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 solution to access content. I was thinking about the case with the San Bernardino texas, california and this is an incident where its this question about whether or not this person and his device was the property of someone who had committed a terrorist act. But there was nothing that Law Enforcement to do. Therewas no access , so i think that there are enough smart people working on these issues there could be a middle ground solution that we havent yet identified doesnt involve breaking into phones. See one or a new piece of legislation. One of the reason i didnt suggest that it seems every turn over the last several years Tech Companies did not see our legislators take up new regulations or any regulations really, meaningful regulations so i think that i feel a little bit more confident about tech sector stepping forward and in that climate. One thing i like about the book is in a time of deep cynicism and pessimism about the role of text which i feel like i am especially speaking as a person in publishing think pieces about the dangers of tech all the time , you really force us to confront a lot of what it does alongside the bad and i want to read a quick section here he writes about how does so much good, for people not to notice it eventually. In 2010 a Police Department instituted a Pilot Project instituting facialrecognition software and 3000 missing children were located. Two teenage boys in rough waters 2500 feet off shore were rescued when a Remote Control drone delivered the rescue upon the swimmers which would have taken six minutes from a swimmer. She talks about an apple watch detected a womans heart rate who had been elevated when she went into kidney failure and she was able to get to the hospital. For just a second excuse me while i reach the rest of my notes. But at the same time, you dont from the bad stuff too and i wonder what your disposition is towards sort of the tech pessimists, the people like the Jacob Silverman who say that the states are fundamentally untrustworthy and have irrevocably taken our power and made society irretrievably works. I would ask first of all whether or not any of them still use a smart phone or google or publish their ideas about how technology is not working for us on their platforms and i think its just the reality that we have to confront is theres a lot of problems with the Tech Companies that we are engaged with on a daily basis. It doesnt mean we stop using their products because they give us something that we have all become accustomed to how quickly we can find that information through search, how quickly we can connect to each other social media how many articles and interesting things we canfind. As these articles online. Theres a lot that it does do for us even people who are sick of their absence of privacy or control over our data, i think are not, theyre not going to live off grid in a cabin somewhere there still using these tools so i think it would be a more productive conversation if we were crap with ourselves and say okay, there problematic but they give us so much and lets not throw out all of that in an attempt to get the data and keep it under control. We have this implicit trade which is sort of privacy for convenience and all these things that these Excellent Services you give us. I think a lot of people didnt realize maybe they were making the trade and by the time they realized the sort of cost of unwinding it was so great that theres a lot of complacency. I mean, even i will focus on these things and work in a place thats fine upon has not spent any time adjusting the privacy guileon all of my whatever. Ive been thinking about it but whether its possible to fight back and have these conveniences that the netscapes offer. What its like if we stay away. Microsoft owns being, you can use that and youve got all these offbrandservices and offbrand phones, if you work at the Washington Post youre already on microsoft outlook. Is opting out till possible while being a member of society . I dont think so, i really dont. As you said youre not talking about the six Major Companies ive listed in the book like microsoft and apple and google. They own hundreds and hundreds of other companies who we may be aware. We know for instance amazon owns all foods. We may be not be as aware that microsoft owns linkedin or no kia instance so theres i think in modern society it would be difficult to find steps to big Tech Companies completely because theyre integrated into some other products they might not even be aware of but i think we can do is look at the different practices of the different netscapes. Ill stop shouting. We can look at the different practices and see who is getting the calibration, maybe not perfectly but a little bit better and i use microsoft as an example because theyve been quite progressive in trying to establish some sort of protections for users. When they had to comply with the gdp are in your they said before going to make data protections available for our users in the eu, we should make them available or microsoft users worldwide. So they created that option and very soon, over 2 million americans had signed up for those same data protections, more than in the past so i think this is something that i found out in my conversation with president brad smith who was responsible for this move, but there is an appetite to do something. Theres a lot of pessimism as you said and this sense that were just too far gone giving away our data to do anything, but i think when you see Companies Like microsoft actually taking them proactive steps to protect user data, we should celebrate that and point them out as an example. That makes sense and you want all of us to assess which of the net states in which Tech Companies largeare doing the right things. You conclude the book with this exhortation for us to wield the powers that we do have insofar as we have them over net states and obviously we have a system in the us where we hold elections and laws and checks and balances but how to advocate for ourselves in a climate where theres power to check shareholders and what beyond kind of phasing the good, what are ouroptions . Thats