pulitzer prize-winning photographer who covered robert kennedy's presidential campaign, the vietnam war, and the white house. watch "1968: america in turmoil," live sunday at 8:30 a.m. eastern on c-span's "washington journal," and on american history tv on c-span3. how risky are technology transfers across nations? two panels explored questions such as whether limits should be imposed on what companies are allowed to sell overseas, how security concerns can be balanced with free trade and investment, and how the u.s. should approach the issue with china. this two-hour event began with remarks by brookings president and retired u.s. marine corps general john allen, who commanded nato forces in afghanistan. >> good morning, and welcome to brookings. i'm john allen. this morning's panel is about

economic, political, and security aspects of technology transfer. i want to welcome c-span to this panel. they'll be covering us, and our panel will be broadcast later today. and at the very conclusion of this panel, we will be followed immediately by the next panel. there is no break in the process. just wanted to make sure you're aware of that. also wanted to announce that if you are unaware, if you haven't muted your cell phone, i would ask you to do that, because some time between 10:00 and 11:00, washington, d.c.'s going to test its cell phone and emergency device emergency broadcasting system, meaning at some point, everyone will look down at their phones. that happens to me frequently in meetings, but let's today anticipate that and not have it be too much of an interruption. i really have the honor this morning as the president of brookings of hosting this first panel of three terrific panelists, dr. anthony vinci, richard antcliff, and nicol

turner-lee. anthony vinci is currently the chief technology officer at the national geospatial intelligence agency, or nga, and i never miss the opportunity to thank your agency for the terrific support that they have provided to us in places like afghanistan, iraq, and many other places. so, thank you very much for that. anthony has a long track record of success at the nga, serving as the associate director for capabilities and the director of plans and programs prior to his current role and has been central to developing the agency's vital public-private partnership efforts. and i think he'll talk a bit about that as we go on. rich antcliff is a special assistant to the associate administrator of space technology at the national aeronautics and space administration, or nasa. prior to his current role, rich served in a variety of top positions at nasa, and most recently was nasa langley research center's office of

strategic analysis, communications, and business development leader. and as well as a chief technologist at the entire center. and nicol turner-lee is a fellow here at brookings in the center for technology innovation within the government studies research program, and nicol's research at brookings focuses on public policy designed to enable equitable access to technology across the united states. she's also an expert at the intersection of race, wealth, and technology, and comes to brookings after most recently serving as the vice president and chief research and policy officer of the multicultural media telecom and internet council and vice president and first director of the media and technology institute at the joint center for political and economic studies. we have three terrific panelists here this morning, ladies and gentlemen. i'm very, very honored to introduce them and to guide this discussion. we'll be here for about an hour. for the first 30 minutes, i will offer some questions to the panelists, and for the second 30

minutes, we'll go out to you. i don't normally ask our panelists to do introductory remarks, but of course, in the first question that i'll ask, which will go to all three panelists, if they choose to make an introductory remark, they are most welcome to do so. with that, i'll go to the first question about technology transfer. starting first with our overall topic of discussion today, technology transfers, be they public good technologies emerging from u.s. government projects or university research. this has been an enormously -- this has enormous potential ramifications when thinking of the growing tech race that we see as nations compete against each other in areas of big data and artificial intelligence, in particular which comes to mind is the united states and china, for example. let's go down the line of our panelists this morning and present the opportunity to get some opening thoughts about do

we need a new definition of public good technologies? and what's the u.s. government's obligations here? this is an important topic, and i think it's a good way to begin this overall conversation. so, with that, anthony, would you like to offer some comments? >> yes. thank you. thank you for having me. thank you for having the panel, which i think is extremely important at this particular moment in time for the country. i think looking at technology transfer, i put it in the larger context of what is the appropriate role of government working with commercial industry and non-profits and the wider economic and civil society? and within that, for my role at nga, i think about national security and strategic kind of consequences. and over history, and in particular since world war ii, we've kind of gone through different phases of working differently with industry and working with the public, and we've invented new approaches to

