Washington. Why quincy, washington . Guest my coauthor and i chose quincy, washington because its one of the data center capitals of the world, if you will. Its near the Columbia River and data centers are being built there because its close to hydroelectric power in both cheap and clean. We take the reader on a tour of if you will, of what is becoming the infrastructure of the 21st century and these mammoth buildings more than 20 of them filled with Electrical Generators and hundreds or thousands of batteries but of course, mostly Server Computers and everything we do in almost every day is accessing or storing our data in the cloud and it means one of those data centers. Host you have 100 of these in 20 countries, is that correct . Guest more than 20 countries, more than a hundred data centers and microsoft is one of the largest but Companies Like google and amazon, facebook and apple were all building more and more of these data centers and it is where we are storing our data and they become, among other things, the Largest Consumer of electricity in the world. Host if i send an email from Microsoft Outlook here at the office to somebody at the office, does it have to go through that data center . Guest it doesnt have to braid you can still use our software and use it in a form where you just write on your own laptop or run it on your own server computer in your office but the world has moved to the cloud over the last decade and it is far cheaper and more secure and you will always have the latest in the technology and will not have to upgrade it yourself. You can rely on microsoft, Cybersecurity Team rather than say, those in your office. The world is shifting and most technology is moving in this direction. Host what does it cost to build one of those buildings that you say is about the size of two football fields . Guest any time we open a new data center by definition is an investment and its hundreds of millions of dollars typically but if you look at microsoft and the other Industry Leaders collectively we are easily spending several tens of liens of dollars in just in building these New Buildings and connecting them electrically and putting the computers inside them. Host what kind of investment are you making in securing that cloud . Guest its a fascinating piece. Its a enormously expensive and it starts with the physical security. You cannot get into the ground around these promises, physical security is certainly tighter than what you would see in a commercial airport but its the Network Security that is more important still. We spend a billion dollars a year just on new security features and thats our innovation but we have 3000 security engineers and just the protection of this has become a huge priority. Host brad smith, you say you were searched on your way out of this facility as well. Guest yes, its fascinating because youre not surprised when you go into a data center and before you go into the interest income, so to speak, the room with the computers on the servers you have to go through a second very tight airport style metal detector but then you researched when you leave as well. You go why am i being searched when i leave because they dont get search my leave the airport but no one can walk out with a hard drive. Literally the only way the hard drive leave that room at the end of their life is by first going through what is a huge machine, the equivalent of a paper shutter but this is for literally metal hard drives and leaves through its own special exit. Host you right in your book, tools and weapons, that ireland is to data what switzerland is to money pit what do you mean . Guest ireland is a great place to store data. Switzerland is generally regarded across europe and across the middle east and around the world, in many ways, as a safe place to store money. It is secure. Ireland, first of all is a great place to build data centers but the temperature is mild and you dont typically have to turn on the heating or air conditioning and you use less electricity as a result but more than that what we really mean is it has a network of laws that protect privacy and data and it has a stable government and it is part of the European Union so it has access to the rest of the eu for moving data back and forth and its one of the worlds most attractive places to store data but. Host but its an island and dont need cables to connect . Guest that is a fascinating a part of this story as well. The Irish Government has long had foresight, i would say, when it comes to planning for its economy and thinking about technology. American tech sector got started in ireland in the 1980s and it is where everyone manufactured their cds back then. Has we got close to the year 2000 the Irish Government came to us, the United States, saw the future and said make ireland the place to build the data center but they said you dont have cables to move data to the continent and they said give us three months and we will go solve that problem. Three months later they had, they came back and entered into a contract and the cable was just about to be laid and the rest is history because ireland really had become a place where, by our calculation, 35 of all European Data is stored in ireland. Host brad smith, what is the advantage of having these Data Security locations, these clouds as tools . Guest as tools they are enabling businesses to do new things and its first, perhaps driving down costs and enabling businesses and governments and others to rely on other peoples advanced Security Protection but fundamentally what all of this is doing is enabling people to use technology in new ways. We really have, in our view, entered a new era for it its an ai or Artificial Intelligence based era and if you think back to the first half of the 20th century the Combustion Engine changed everything and thats the car or the tractor or the truck in the tank and the airplane would over the next three decades ai will have a similar impact and its already making it possible for machines to understand speech, what people say. Vision, to understand peoples faces and recognize people and that translate between languages. All of that is based on several things but perhaps the most important is this large amount of computational power of data storage in the cloud and data centers. Host also in your book, tools and weapons, talk about the weaponization of data which is what . Guest it to as many things but i would say it starts with the cyber attacks. It starts with hacking by organized crime and it starts now these days unfortunately with hacking by nationstates, hacking of political candidates and campaigns and think tanks and the like. This includes disinformation campaigns and includes the potential hacking of