a tough one because youre right, theres not an organized movement right now that we can all just sort of sign on to say okay, we will use our collective will and actions to move away from one Software Movement onto another one instance but when people get outraged online and get mobilized in some sort of unifying cohesive way , it is possible to hold people to account. If we all for instance, not in this room necessarily but as a country or even larger, decided we would just protest facebook for two days i guarantee they would notice that cause without us, without users, these platforms are ghost towns. They dont have content. They dont have the energy that fuels them they dont have the data. Theres all these people that are there and they would be able to collect our data which they then sell or share so i think that part of this is just a lack of an organizing principle. And i do think that is a matter of kind of competing and in some way the frustration that people feel. Im not sure exactlywhos going to be the organizer of that , is there an instance where thats happened even on a small scale that you think could be . I look at movements online that have come about organically have an organizing framework like for me to movement. This is something that came about the rate sort of naturally, people sharing their stories on twitter with that hashtag and that was enough just to have a hashtag that people could get behind and a framework to say okay, with this hashtag i will share this story and enough people did that and it translated to actual change in our world. People were taken out of positions of power, held to account and changed our climate of how people treat people in the workplace. So i do think theres examples where the online movements translate to realworldaction. Host you write against what you call privacy nihilism, the complete resignation a lot of us do feel. Is there anything im curious that you change about your technical habits as you researched the book . Guest there was a period of time where i felt i should not use any social media sites or google or anything. Turns out you cant write a book without technologythese days so it didnt last long. I did become more conscious of the kinds of things i was posting online and for instance, maybe fun for me to be posting pictures of my kids on facebook when they appreciate when they became adults knowing there was all of this content about them online . So i stopped doing that which makes facebook a little bit less fun but i thought it would be more respectful to my childrens rights. You have any rules about how your children engage with net states . Theres this interesting practice, the kids arent on facebook because thats just not cool, theyre on instagram and not knowing its on my facebook but different story. Host somebody to tell them. Teenagers listen to their parents, i dont know how to crack that code but one of the things i have noticed is people you useinstagram, especially teenagers are starting to use collective accounts. Creating an account multiple people log into and i think its mostly to evade their parents watch. Certainly in the casei discovered , that was the impetus area but it also has this interesting effect of helping evade Data Collection parties and figure out are sort of or sort of compound their ability totrack individual behavior. I dont think thats its, that they can track it all in the same way that netflixis phased out quickly. Theyll probably figure it out quickly like theres three distinct personalities posted to this account and track them accordingly i think that its interesting to see young people finding their own way around the Technology Selection or Data Collection class i want to make sure wehave time for collections, a quick round of applause for alexis. [applause] i dont know if theres other microphones so if anybody wants to raise the question, just jump up and shout as loud as you can area. I want to flip this to sort of the international scene. So we have to other Chinese Companies and recently there was a good article in wired magazine about how huawei is basically taking the 5g technology, so you talk about net states and that could be state next. Because theres the fear that the internet might break into more than one. So if you take all the analysis that you did for the usbased multinationals, how do you think that fits to the chinese multinationals which are really multinationals, theyre serving the rest of these now. Its one of the things that i really wrestled with when i started looking at these companies was where are we going to sort of draw the line around and one of the reasons i didnt include large chinese Tech Companies is that its not that clear what their relationship with the State Government is read there seems to be a relationship, quite a strong one in some cases and i think that changes the dynamic a little bit where you are not seeing these independent Technology Companies fueled by citizens believe in it. So much as the use of Technology Companies for strategic and binational government. And to your point about the sort of fragmentation of multiple internet, it is something i worry about. I think that there are units in china where theres a lot of Online Activity really occurs justin country and i know russia as experiment with ideas of having their own secluded internet as well and from what i understand, the eu also in their conversations about the dvr look into this idea to of should we just create an eu internet area so i think that if thats where things go, my theory is there would be 2 tiers, the National Internet that you log on to easily but i suspect there will always be some sort of global world wide web, even more of a wild west but i dont think you can put the genie back in the bottle once people have had a taste of what its like to have Global Internet access. Connecting with people all over the world, i dont think its going to give that up that easily. Caller [inaudible] guest thats one possibility. Caller thank you for coming and i have a similar question. When thinking about chinese regulation of the internet or other social networks, do you think there are any lessons the United States can learn and how to