doing that. and the entire idea of tech transfer as an approach, uses of ffrdcs, uses of contracts, approaches like cratas and otas and things like this. and i think as right now we're watching a kind of geopolitical shift. and if you look at the national security strategy, national defense strategy, we're seeing this shift from kind of the post 9/11 world into a new era of near peer-peer competition with china and russia. and so, i think what that demands is a new approach to public-private partnerships, and within that to tech transfer. and seeing tech transfer as a means of strategic competition. and within that, i would include not just transferring technology, but more broadly,

transferring sharing, investing data and other intellectual property. and i see, you know, i look at the last sort of 40 or 50 or 60 years of government activity, and i've noticed that we've built up a massive asset and resource, really. whereas we used to think of natural resources as something maybe the government owned and then leased out, say to the energy industry, now we've created this ip and data and technology kind of national asset, and i think we have to come up with new ways to invest that asset and use it for strategic national security and economic purposes. and so, one of the things i've been working on at nga is to do that, which is strange for an intelligence agency to think that way. normally, we are consumers of data and information, not provider to industry, but i

think that's what we're going to have to do to strategically compete and start looking at it not necessarily just as something we open source, we brought up as sort of a public good, i think there's still definitely a role for that and for opensourcing things. for example, the corona imagery was opensourced for kind of historical and archival reasons, but i do think there's other aspects where we might want to not opensource it, but still provide it and treat it more like proprietary information that we could, you know, unclassified so we could provide to partners out there, to universities, to companies, to create technology. and you brought up ai. i think that's the major technology to sort of consider in this aspect, where you need historical data to train some of these algorithms. and so, all of a sudden, this asset that we've developed over the last 50 years of historical data is extremely important in that economy. so, we have to find ways to share it, you know,

strategically with certain companies, not with everyone, and i would suggest primarily with american companies or potentially allied. i start to think about five eyes, for example. and that's what i think we're developing at nga and the department of defense and the intelligence committee and some other agencies are also starting to work on. so, again, perfect timing on the topic matter and very important to what we're all trying to do. >> thank you, anthony. let me turn to rich. from your position at nasa, what are your thoughts on this? >> one thing i want to mention is we need to make sure we think about tech transfer in both directions. as an agency that has a mission to do something technologically pretty difficult, it's really important for us to tap into the technological activities that are going on outside of our own development. and so, we have traditionally used tools like sbir to tap into

small companies to get their technologies, to take advantage of those within the nasa mission, but recently, we were doing a lot more with prizes and challenges. and with those, we actually can now reach into a much broader community, outside of just the u.s., tap into technologists who may be in a garage somewhere across the globe. this is really important as we look at technologies that now 70% of the research is done offshore, outside of the u.s. for us not to tap into that is a big mistake. we have got to tap into that, and we've got to develop the partnerships in order to get that kind of technology, in order to accomplish the kinds of things that we are working on. so, i think we need to make sure we have a balanced discussion with regard to tech transfer. the other side of that, with regard to the tech transfer itself, it is something that is in our original mission statement. it's something that we do a lot of. we have a spinoff magazine that goes out that people look at all the time for the amount of things that have come out of the space program. so, it's kind of part of our

culture to do tech transfer. i think what we're recognizing, however, is that this broad dissemination of the technologies is not as effective as perhaps doing it in a more focused way. so, we've recently begun some programs around working with individual companies, with individual organizations, and particularly looking at start-up organizations to try to see how they can take advantage of some of the technologies that have been developed within nasa, not only technologies, but take advantage of some of the expertise, some of the subject matter experts within nasa, to help their companies actually move forward. so, we find that we can actually leverage those technologies a lot quicker and a lot faster and try to help that economic ecosystem be more robust, actually transfers the technologies in a way that is much more effective to help businesses grow, to create jobs, et cetera. so, that's something we're experimenting with and we think is going to be something very important as we go into the future. so, i'll leave it there for now.

