三和一善 | From the Cold War to the "Code War": Why the Government Needs Technical T

Posted by Kazuyoshi Sanwa on October 28th, 2021

A former secretary of state adviser wrote that in order to win the competition for economic and political power, policy makers need to be proficient in digital technology.

Amazon\'s Alexa will come to a hospital near you

Blockchain makes domain names more private-for better or worse

Update from the doctor\'s office: shipping containers in the parking lot

In the months before the Syrian civil war, I led a State Department delegation on a controversial visit to Syria, which included a meeting with Bashar al-Assad. Our goal is to put pressure on the Syrian dictator on a series of security issues in the technical field. The weaponization of widely used consumer technologies has made it easier to monitor, spread false information, and develop and destroy political movements. Our delegation exerted political and economic pressure there, trying to get Assad to move in the right direction.

What sets this delegation into Assad’s office different from other delegations is that it is not composed of diplomats or government officials from the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency. It is composed of senior executives from American companies such as Cisco Systems, Verisign, and Microsoft. Our view is that in this case, the company has more persuasive powers, and given the topic, the executives actually have expertise in the topic discussed.

As far as Assad and Syria are concerned, digital technology has indeed had a fatal impact in the end. The Assad regime conducts digital organization on open social media platforms, including Facebook, and then attacks locations of protests organized online. When they detain people, they will take their phones, force them to log in to Facebook, and then decide whether to kill or keep them alive based on the person\'s posts and Facebook friends. The Android application developed by the Syrian government appears to be an application related to the Covid pandemic. One of them pretends to be an application to measure the user’s body temperature, but it also acts as a powerful spyware, accessing the user’s data, text, and contacts List and provide real-time geolocation data to the Syrian government.

The United States and our technology companies did not convince Assad. Instead, he stood with Russia, just as Russian planes bombed Assad’s Syrian opponents. Russia and hackers working inside and outside the government launched a cyber warfare for Assad.

????

There are many things to learn from, but one thing that stands out to me is that democracies, including the United States, need to do more to deliberately bring people with technical and technical policy skills into the government. During my tenure in the government, I often sat in a room full of titles, long resumes, and a lot of responsibilities, but my knowledge of technology was zero. Sure enough, the topics discussed increasingly require understanding of the technologies that are reshaping power and governance, from surveillance to artificial intelligence, from encryption to social media, to quantum computing, and so on. It doesn\'t matter if your title is \"Mr.\". If you don’t know the difference between hardware and software, please use \"Secretary\" or \"Mrs. Ambassador\".

Land is the raw material of the agricultural age. Iron is the raw material of the industrial age. Data is the raw material of the world today and in the future. The competition for political and economic power in the agricultural era mainly relied on the seizure and control of physical territory. The competition for political and economic power in the industrial age meant mastering machines and new weapons of war, including aircraft, tanks, and battleships. Understanding how to collect, manage, and weaponize data is shaping the competition for political and economic power in the 2020s. We have moved from the cold war to the code war. The Cold War fighters of the industrial age are often lost in this world. This creates a need for a new type of person in government who knows how to maximize commitments and minimize the dangers of emerging technologies.

The aspect I have seen recently is in the field of national security, just like the situation in Syria. But this demand is not only reflected in national security and foreign policy. We need people who understand precision agriculture to make agricultural policies. We need to know how to build a technology platform to reliably provide goods, information, and services to tens of millions of customers in the consumer market, and bring their expertise to the health and veterans affairs of the public system. We need executives and human resource managers who are best at understanding what skills are needed and how to develop them in our workforce, so that we can bring these skills to the largest employer in the United States: the government, with more than 24 million people in the public service sector. Service department work. Local state and national level.

If people with technical skills are given real responsibility and participate in projects that change and save lives, they will enter the government. Fortunately, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton created a position for me to lead a variety of projects, from protecting vulnerable women in refugee camps in eastern Congo from sexual violence to training civil society organizations in developing countries How to improve its effectiveness through digitalization. More and more technicians are trying to apply their skills to the challenges of improving the health, wealth and well-being of poor communities. The government provides an opportunity to do so on a large scale. Those of us in the technological world love scale, and our efforts can create a multiplier effect and reshape the lives of millions of people. The government is usually not the most flexible organization, but it is almost always the largest organization.

Without innovators entering the government, it will continue to fail and become weaker and weaker, and we will all get worse because of it. As HG Wells wrote at the end of the Second World War, \"Adaptation or perishing, now, as always, is an unstoppable priority for nature.\"