be helpful in the United States . Theres a lot of practices we see occurring in china that other countries would like to adopt but there is the challenge of the fact that we have a lot of Citizen Protection and recourse china doesnt have to worry about necessarily. I think its something we do need to think about for other countries context. China has a sophisticated Surveillance System for its citizens and is working with countries in africa to import some of those technologies so they can use them as citizens. I think that we need to look at not just what china is doing with its own people but how far theyve expanded into other markets whose governments see these tools as very handy in terms of citizens control and containment. I dont think they arent, theres necessarily a risk of that happening here in the same way because theres a lot of things americans dont agree on, were especially now in a polarized place but i think peoples distrust or nervousness about government surveillance for instance is a useful theme for people so i would be surprised if there wasnt some resistance from citizens on that. Host do you think overtime kind of in the tech great game universe, Chinese StateNet Companies as you put it will eat away market share from the us net states abroad . Guest i think if unchecked thats a possibility but i also dont think the net states that are operating out of the United States arerelinquishing their control over foreign markets. I think we might not necessarily see it as much from our context and perspective but theres not a unifying fame like the bell throat initiative that makes it part of this Strategic Plan but i also think the role, the growth of Tech Companies into other sectors and the growth of data centers into other countries means theyve got a foothold in other places. Im going to bring us back a little bit but why are some Companies Considered big tech and whyare others arent . Why does j. P. Morgan considered a bank and not a Technology Company when the ceo says we are a Technology Company . Its a great question and for all these issues its important to break it down to its fundamental essence just because all these companies are operating now, theres companies that use technology for their products and services and theres a difference in the original intent of the company. If you look at for instance amazon, it startedoff as a online book retailer and its moved into a lot of other areas. We could say that they have a role to play in Law Enforcement with their surveillance technologies and food , with whole foods. Exactly, and but i think that because their Core Products and services are online and thats where it came from, thats how we define them still and i would say the same thing about banking. Theres a lot thats happening digitally but they started off as banks and i think we still see that motivates and drives them. One thing you talked about at the end was how critical it is for consumers to wield whatever power they had and one example that i think where that did happen was potentially when people were frustrated with uber and went over to lyft and a lot of the way that was possible due to competition so what role does competition and the ability to switch platforms make it possible for doing things that is not in the facebook dynamic. Relating that to calls to break up big tech. I think this is definitely one of the great challenges in how we approach them. Theres no other youtube venue then you too. Every time one emerges like instagram, somebody buys it. Guest instagram was a tiny company with 10 employees when facebook bought it for 1billion so theyre good about realizing potential competition and gobbling them up. I think this is where regulation could play a role in getting competition a chance to get its feet off or to get a running start before they feel theres no other choice but to sell to a tech company though i think this is where the conversation about treating these kind of Tech Companies as utilities is usefulbecause they dont just provide a product or service. They and their way create a public good. The totality of what you can find on google is not just interesting or useful. Theres a value thats bigger than the sum of its parts. The fact that it provides the ability to do research in all kinds of different areas. And again people who otherwise wouldnt have a means to share their work way to reach other people so i think that regulation is something that needs to be taken seriously and im not necessarily confident that just breaking them up into other businesses is really the answer. Host our antitrust law is comically illsuited todeal with this. The problem with having regulators be responsible for these decisions is they are always going to be behind the curve. They are never going to have the savvy, the nuance that will effectively break up the Tech Companies in a way that will stick. One of the things i heard from a colleague at the French Embassy was experiencing with coregulators to say obviously you have to give up something but lets figure out a way to do this in an intelligent and nuanced way. Its still an experiment. We havent seen with the ultimate regulation would look like. Where is that having . France. What company . Facebook. All these companies, they make that nonfalsifiable claim you can keep up and then you can call it pretends or rationale to do anything they want. This is where i think we have a lot to learn from our eu partners. Companies countries like france who have an ambassador for digital affairs, theres only handful of countries that have one, and i met with the annotation for digital economy. I dont know if we have people working on these issues are quite a level here in the u. S. By elevating people in government to these unique position of authority who do understand the technology we can help debunk those arguments that nobody gets it. To the tech to get ambassadors get more from the net states that our people do . I would say so. In the case of france they took some of from the tech sector and pointed attorney appointed him as an ambassador so theres no argument that he didnt understand. Indicates a denmark who was the first tech ambassador he was a career diplomat