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

by Brad Smith

Today, every aspect of human life is fueled by data. When it comes to modern civilization, data is more like the air we breathe than the oil we burn.

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This decade will end with almost 25 times as much digital data as when it began.

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How do we strike the right balance between public safety, individual convenience, and personal privacy in this new era? How do we protect ourselves from cyberattacks that are using this technology to disrupt our countries, businesses, or personal lives? How do we manage the economic effects that are now rippling across our communities? Are we creating a world that will have jobs for our children? Are we creating a world we can even control?

Increasingly this new technology era has ushered in a new age of anxiety. This tension is the most pronounced in the world’s democracies.

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finally learned that PRISM, the NSA’s national security electronic surveillance program, is an acronym for Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management.

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In times of a national crisis, trade-offs between individual freedoms and national security were nothing new.

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Today, cyberspace is no longer some peripheral dimension. It increasingly has become the place where people organize themselves and define what happens in the real world.

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During a typical year, they address more than fifty thousand warrants and subpoenas from more than seventy-five countries.5 Only 3 percent of these demands are for content. In most cases, authorities are looking for IP addresses, contact lists, and user registration data.

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Building from this starting point, we assembled a team that developed what would become four principles that we would call our “cloud commitments”: privacy, security, compliance, and transparency.

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As Roberts put it, “Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans the privacies of life.”

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We called for greater transparency and what we termed digital neutrality, or the recognition that people’s information should be protected regardless of where and how it was stored.

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Consumer tests showed that a delay of just a half second would get under people’s skin.

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As we also found, perhaps more than any prior advance in weapons technology, views about cybersecurity fall along generational lines. Younger generations are digital natives. Their entire lives seem to be powered by technology, and an attack on their device is an attack on their home. It’s personal. But older generations don’t always see the impact of a cyberattack the same way. This leads to an even more sobering question. Can we wake up the world before a digital 9/11? Or will governments continue to hit the snooze button?

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One of our biggest challenges was how to talk publicly about the threats. Every tech leader was reluctant to name names, and we were no different. We were companies, not governments, and while we all had lived through governmental criticism before, we weren’t accustomed to accusing a foreign government of misusing our platforms and services. But it was becoming increasingly apparent that our silence risked further enabling the very threats we wanted to help stop.

“This is the house of freedom and it should constantly remind us how subtle and sensitive the barrier is between freedom and its opposite, totalitarianism.”3

The Safe Harbor principles were a fundamental pillar of the trans-Atlantic economy, but it was little known except by privacy experts. It was a creature of the EU’s 1995 privacy directive, which permitted Europeans’ personal information to move to other countries only if they had adequate privacy protection in place.

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In other words, a significant portion of rural communities lack the internet speeds that were available in urban areas over a decade

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Its 2018 report titled Map to Prosperity shows that eighty new jobs are created for every one thousand new broadband subscribers.13 An increase of four megabits per second in residential broadband speed translates to an annual increase in household income of twenty-one hundred dollars. And people looking for work find a job 25 percent more quickly through online searches than through more traditional approaches.

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As much as anything, her story is a testament to the need again to recognize that the spread of new technology is not just an economic imperative. It needs to be treated as a social cause.

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Between 2011 and 2018, median home prices increased by 96 percent, while median household income rose by only 34 percent.

Seattle

The increase in housing prices meant that new Bellevue police officers could no longer afford to buy a home in the city they patrolled. Even the chief of police endured a commute of an hour each way to work. There was an important connection between our two points: It’s difficult to build a stronger connection between a community and its police force when local officers can’t afford to live close

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had become increasingly apparent that AI technologies desperately needed to be guided by strong ethical principles if they were to serve society well.

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As computers gained the ability to make decisions previously reserved for humans, virtually every ethical question for humanity was becoming an ethical question for computing. If millennia of debate among philosophers had not forged clear-cut and universal answers, then a consensus was not likely to emerge overnight simply because we needed to apply them to computers.

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the best response to a half-baked idea often is not to kill the idea, but to finish baking it.

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Having worked in the technology sector for more than a quarter century, I realize that the products are complex. But so are contemporary commercial airplanes, automobiles, skyscrapers, pharmaceuticals, and even food products. You don’t hear any serious suggestion that the Federal Aviation Administration should leave aircraft unregulated because they are too complicated for people in government to understand.

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