Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

data is more like the air we breathe than the oil we burn. Unlike oil, data has become a renewable resource that we humans can create ourselves.

When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.

John Wilkes’s lawsuits marked the birth of modern-day privacy rights.

Washington Post story indicated that the NSA, in collaboration with its British counterpart, was pulling data from the cables used by American technology companies, potentially without judicial review or oversight.

The LENS team operates from seven locations in six countries on three continents. During a typical year, they address more than fifty thousand warrants and subpoenas from more than seventy-five countries.

good litigation results are not actually hard to achieve. You just have to fight the cases you deserve to win and settle the cases you deserve to lose.”

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi employed almost ninety thousand operatives backed by a secret network of more than six hundred thousand “citizen watchdogs” who spied on their East German coworkers, neighbors, and sometimes their own family.

armed with this knowledge, governments can prosecute, persecute, or even execute those individuals they consider threats.

it was more fun to fight a battle but typically more rewarding to strike a deal.

a security researcher in the United Kingdom analyzed the code and found this kill switch. For the modest price of $10.69, he registered and activated the URL, stopping WannaCry from spreading further.10

from network security company RSA’s annual conference in San Francisco, “Every organization has at least one employee who will click on anything.”

In a museum in the center of Tallinn, Estonia, which sits on the edge of the Baltic Sea, a young woman and man spin in perpetual motion, perched on opposite ends of a long, narrow plank. With arms outstretched and locked gazes, they steady themselves and each other while a giant seesaw slowly rotates on a narrow fulcrum. While whimsical, the curious sculpture sends an unmistakably serious message.1 It represents the fragile balance that free societies around the world now confront: protecting democracy in a social media age from the freedoms that can drive people apart.

Estonia didn’t become free in one day. We’re seeking freedom. We do it every day.”

Who figured this out and capitalized on it before anyone else? It was people who, like the Estonians, had lived their lives under a combination of repression and freedom, and were perhaps able to appreciate this dynamic more quickly than others—the Estonians’ neighbors across the Russian border. And who were the last to wake up? Idealistic Americans on the west coast of the United States who had lived their entire lives in freedom.

almost every technology that has connected people who live apart has also created new barriers between people who live close together.

In late 2018, a team from Oxford University and the American analytics firm Graphika analyzed subpoenaed data that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

between 2015 and 2017 more than thirty million users “shared the IRA’s Facebook and Instagram posts with their family and friends, liking, reacting to, and commenting on them along the way.”

radio market initially grew on a business model that provided free programs as a lure to sell radio receivers, by the 1940s, most American homes already had one or more radios inside them. The business model for radio programs evolved towards advertising,

While the United States has traditionally been reluctant to regulate content, given the importance of the First Amendment to the Constitution, among other factors, other nations do not protect freedom of speech to the same degree.

there is likely to be room for complementary regulatory approaches, combining a more narrow focus on specific categories of objectionable content with a broader effort to provide users with more information on its sources.

NewsGuard, a service that relies on journalists to create what they call “nutrition labels” for the media.

Genêt’s arrival sparked increasing tension within Washington’s cabinet, with Thomas Jefferson sympathetic to the French and Alexander Hamilton sympathetic to the British. Genêt sought to appeal directly to the American public for his cause, a move that, in the words of one historian, did more than spark the origins of our two-party system. “Political dialogue was impassioned, street brawls were not uncommon, and old friendships were severed.”

The Danish foreign minister, Anders Samuelsen, had proclaimed the position “a world first” and a necessity, stating that tech companies affect Denmark as much as countries do. “These companies have become a type of new nation and we need to confront that.”

James Ely’s Railroads and American Law may seem an unlikely book to see on a software executive’s shelf, but it’s one I refer to periodically to help me think about how technology changes the world around

Digital Geneva Convention could capture people’s imagination about the need for governments to protect civilians on the internet in times of peace.