>> that's great. thank you very much. that's a particularly important point about helping the start-ups to accelerate a process that might have otherwise taken quite a long time. nicol, please. >> thank you, john. and i feel so honored. i'm sitting next to two scientists from the federal agencies here. i'm actually going to talk about tech transfer from the perspective of civil society and what we're seeing that to a certain extent is creating i think some difficulties and challenges with tech transfer, because the internet in the way it's been commercialized has sort of accelerated the private sector's engagement, right, and taxed the government sector when it comes to r&d. so, we all know that the first tech transfer was probably the internet and gps systems. and if we look at the way that those systems have been leveraged as well as u.s. regulatory decisions to make the internet more commercial, we are seeing displays that i think is a lot different today, if we would look back, where internet's growth is sort of

outpacing what governments can do. and i think that's what you were sort of referencing. how do you create different models and partnerships. but i want to address this question of then what do we look at when we see public good technology, and just reflect on that for just a minute. minute. this competition created a good firewall where companies with newly created in this destructive age are out -- not necessarily doing things for the public good. may not translate which is something i work on here. or we're seeing the government not able to keep pace with the private sector doing. i think that's somewhat problematic when we start to look at government funding towards r & d, something that traditionally supported public technology.

i also think that public good technologies require some level of architecture that protects citizens. i think the second panel will talk a little bit more about that in terms of civil society, but there's a challenge, right? if public good technology that is designed for health care, that's designed for transportation, environmental systems, et cetera, military, do not have those protections in place, which i think john goes back to your question, it creates a different type of definition of what we should be looking at when we look at public good technology. i also think, and many of us in this room have been watching the news. when you have private sector companies that are sort of etching into the public domain and suggesting in many respects they're doing public good, there are problems and challenges associated with that. most recently with the breach that i think all of us are very familiar with that has now toppled about over 80 million people. with respect to that, i think what we're seeing in terms of pun good technology, where we're seeing private companies like google, twitter, facebook, et cetera, doing public purpose

things that do not necessarily translate with what federal agencies have in terms of strict scrutiny around design, intent and the benefits of that product outward. i am always reminded of having work and interfaced with federal agencies, things like precision medicine, things we are seeing advance through r & d, the question becomes when you actually negotiate that or universities -- i've had the opportunity to go to m.i.t. to read their tech day where students are essentially putting out patents for new products. it is a little different, you have seeing the two screen television and thinking that's an interesting patent coming out of a university. but when you talk about drone technology or interference with national security system or health care precision medicine that sort of find itself in content with the private sector and public sector goals, think it is problematic. to your question, john, i think we need to revisit a public

technology definition, particularly in the u.s. from the framework when we started making the internet commercial, it has implications on how it affects civil society. >> so your thoughts are then there has to be some semblance of transference? >> yes, yes. >> in the context of public good being of use to the broader civil society? >> exactly, exactly. or the private sector will sort of drive that and we'll have to sort of catch up. >> terrific. anthony, back to you. in the world you have lived in and currently do at nga, in thinking about the american use every day -- america's use every day of gps and entities like google maps and what uber is currently doing in terms of using big data collection, significantly enhancing these technologies, but as we watch that unfold we don't necessarily always know that it is for the public good.

so thinking less about the data itself and more about the technology that collects that data, should there be limits on u.s. companies that are allowed to sell this information abroad or even disseminate it to third or fourth parties in that context? >> yeah, i mean this is a particularly important question. when i -- going back to thinking about this as a strategic issue, international security issue for the country, but i would say even in terms of economic competitiveness outside of the national security realm it is important. clearly there should be some limit on technology transfer abroad, and i think we're all fairly comfortable with that, and nuclear weapons for example come to mind as something that very clearly should be limited in how it goes. so i think there's really a spectrum here of what we're willing to transfer and should transfer, and some things do best when they are fully open sourced and available to everyone. so gps, for example, i think revolutionized not just one industry, multiple industries globally, and definitely helped