voting and elections. It includes a variety of other challenges that may not be weapons per per se but when we think of the impact of all the technology on our jobs what will it mean for our people, our jobs, our children, their jobs and all of these are the challenges that technology has created. Host that takes us on our tour to north korea, russia and china, doesnt it . Guest it absolutely desperate as well as iran paid we are seated seen certain governments around the world being particularly aggressive. We measure this every day and we see the attacks that are taking place and weve been public in saying that we seen the most attacks over the last few years and from russia, north korea and iran. Especially attacks that tend to be more focused on our civilian infrastructure or on our electoral processes in particular. Host what is microsofts business interests when it comes to china . Guest well, i think we want to serve our customers when they do business in china. China is not as large a market for us as it is for some other Tech Companies in china has 18 of the worlds people. It accounts for 1. 8 of our revenue but if an American Company wants to go to china to sell coffee we want to be able to use our services in china the same way it does everywhere else. If there are consumers in china who want to use windows on their Laptops Office to write their documents and to send their email we want them to be able to do that. We want to participate in that economy and we want to participate in the Global Economy and in a thoughtful way, in a way that actually is focused on u. S. National security and the protection of human rights but also serving people who, in our view, need to be served. Host but in tools weapons you talk about the fact that mycroft doesnt judge a nation on its humans rights scores, correct . Guest before we open a data center in a new country we evaluate many things. We have access to electricity, to water even for a data center. Do we have concerns about corruption risk and the like and evaluate human rights. We use that human rights evaluation to make decisions and there are some countries where we wont place a data center because we feel that once the data is in that country we cant protect peoples rights the way they need to be protected and there are other countries where we will put data in this is china as one of them, but we wont put our Consumer Services so we have, for example, a Consumer Email service outlook. Com is it current name we dont offer it in china because we dont feel that we can strike the balance we want to strike in terms of protecting human righ rights. Host with china moving towards this social Credit System that they are having, are we in danger of perhaps having to worldwide webs and to internets . Guest i think over the past decade there has been a trend in that direction and i think that one sees two countries in the world today that tend to be producing the most tech leaders. Its the United States and china. You see less American Technology in china and you see less Chinese Technology in the United States. You see different laws and Public Policies and to some degree even some distinctions and business practices. Then you see competition, especially in places like europe as they decide where they will buy and who they buy from. Host brad smith, you call for regulation in this book and in fact, bill gates and his forward points out the anomaly of a Business Leader calling for more regulation but you are writing that you need that and you need to have that regulati regulation. Guest i think we need two things but we need businesses in the tech center to step up and exercise more selfregulation and higher commitment to responsibility but we do think we need more regulation of technology. Think about how we live our lives. If you go to the Grocery Store and you pick something up off the shelf you will read the nutrition label knowing that standardized and accurate because of regulation. If you go to the Pharmacy Department and buy a product you dont worry about the safety because its regulated. When you get into your car complies with certain Safety Standards at the same as true as an airplane. Our basic point is that Digital Technology has gone longer with less regulation than almost any Technology Since the middle of the 1800s. We think the market and customers in the industry itself would be better served for the long term with a different [inaudible] host that takes us to washington dc because bill gates took a lot of pride in the fact that microsoft did not have a dc office for a long time. Guest bill points out in the forward that he did take pride in that and then learned that were probably some Better Things and he could have Better Things taken pride in and we are here today and we are in 56 capitals around the world. Host you conclude your book by same Technology Innovation is going or is not going to slow down the work to manage it and it needs to speed up. Guest we really do believe that governments need to speed up. I used to come to washington and people 15 years ago here did not understand technology. I think many times today they often do and they understand that much better and i think, to some degree, politicians get a bad rapid journalists look for the opportunity to point out heres a politician that did not ask the right question or heres a politician but did not ask the question the right way and i think that is, frankly, a mistake but i dont think its accurate and you serve anybody well whenever you criticize them for asking a good question the wrong way. The truth is we have regulators and politicians today that i figured out how to regulate very complex pharmaceutical products and we have people today that regulate airplanes that are basically computers with wings and they regulate the Safety Standards for cars and basically those are computers on wheels. We have people who are perfectly capable in washington dc of regulating computers that dont move it all and sit in a data center and i think as a country and as a world we need to strike a balance with a healthy dose of regulation. When it comes to privacy what would microsoft look like. We would like to see a Strong National privacy law in the United States and weve been advocating for that and i personally have been advocating for that since the year 2005. You can see how little impact we have had in washington dc on that issue over the course of a decade and a half but we think its a good thing that california adopted the strong privacy law last year and we think its a good thing that that is now bringing the debate to washington dc and i think the american public, consumers and even Tech Companies will be well served if theres a good privacy law and a strong privacy