Arms control ranks among the world’s more difficult endeavors. But as one study concluded just as the Cold War was ending, agreements to control weapons so they are not used—as distinct from eliminating them entirely—“may, in the end, be better, if only because its prospects for success are greater.”

to some degree, everyone has their difficult days, and if our first principle is to run away from people in times of trouble, we may doom ourselves to inaction even on issues for which collective efforts are needed the most.

It seemed ironic and even uncomfortable as a company to advance the mantle of multilateralism, which typically was the role of governments.

the most novel aspect of the Paris and Christchurch calls is perhaps the involvement of companies, as distinct from other types of non-state actors, on a new generation of humanitarian and arms limitation issues.

While some traditional diplomats might roll their eyes, the idea captured public imagination in a way that had escaped the expert discussion of the critical but less than glamorous sounding international cybersecurity Tallinn Manual 2.0.32

As Trudeau mentioned the potential for changes in Canadian privacy law, Satya encouraged him simply to adopt the provisions in the GDPR. While this suggestion was met with some surprise, Satya explained that unless there was some difference that was of fundamental importance, the costs of maintaining a different process or architecture for a single nation seemed likely to outweigh the potential benefits.

I believed the privacy issue would be quiet until the day it was not.

tech companies embarked on a fund-raising campaign to oppose the initiative. Silicon Valley recognized that success would likely require raising more than $50 million. We donated $150,000. It was enough to stay connected with the rest of the industry but not the type of money that would give the opposition effort too much momentum.

Schrems and Mactaggart used established judicial and initiative processes to redress what they regarded as a wrong. Their success speaks to the ability of a democratic society, when it works well, to adapt to a people’s changing needs and move a nation’s law where it needs to go with less rather than more disruption.

Europe is not just the birthplace of democracy and the cradle of privacy protection. It’s quite possibly the world’s best hope for privacy’s future.

The highest unemployment rates in the country are frequently located in the counties with the lowest availability of broadband,

2018 report titled Map to Prosperity shows that eighty new jobs are created for every one thousand new broadband subscribers.

An increase of four megabits per second in residential broadband speed translates to an annual increase in household income of twenty-one hundred dollars.

When Louisan joined the REA, 90 percent of city dwellers had electricity versus 10 percent of rural Americans24—a gap not seen in other Western countries. At the time, electricity powered homes and barns in almost 95 percent of the French countryside.25

The country’s ability to attract Albert Einstein from Germany at the height of the Great Depression played a vital role in awakening President Franklin Roosevelt to the need to create the Manhattan Project.

Each party easily found its way back to its political corner. Each would double down on appeals to its base, which were not difficult to fashion. The only thing that suffered was the opportunity to get something—anything—done.

Never let a negotiation narrow to a single issue that can produce only one winner, even if it means holding open some other topics on which agreement might seem in reach. Instead, broaden the discussion so that more issues are on the table. Create the opportunity for more give-and-take and a round of compromises that can produce a scenario that enables everyone to claim victory in the final stage.

The notion was to couple a limited increase in the supply of visas and green cards with a larger hike in immigration fees, using the added revenue to fund broader education and training opportunities for the skills most in demand for new jobs.

he knew other Microsoft developers who could do a good job team-teaching with someone like the school’s math teacher. The volunteer would provide expertise in computer science, while the math teacher knew how to teach, manage a classroom, and work successfully with students. Working with the volunteer, the math teacher over time would also learn computer science and become a computer science teacher

While you would be hard-pressed to say that every student must take computer science, you could say that every student deserves the opportunity.

LinkedIn created the Economic Graph,17 which identifies what types of jobs companies are creating by region and country and what types of skills are needed to fill those jobs.

The industry, like most, often rushes forward with an innovation without helping people understand fully what it is or how it works.

Even the best technologies have unintended consequences, and the benefits are seldom spread uniformly. And this is before the new technology is misused for harmful ends, as it inevitably will be.

“AI is a computer system that can learn from experience by discerning patterns in data fed to it and thereby make decisions.”

When I’ve talked with military leaders around the world, they all share one thing in common: No one wants to wake up in the morning to discover that machines have started a war while they were sleeping.