the united states economy, the government, and everything we do essentially and every day. you can't necessarily always predict when you're looking at a particular technology what the ramifications will be when you to open it up. so my personal bias as somebody who actually came from commercial industry is that there is a bias towards opening up, but at the same time putting on my national security hat i realize that there are some competitive advantages that we want to keep within the country to support some of the industries here and then to support the national security community. i think that it is creeping from, again, if we have nuclear weapons all the way at the extreme, think it is creeping left as more and more issues do become particularly important for national security. and, you know, you've brought up algorithms and data and hardware, i think we're creeping towards the algorithm side and where intellectual property should be protected. i think the primary issue there is as you kind of creep left and get from hardware into software

and into algorithms, the shelf-life, the half-life of these technologies becomes shorter and shorter. the shelf life of an algorithm might be months and sometimes even weeks, so how do you even protect something like that? and is it worth -- is the juice worth the squeeze in even trying to protect it? we have to kind of factor that in as well. in particular, where much of that happens in open source and academic realm anyway. so those are the kinds of point we have to kind of start considering, and i would suggest what it means is taking a much more sophisticated approach to how we secure and how we think

about securing intellectual property and technology in the country, and thinking about multiple factors and then figuring out where in that spectrum of transference we should allow it to exist. >> let me make a comment. i would ask for your thoughts on this. obviously the speed of government is woefully behind, whether it is collection of data, emergence of algorithms. to your point about public/private partnerships, is there some hope that that concept of public/private partnerships can create a regulatory process faster than the speed of government to create the regulations but demonstrates a level of responsibility in the private sector to do what we ultimately hope, which is doing good and protecting privacy and that sort of thing? your thoughts would be helpful on that.

>> it is an excellent question, and something i'm intimately involved with at the agency. we do have a discrepancy and asymmetry between the speed at which technology is developed and commercial companies move and then the speed at which the government develops technology or, really importantly here, adopts it and integrates it into our operations, and how do we -- how do we kind of shrink that asymmetry. i think there will have to be some new regulatory policy statutory approaches to this. as kind of where i started, i think in our history we have adopted those new approaches when we have determined that we need them, and so incutel is an example. you know, we realized in the late '90s and early 2000s we needed to be able to communicate

with silicon valley and early startups better, and so that required new authorities. and more recently changes in how otas are able to be used within the department of defense. so i do think we're going to need some approaches to kind of take this speed issue -- and i would call it the speed of adoption. it is not really the invention, because i think that we're actually reasonably good at r & d and inventing new technologies, and commercial industry is great at inventing it and we're great at buying it. it is how do we adopt it faster. that's what i'm sort of seeing in the government now. if you look at things like project maven, that's what they're focused on and i'm involved in that project for that reason. so i think that we right now can muddle through, but i think that it is incumbent upon congress to come up with new approaches that are going to support faster adoption.

>> and i think we're going to find that -- i believe it is the 12th or the 11th, the testimony on the hill of the three tech giants, we will see some of that worried out into the public domain where we'll have excellent commentary on that. nicole, would you like to add? >> can i add to that too. i think we're going to see some of the public/private sector cooperation when it comes to big data analytics, et cetera. but i think we're in a stage where much of the u.s. regulatory framework has been focused on consumer privacy, right? i think the area where we talk about privacy in terms of tech transfer has been more limited to the ip space, and i think those conversations do need to happen, right. but i think what is scarier about this particular area and the rate of technology's pace is the algorithm piece. some of the research at

brookings is on algorithm basis. there are not many on staff that understand how to unpack that and not many companies want to give away the algorithm which is why we talk about bias because you can't see what is under the hood, particularly when it disproportionately is affecting people. i was going to say, john, we have made progress. it was privacy week here in d.c. we will see data protection policies come through the pipe. i think the u.s., and i wrote this after april 11th, probably in the afternoon when he leaves the capitol hill testimony room, we'll probably see privacy legislation begin to be debated. the question becomes with tech transfer, what we've seen in the last few months is the manipulation of what is available to sort of innovate