it works pretty well in Silicon Valley to establish relationships net states. He just got poached by microsoft be represented to the eu. What of those people looking to do . The idea is put ambassador to establish ties to a new domain and to help create some crosscultural understanding. So help people in our government understand or their home a government understand what these communities are all about, what drives them, what motivates them and help the Tech Companies, the tech sector understand how to work with government more effectively. Sort of a bridge. A question here, please. Mustve been a very this is been a very insightful presentation. Sarah moynihan from a while back and around 2000 wrote a book called secrecy. Moynihan was from new york, was professor, worked for the u. N. , the state department. They moved into National Politics but a visionary, so anyway. In his book he said openness was the singular american advantage and he put in peril by poking along an error that is now past. The soviet union was a close site that failed miserably. We have seen some pushback. That opened perhaps this point seem to be coming back to haunt us to certain degree as you mention in the election issues. Just your thoughts on that dynamic. Thanks for bringing that up. Im a big fan of his writings. The rest of the quote he says secrecy is for losers. Its putting up after us in peril to try to keep this close government Close Society in imageworks no longer relevant that was as you sit back in the late 90s before social media. We do get caught by surprise as a people, our governments, without quickly tech evolved. And love for things like Disinformation Campaign in 2016 to happen and really i think wasnt anything anyone expected but it dont think we have an excuse now for why we havent reacted. I do think there are ways to put in safeguards to ensure that at least even if we dont create mechanisms we could label this information came from this country. That would help consumers understand better i think the source of information whether it was regular or disinformation, we could at least empower people to know. Any other questions ill just ask one more. The reason we have dealt with it this time for we have no excuse, which agrees basically a part of political warfare. Was yes. Were in a really gridlocked scenario right now and theres not a great appetite for people in congress to work across the aisle, to make things happen in a bilateral fashion but i think its also the people who were in office have in some ways benefited from the fact that hasnt been any regulation. It will be really interesting to see what happens in the coming year with the new election. On that note i want to thank you all for coming out on the pandemic super tuesday. Lets give her a round of applause. Thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] on booktv monthly callin program in depth former advice to present donald trump Sebastian Gorka discusses his books and offers his thoughts on politics and National Security. A few weeks before the graduation they took my daughter photographs and on social media and on posters around campus they put her name, and underneath this is the face of white supremacy. Why likes because she was part of, because she was my daughter, despite the fact that this girl has helped ethnic women, minority women when she was doing a Research Project and had been abused financially by the partners, their husbands. So when it came to graduation i was very, very trepidations. I didnt want to cause a scene. Many parents were probably not trump supporters. So when i arrived on the second day in connecticut to the quad, i didnt sit with my family. I sat under an oak tree so that wouldnt be any distractions from what shouldve been my daughters celebration. It was all fine until after the ceremony my daughter received her diploma, the caps were thrown in the air and i decide to make my way back to my wife, my motherinlaw, my sisterinlaw, my daughter. And in the throng of the separated from everyone. A little girl walked up to me and this is the opening fishman a little girl walked straight up to me maybe 19, maybe 85 pounds dripping wet. She looked me in and she said are you Sebastian Gorka . Are use Sebastian Gorka that worked for donald trump in the white house . I smiled, extend my head and suggest, thats me. And here i have to edit things. In that case, ask you, you nazi. I had been through the mill in the white house, but endeavored somebody who was living in the most successful, powerful freest nation in the world do that to me in front of hundreds of witnesses. Once i found the composure i set a quintal at this fly. Now if i come back in. Her mother, her grandmother probably was standing there. I i looking to face and i said, who the hell do you think you are . My parents as children suffered under nazi occupation in central europe. After that, my father under communist dictatorship was arrested and tortured and imprisoned. Who the hell do you think you are to call me a nazi . The girls mother was clearly shocked and she said, did you really say that to this man . This is why i wrote this. The little girl, american born and bred, living in the free station world, with a slight grin from the joker in batman looked at her mother and me and said, yes, i did. Thats frightening. Its frightening that according to the victims of communism and moral foundation in the latest poll, 72 of american would like to live in in a communist or socialist country. This after the fact that we know if you read the black book of communism, at least 100 million human beings were exterminated in the name of karl marx and his communist ideology. So i spent more than 20 years in the National Security domain. I specialize in nonstate actors, irregular warfare and the strategy of jihadists and counterterrorism, and now the last few years have been the damnedest moment for me. The scales have fallen from her eyes. Ive realized perhaps the greatest threat we face is the falsification of history, i mean, doctor nation of a whole generation of americans. To watch the rest of this Program Visit our website booktv. Org and click on the in depth tab or search for Sebastian Gorka using the