the territory of government. You dont see uber getting involved in counterterrorism yet at the moment microsoft is deeply involvedin diplomacy. You dont think of sisco as having a real stake in National Treaties so this is sort of the differentiation i make between these two and some people have asked me what about other Big International companies . You have cocacola that operates globally, mcdonalds that neither one are opening a Counterterrorism Department. Facebook felt as a larger Counterterrorism Department and the state department and it doesnt seem that strange that they would so i think this is one of the reasons i thought its worth paying attention to. The listed companies that qualify as net states, google, amazon, microsoft and you anticipated my question, tesla. Why tesla . One of the things i looked at in the book is not just thatcompanies are expanding into governmental domain but how their expanding into physical infrastructure and services. This is something that tesla and elon musk and his many tester companies in tesla is doing in some ways more than anyone else with his solar city operation, pursuing partnerships with governments to apply to electricity. Hes moving into space, theres a lot of endeavors where they are no longer just looking at their prime products and Services Like cars but are changing the way we think about Public Infrastructure so for instance with a boring company, their producing highspeed rail in chicago. Thats a branding mechanism that elon objects to. Exactly, we have no private Sector Companies who are in charge of our Public Infrastructure. What happens when they decide they dont necessarily want to make it available for all . This is one of the reasons why i talk a lot in the book about teslas work in puerto rico. A stepped in at a time when puerto rico needed something that the federal government did not that theyre not under any obligation to stay. They dont have the responsibilities the government has two provide equal access to services. Host you say in the book that net states have the belief. Guest one of the things that distinguishes these companies is that a large enough contingent make a difference, lets say. Are driven in some ways by the belief that technology should be used for good. We see this with google, they worked with the department of defense on a small contract called project maven looking at how to apply ai their recognition technologies from , this is a very small contract. It was about a handful of people out of googles empire working on it but when people found out insidegoogle this was happening , a number of people resigned in protest. There was a companywide letter circulating king we do not believe google should be in the defense business and google backed out. They let go of the contract and let it expire so its a significant portion of the drive of people that work at these organizations that want to see tech being used the buildings, to dogood. Host so the belief is not totally unlike a government and its constituent parts. Guest this is something that one of the interesting features of these particular companies that i call net states is that of course theyre interested in their bottom line, interested in making sure they can be successful businesses but you do hereabout internal employee protests when the company , they dont think aligns with their core beliefs, that tech should be used for good and i think that its one of the challenges with this dynamic is that we may cheer them from the sidelines and say yea google, go ahead and protest. Do anything you think is right but we dont have any role as citizens to directly influence that process. I think thats another thing that makes this a unique phenomenon. And based on your experience and a lot of what you talk about in the book i want to ask you a bit about the governments relationship to net states. Let me ask you if you can start by recounting this episode you have in the book where i had not read about before, a meeting invoked by a bunch of the social Media Companies with the Justice Department and ftc about interference before the 2018 election and how that went. There has been attempts by the Tech Industry to up to around 2018 in reference to this book to reach out to Law Enforcement, to reach out to big federal agencies and try to partner with them, try to work with them about figuring out how to meet the challenges that we all face together. And the Government Entities have been a little slow to respond. There was a meeting held in which the key players, google, facebook and another invited members from the department of Homeland Security and offered a lot of information about their own strategies to deal with terrorists on their platforms. The emerging campaigns and in response, they were met with silence. So the next time they can be, they did not invite anyone from government to the table. I think in 2020 using the shift a little bit, especially from the Defense Sector earnings to reach out to companies. Aggressively get them to work with them. But i think that there was the chief Security Officer at facebook now at stanford but it really well and he said a local Police Department maybe really hardworking and strong but we wouldnt ask a local Police Department to defend against an invading army. But thats sort of whats happening in the tech sector. Were looking at these Tech Companies to stand up their own counterterrorism units in their own Defense Mechanisms and not really provide a support that they need. As a disengagement after that episode and maybe before this cycle is a really interesting parable in the book about the rest of governments standoffish in us. If the federal government cant get back together to participate the Tech Companies will just do whatever they want to do. Which i thought was a valuable point. That at the same time present a problem because we know that dc and especially Congress Even more than the executive branch does not and cannot keep up with tech and