new types of practices and procedures. for example, with the algorithm has manipulated democratic institutions, that's a different type of regulation where the data flows are not easily identified and not necessarily understood by all actors. i would even say in some cases the private sector outside of silicon valley. i would say companies experiences these breaches every day don't even understand what that means. i believe going forward we have to look at this implication that distinguishes between consumer control or consumer access to their own data, business or enterprise access to data, and then the government transfer of data as three different verticals that at some point have to be reconciled to create a safer and more resilient system. >> can i just? >> please, rick. >> let me just add, maybe it is

a little bit of balancing. in the preconversation we talked about a balance issue between these issues. you know, there may be ramifications of some of the new technologies, but there's also opportunities of the new technologies. we've got to be careful not to over restrict to miss the opportunity, right? that's the balance, we have to find the right place in the middle. i think as was stated, this idea of public/private partnership is a really good one. we have done it with the airline industry before to try to move composites out into the industry, and that serves -- they have the speed that we don't have in order to move those technologies forward, and taking advantage of that speed is very, very important. you know, nasa is a bureaucracy like the rest of the government. us trying to move things forward is difficult, but when we can have the public/private partnerships, they bring the speed in. they make it happen a lot quicker, and that's important for us to move it forward, and within the opportunity space that's important for the future.

>> rich, thanks for that contribution. let me shift over with respect to your nasa background. we have seen growing success of companies like spacex combined with a resurgence of interest of human travel into outer space, and in particular towards mars. what are your thoughts on the private sectors role in that? are there risks associated with the technologies obviously being developed in the private sector in the context of technology transfer? >> so let me make sure we got the right perspective on this opportunity frankly, with regard to organizations like spacex, blue origin, et cetera. let's take us back a few years back. nasa was formed out of an organization called naca, the aeronautics committee. that organization was really put in the position to try to help the fledgling aeronautics industry move forward. so they put -- they had a lot of research, they had a lot of policy discussions about how do we have a -- how do we open up the airspace to these crazy companies that are flying airplanes around and, oh, my gosh, don't we have to have some kind of restrictions on those, et cetera? that has been a job that nasa in its history has been a part of for all of its lifetime really,

is trying to help industry grow such that it can commercialize and become something very valuable for our country and, frankly, for the world. we're in a new era of that now with regard to the space economy, where we're seeing organizations like spacex, like blue origin, et cetera, et cetera, who are taking some of the technological developments that nasa has done over the years, they're taking them on and they're figuring out how to do them cheaply, right. again, this is not something nasa is good at. we're good at the technological stuff. we're not good at figuring out how to do it cheaply. spacex and those can figure out how to do it cheaply so we can have a commercial market that's very valuable. we think it is very positive and the way it should go, and we're working to support those industries. they're using a lot of our facilities and capabilities, subject matter experts. you know, we are trying to become a customer of theirs to try to get, obviously, provisions up to the space station and eventually humans into space. so we see it as a very positive benefit. it is the public/private partnership we have been talking about in kind of a big, mega economic way. >> sure, please. >> if i can come back, actually. you bring up a great point, which is relative advantage and

relative competitive advantage, and what is private industry good at and what is the government good at. that really gets to the heart of why you would even have public/private partnerships. when i look at the government, and in particular i look at agencies like nasa or nga or the department of defense, is very good at doing certain sort of more or less impossible tasks. i mean putting people on the moon, i think of the corona program, putting satellites in the air, literally dropping film canisters over an ocean, sending an airplane to pick it up in midair and getting it back to the u.s. to be processed and analyzed. it is a nearly impossible fete and it is incredible they did it with the technology they had. whereas when you start to look at private industry that is good at something very, very different. being inexpensive is a big part of it, but also being creative in a way that the government isn't. an example i like to use is wayz.