law in the United States and i think for the next what we really need is more of a global privacy compact. Data moves around the world and you dont actually want the protection of peoples privacy to constantly change every time data crosses the supporter and thats when we bring governments together. Host what you think of the gdp are . Guest on balance we are pretty enthusiastic about it but we have been enthusiastic about it in the tech sector and. Host is that because you do Different Things . Guest i think to some degree even say we do Different Things and we are not as focused as monetizing data through behavioral advertising and the like but i think it reflects our own experience with laws and regulation and antitrust cases that we learn from when they unfold in the 1990s and early to thousands and i think in some respects it reflects the belief that a market will work best in the companies that participate in it will succeed the most for the longterm if consumers have confidence. Host mr. Smith, what is the current status of International Cooperation on these issues . Guest i think there are signs of progress and a lot of headway. You see signs of progress on a Cyber Security and on digital safety and we have seen impressive leadership last year by the french government and this year by new zealands Prime Minister in the wake of the christchurch terrorist attack in the brain companies and ever moves around the world to advanced digital safety. That is creating a model that we can look to more broadly but of course, we are also living in a time when multilateralism is less popular and certainly less popular than the United States and perhaps any time since the 1930s. In part a book is a call for governments coming together with companies, with the Civil Society and a multi stakeholder approach and you dont just see any effective alternative for addressing the challenges that people care about. Host Christchurch New Zealand takes a part in your book to. Guest it does. We were in new zealand 12 days after the christchurch had happened. During the course of the day Prime Minister Office Reached out and we heard she wanted to meet with us so course we did. It was a fascinating conversation but she said look, i just dont want to see what happened in christchurch repeated and what happened there was different from other terrorist attacks because the attacker really used the internet as a stage and it was streamlined on facebook and it was uploaded probably millions of times on youtube and its the kind of thing that can incentivize terrorism if we are not careful. So we said lets see what we can do together and thanks to her leadership, more than any single thing, she got on the phone and called other tech leaders and we worked with others across the tech sector and it led to what is now called the christchurch call. It was signed in paris by september in new york at the un and there were more than 50 governments that had signed up as well and this has facebook and google and youtube and amazon and microsoft. Weve all committed to taking now some very concrete steps that make it certainly harder for any terrorist to do what was done in christchurch. Host so how often do you find yourself and this is something you write about, working with the federal government and or suing the federal government . Guest well, we work with the federal government every day and we probably through the federal government on average every year. Thats the balance and of course once the lawsuits start you have to continue it. We never sue our own government without a lot of thoughts. And without believing that a real principle is at stake. We have brought litigation several times, both to stand up for what we believe are important privacy rights for our customers and during the last couple of years as well as to stand up for our employees who are protected by the aca. We have 56 employees who are dreamers and so we thought that was another important case to bring so we did so. Host when it comes to privacy what is one of the cases you pursued . Guest most of the privacy cases we pursued have been about giving people businesses or individuals more knowledge and information about when the government is known want their data. The started in 2013 when we argued successfully that we had a First Amendment right to start to published data generally about how many kinds of National Secure the orders and one issue we continued to litigate is the right that we believe businesses have so that when the federal government wants their data and the vast majority of circumstances we believe the government should go to the business and not come to us or some other Cloud Service provider and that is the way this country worked since it was founded and until the cloud was created. If you ran a business and if you had emails or documents that the federal government wanted and had to go to court to get a warrant and serve it on you. Therefore it you knew about it. You may have to turn over the information but you could then go to court to protect your rights. What we dont want to see is of future where the government only comes to us and you dont even know what the government has your information and you cant stand up for yourself and defend your self. Whenever we see cases like that and we do see them periodically we try to negotiate an outcome with the department of justice and if we fail and we believe the facts are on our side we go to court. Host mr. Smith, Edward Snowden revealed quite a bit and he features in your book as well. Was the government stealing microsoft information surreptitiously . Guest i would never use the word stealing and i would be quick to add that even six years after the snowden disclosures there might be a lot that we still dont know and that might be appropriate in certain respects when it comes to National Security and i do talk in the book about the coverage of the Washington Post in october 2013 and we do talk about the reports and by itself or with the British Government that the u. S. Government was tapping into cables potentially undersea or landbased cables to access data that it may have been happening outside the use of warrants and therefore the rule of law. We were explicit then that that was something that concerned us and it was complicit with the white house and president obama then and in saying that there has been reform and has been an important in the six years since. I think its good that generally speaking we learn more and the world learns more and we could address perhaps a bit of an imbalance. Host do you feel that microsoft management of data is secure today . Guest i do believe. Host from prying eyes. Guest i would say the answer is yes and i would say the answer is yes is in