we have all these septuagenarian lawmakers made their careers in insurance or car sales or even medicine and law but they show zero grasp of technology, i just remembered during the soccer hearing Lindsey Graham asked if facebook was the same thing as twitter and or and had asked how facebook made money. Its clear hes not been on the platform at all. And we could tell these people to be better and higher better staffers or whatever but fundamentally im wondering if you talk about how government can be smarter about its relationship with net states that the people in charge with overseeing agencies have no idea what to ask for. Its a good question and i think theres a couple of different ways we need to think about it. One is we need to make sure were putting people in congress who do understand the importance of engaging with technology. Not just as an ancillary locale but as a power player in both domestically and geopolitically. So thats number one and i think were starting to see an influx of younger sort of and more Diverse People running for elected office i have some hope that within a few years we will see kind of the nature of people representing us start to reflect societys interests more globally. But i also think that the people who are currently in office, its not a surprise that Technology Companies are impacting our daily lives. This is not news in 2020. We had the 2014 elections and Disinformation Campaign from foreign actors, that was a few years ago and weve not seen congressional action and i think theres no real excuse for it other than a lack of appetite. I dont think its a lack of understanding and even if congress doesnt grasp all the details of technology, they certainly have access to resources that they can learn and inform themselves better about what to do. Its hard to be passionate if you cant grasp it but apparently its not Vladimir Putin doesnt want that society. Talk about the work of these states who are staffing up and counterterrorism and antibigotry and prejudice groups. Im wondering what you think about the imbalance that exists between the workflows Tech Companies, those net states can do here and abroad and what do you think theres acertain imbalance in the plainfield of that the First Amendment presents. We can, they are, we have president s instructions about how we can silence speech here comparedto the eu we can do lots of things more easily. And i wonder if you talk about that. I was talking about something earlier about the fact that they have robust hate speech laws in france and saying that we dont have anything like a First Amendment. And in a blissful way and i was looking at him and his wistful way and thinking wouldnt it be great if we were somehow able to find a middle ground and i think there needs to be some sort of movement from people who are sort of at the extreme end of thesethings. Theres no mistaking really serious hate speech or anything other than what it is and its sort of the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater i think. I think that extremely egregious examples of hateful content, if it cant regulate them in some way we can at least put pressure on our Tech Companies to be more aggressive about labeling them if not taking them down and this is something weve seen with facebook and youtube and google is labeling the content that is problematic. Facebook recently has been doing this with information about the coronavirus that seems problematic , labeling it as being potentially suspect and this is i think one way to get making sure consumers are more informed about what theyre seeing without just stripping away on the internet completely. You feel like you have any thoughts about whether that people working, can work . I think its still early days and we need to study the impact. I think that its a start. Its better than nothing. I remember a few years ago asking eric schmidt was ceo of google at the time the plot was at google about search area and whether or not there should be something that theytook a heavier hand in. Identifying hateful and problematic content and he said we dont censor anything we can be ranked that kind of content so it doesnt come up first though their sort of tipping or putting their thumb on the scales behindthescenes and again, this comes up to this question of the fact that we dont necessarily have visibility into these actions so i think one of the that makes these companies interesting from our citizens perspective is this, relative absence of transparency. Were not in a position to say revealed to us your algorithms that show who your the ranking or flying or not. We just see the results and hope thattheyre doing a good job. I have more questions about that but i want to make sure we cover ground before we take questions from the audience area i wonder where you come down on backdoor, the idea that Law Enforcement needs a way around security features on devices so they can lock them during an investigation or a terrorist event, theres a big fight between the attorney general andSilicon Valley. Its a difficult question and its something that i keep at columbia parttime in addition to my job with the city and i recently have had some people from the fbi come in to talk about this exact issue because i thought lets get it from the experts but theres this powerful sense of frustration from the Law Enforcement sector that they dont have the tools they need to pursue people who are doing criminal activities in the way they would without this kind of technology. On the other hand you can see from a company like apples perspective one of the selling points of their phone is that its secure and your information days on the phone unless you choose to do otherwise would it so i can understand the Tech Companies perspective to say why would we weaken a product that has good security . But i think there has to be some sort of agreement with Law Enforcement if they have all the proper approvals in place to find some sort of solutio