i feel like the government approach, for example, to global traffic monitoring, if we had come up with it 10 or 15 years ago would have been to go out and buy helicopters because we looked at how do you monitor traffic. well, the local news stations use helicopters and they film the traffic and they radio it down. so we should just buy a lot of helicopters and be doing ee lips around every city in the nation and sort of radio it down and let's go global with that. whereas, waze with almost no money -- and without even that in mind, created a community of people to kind of -- well, for mapping purposes actually to start, but then for monitoring traffic and sharing that, and they use cellphones and they use gps. now they give it away for free. so that is just a very, very different approach to problem solving that lends itself to solving very, very different

problems. so when we start to think about these public/private partnerships, we should look at it from that lens of, you know, what is the relative competitive advantage of each side and where should they play. i think even within that example we see an example of that is gps, right. waze couldn't have been possible without gps, and gps would not have been possible from a commercial perspective. it is a money loser i suspect and it is really big and expensive and complicated, and just difficult to do and it has to last forever, for decades and decades, which not all companies do.

so that is a clear role for government, but then there's a clear role with something like waze for creative new uses for it. so, again, it is that relative advantage, and it is a any waugh to think about how government partners with private industry. >> and, john, just so i don't sound like debbie downer, i agree with the panelists there are positive ways to deploy technologies. space x is looked at as a way to provide broad ban to rural communities. i think what the panel is, it is a responsible -- not necessarily standards-driven, but some type of input/output where the commercial and public sector is defined by what the output is so it doesn't become something where you have geo location and then later the government is kicking themselves because the geo location had an unintended consequence not thought of by the commercial sector. i want to make sure everybody knows i support it. >> it is a balance issue. >> it is a balance. >> it is. i think the common thread, and i will go to the audience in a moment, the common thread is that the public/private partnership is really the way ahead here. it is something that can

reinforce the public good. it can probably minimize the deleterious or negative effects. waze has the capacity, as anthony says, of producing enormous amounts of useful data with respect to metropolitan planning, infrastructure planning and that kind much thing, but it will tells members of my family if i stopped off at the dubliner and i worry about that. with respect to involvement in the space program, i agree with rich. this has been an accelerant. it is cost effective, a quit integrator of technologies. the one tesla i had my eye on is on its way to mars now, so i'm out of the business for a while. but i think it is a real opportunity for us in terms of technology transfer, both in context of national security, but even more so towards internally the goods of civil society and the transference to civil society that is the real opportunity. rich, you have touched that a number of times in terms much opportunities. let me go to the audience now. we have a rich array of attendees this morning from a number of different organizations and from many different countries. so we welcome you here today.

we'll go for about half an hour. i'm busted to another five minutes and i will end straight on the hour at 11:00. i apologize for taking up five minutes of your time. when you stand, if you could give us your name, please, where you are from. and if you could get to a question relatively quickly, i would be most grateful. if not, i will find a question in what you are saying. so, please, yes, sir. right third row back and we'll come to the second row after that. >> gentlemen, thank you for a very good presentation. my name is elliott horowitz, from rockville, maryland.

i used to work for the world bank in the intelligence community. could people please define the public/private partnership a little bit more clearly? >> why don't we start with you, anthony. >> yeah. it is a loose term and it is used in a lot of different ways historically, everything from, you know, building toll highways together to, you know, nih investments in health care and so forth. but the way i would use it is to see it as what are mutually beneficial things that the government, the public side and the private side, primarily

commercial industry but i would also include universities, nonprofits, civil society within that, what are mutually beneficial things that they can do with specific projects. so those benefits might be very different from one side and the other, so -- or they might be the same. so the example that i would use is the co-creation of technology, what i was saying before, the government's good at creating certain technologies, commercial sector is good at creating different kinds of technologies. how can they work together in a mutually beneficial way to come up with technologies that they both want, and so therefore chipping in different things at different times. i see it as a partnership in the sense it is not a one-way street. so it is separate from contracting, for example, where the government provides money and in return gets a service or a product. so that's really more of a one-way street. this is a partnership in the sense that they're both sides need to chip something in, whether that's money or time or effort, capability, and both sides should receive something