part because of technological changes that microsoft and others in the industry have made. One of the responses to those disclosures was to deploy stronger encryption basically comprehensively. It means that whenever data is moving between data centers its encrypted and whenever data is stored on our servers its encrypted. If any government and this is not, by any means a question that anyone should think is come bind to the u. S. Alone, if any government tries to tap into data it is highly unlikely to be able to read what it obtains but more generally i feel more confident not just because of these technical advances in cyberSecurity Protection but because of the legal reforms that have been adopted in the United States and similar legal reforms have often been adopted in other countries and thats a good thing to. Host and we havent even cracked the code yet when it comes to regulation or looking at ai and facial recognition technology. Guest this is one of the Big Questions for the 2020s. We suddenly live in a world where, you know, a government can, if it wants, use cameras and computers and facial recognition to identify everybody who walks down the street. We are seeing this in some parts of the world. We do believe that we need to put in place controls and we do as a company so this is used in ways that we believe would conflict with human rights and they are not protected adequately but we need laws as well and theyre very important question even in the United States and when should lawenforcement be be able to use this technology it should follow you everywhere you go and probably the way it goes and gets access today to get a search warrant but thats a debate that we need to have in the United States and we need to Start Talking about what this Technology Means for, what we would say, the values that are timeless. Host brad smith your president of microsoft and they have a ceo and that is bill gates. What are your duties . Guest i play several roles in the company but i think one of the most interesting certainly is to be on point for these issues for Technology Needs of society. There are so many issues today sustainability, privacy, security, responsible Artificial Intelligence, digital safety. The worlds a different set of expectations of us than it did a decade or two ago. This requires we bring people together across our business because we need to innovate in the space but it also requires that we connect with the rest of the world and with people in government and elsewhere because this is a journey we are all on together and requires not only action by companies but requires new steps by government. Host you joined microsoft and 83. Guest ninetythree. Host sorry about that, how has it changed since then . Guest when i joined microsoft it had over 4000 employees and today it has 150,000 so for the first thing is everything is bigger. When you are big you have to find ways to move quickly in a new forum because obviously moving a big group of people is harder than moving a small group of people. When i joined in 1993 technology was not something you read about every day unless you were a tech geek or intellectual property lawyer. Obviously it has become, perhaps, the single most defining element of our time and we live in a Technology Era and it means that the world has questions and we need to answer them and it means people want to understand Technology Without having to go get a phd in computer science. Part of what i need to do and what a lot of us need to do and we have a great team that does it is serve as translators, both to help people understand what the issues are and to help our engineers understand what is on peoples minds. Host you are joining us here in washington with the jedi contract by the pentagon has been awarded to microsoft but theres a challenge by a fellow seattle company, what is the status . Guest microsoft and amazon and other companies were competing for what is clearly a very important contract for the future of the pentagon and its helping Enterprise Architecture and data moved to the cloud and we were delighted when the pentagon awarded that contract to us and amazon has filed a protest which is not unusual. I think for people who live in washington dc protests barely make it into the news that they are so common. For us to have a job to do. One thing i said to our own employees is every contract is important and some are even more important than others. Its hard to imagine a contract that is more important than this because now we have a height response ability to help the military protect this country. There is a protest and there will be more work for lawyers but we need to focus on doing our jobs and building the infrastructure that the pentagon is purchasing. Host matt smith brad smith, president of micro soft and he along with carol and brown have written this book, tools and weapons, the promise and the peril of the digital a age. This communicators and all others are available as podcas podcasts. Cspan has unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from the president ial primaries through the impeachment process and now the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch all of cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online or listen on our free radio app and be a part of the National Conversation through cspans daily Washington Journal Program or through our social media feeds. Cspan, created by americas table Television Companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Tuesday the Supreme Court continues hearing oral arguments via teleconference. First, a consolidated case dealing with president trumps financial records and whether the president s personal financial records prior to becoming president should be subpoenaed and then a look at whether the president has immunity from subpoenas for financial records. This includes president trumps tax returns. Thats unrelated to his duties as president of the United States. The Supreme Court, live tuesday on cspan, ondemand on cspan. Org or listen on a free cspan radio app. Immediately following the life Supreme Court session joined Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution center leading a live discussion with scholars. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders set down for an interview to discuss the federal response to the coronavirus and the upcoming 2020 president ial election. During the interview senator sanders said it was very unlikely he would run for president again. Held by the Washington Postou this is half an hour. Our job right now is to think big and act in an unprecedented way both in terms of healthcare and in terms of the economy. Im asking every
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.