in return. again, whether that's technology or data or some competitive advantage. >> anyone else? >> i just want to add, i absolutely agree. a lot of our public/private partnerships are in that vein, where we both contribute to the mick. i think the other kind is -- what we do a lot is precompetitive work, where we'll have several companies that will come together that we partner with as a team to work on technology, the maturation of technology to a certain level that's competitive, and those companies can take it off and do something with it competitively. think both of those are model also that are used. >> i would say with public/private partnerships, an area i deal a lot with in the telecom space, you have to have common goals between the private sector and public sector in what

you want to accomplish. a fundamental industry in protecting public interest, honestly. public/private partnership is not one if the civil society is not at the core of what that partnership looks like. i with agree with rich on the sense that the public/private partnership has to be done in a way where it does not stifle innovation. so we've seen different arrangements where you kind of go into the public sector, private sector partnership and there's concerns on whether you can have the ideation and innovation happen because of constraints of the public sector or the private sectors unwillingness to invest the resources. i was going to say a good example are electronic health records. over the years we have seen electronic health records become more resilient because of public interest guided by hipaa and other regulatory prescribed rules have helped the private sector innovate in a way that that's more readily available.

i would just end by saying it is the scale ability of that partnership that has to generate the output. we often deal with that as we're -- in my particular work where we're asked to see, is it a benefit to civil society? if it is only benefitting one part or a block and not reeling scaling and you are taking all of this r & d money for a competitive advantage, it hasn't met the criteria. >> thank you for that question, mr. horowitz. a question in the second row, please. and i'll come to you in a moment. the left side of the room seems extraordinarily inquisitive this morning. we invite anyone from the right side. >> thank you very much. i'm an african-american journalist. it is exciting to be at the digital era and watch all of the differences it will bring for our societies. could you please make -- put into context how this relates to future of government up until this morning really the societies worked on a global system of opening economies and coordinating the economies and governments. right now we're in the midst of such populist movements, and

with technology being at its earlier stages, although we're seeing some of its fruits, we are seeing it being used and you all described processes where it is going to take time to introduce regulations and perfect techniques to ensure that they still serve the public good and government can have its jobs. could you please put it in context? this is going to take a lock time, and yet we are on the brink of what looks like a new cold war, with so many conflicts brewing both in the private sector and global. thank you. >> who would like to take a crack at that?

>> so i think your question is spot on. i kind of describe this as the myopic tendencies of creators who want to see a product go to market quickly. a lot of tensions that we've discussed and the broader goals of what that technology's impact is on society, and you're correct that we're so much more global. i would actually argue that tech transfer become much more protected by people in terms much what they want to share because the vulnerabilities that it sort of created by having the technology be so much more widespread is not generating the outcomes that we all thought it would generate. you know, it is different from a

government or a smart city, you know, leveraging technology and practices to do -- be more efficient, et cetera, to actually cutting into your democratic institutions. i really do think we'll go into an age where those -- those regulations actually happen before the innovation catches up, which will be a flip-flop model of what we've actually seen where the innovation out paced government. i think government is going to come in and sort of put a plug in some of the stuff before the innovation comes out, which might also create its own set of problems. but i think generally your question is correct, that we have to figure out ways to harmonize these systems. since we are moving into a more of a digital economy, the bureau

of labor statistics put out a report on the pearlsage of gdp driven by digital. this has taken up a huge portion of our attention not only in terms of the innovative side but economical. this will be a problem. it is a good problem to have but it also has consequences. >> let me also add a couple of points. in terms of afghanistan, there is enormous capacity for the community of nations using the digital environment to accelerate civil society, economic productivity, and even improve governance in many ways, apart completely from the security side of it. here is where i think the community of entities, which is bigger than the community of nations when we talk about entities, i'm talking about facebook and google, some of the most significant sovereign entities when you think about sovereignty, have the capacity to help to sling shot many countries that are in the developing world that would not otherwise be able to do it on their own through public/private/international

partnerships, have the capacity to be quite helpful in that regard. you also mentioned the potentially emerging cold war. quite apart from the dust-up we are having right now with the chinese, i think there are enormous opportunities, again, for us to share and to cooperate, the u.s. and china, on a number of issues. the cold war, you might have mentioned this with respect to russia and i have great concerns about where all of that is headed frankly, but i see china in a very different mode. i think if we beyond the reflex for protectionism, which can chill this, can chill the opportunity to cooperate in these very important areas, the capacity for the united states and china in this regard to find common ground in the digital future i think is extraordinarily important to

both countries and to the community. i would hope that we don't confuse the activities right now that appear to be protectionist that could lead us down the road towards a trade war as being helpful over the long-term towards the u.s./china relationship. >> if i can add in there, i completely agree with your point and the point that's come up here on the value for developing countries. i'm a technology optimist. i used to work for alvin toffler who wrote quite a bit about this subject and talked about how you can skip a generation of technology and this can have a profound effect on countries.

if you skip from land line to cellphones, for example, much more resilient, much less expensive technology, that i've done a lot of my ph.d. field work was in africa and i watched what mobile phones did to an entire continent. that's the problem with the use of technologies, and we all know there are also negative consequences for lots of technologies, but the net gain to me is massive. i think when we talk about the public/private partnerships, there's an unsaid assumption which is really important which i see in my government role more and more, which is an acceptance by government at the working level that commercial industry, commercial technology has a lot to contribute to governance and government in general and that we should adopt it. it doesn't -- this is a really -- a very real factor within government, the not-invented-here mentality, within any large organization. i think we're starting to get over that and realize that there are a lot of these technologies that we can use that allow us to govern and to enact our government duties and responsibilities significantly better, cheaper, with a wider scale. what came up before, for example, broadband, whereas government again in the ways of example maybe we don't buy helicopters but we dig a hole in the ground to every house in the country no matter how far off. i think that is valid and everyone in the nation should have broadband. but all of a sudden maybe there's a game-changing technology if we can do broadband from space because of a company like spacex and even some others one than that have come up with a new, much cheaper solution. that's really the promise here, and we need to be open minded as a government and government employees in thinking about that. >> we're not cycling very quickly through these questions. the gentleman i think just next to the camera, please. yes, sir. >> i'm bobbie pasteron. i would be interested in your thoughts about the wealth that has been created through digital

technology. that wealth is unequally distributed currently, and the digital industry is becoming increasingly sophisticated at the creation of rules, as other industries have in the past once wealth has been created. do you think we have the right balance in the public/private partnership with the financial wealth that's returned to government for public purposes, that public governance can make decisions about? >> no. just leave it at that. no, i think -- no, i completely agree with you. i mean if we go historically and we look at the evolution of technology in general and something that i always have to

remind myself, you know, we really started with, you know, i.t. and very basic principles of what tech meant, you know, even going back with government. that's morphed into an economy that has not been a static economy. the internet is no longer this that creates its own wealth. with the digital sharing of economy that is ruled by the internet of things and other types of really cool technology that you can touch, cloud computing, you know, each of

those layers actually generate its own sense of -- of economic output that does create this unequal distribution of wealth and access. all of us in this room, if we don't own a patent or technology company, what we all should be -- i don't know if we should be proud to say this, but wire 'all passive consumers in the digital economy right now. startups and other incubators, government is trying the break through -- and this is a case where i think government is behind on that, too. vcs that were government driven or supporting government technology applications are coming around to see, hey, we have to fulfill this role. i tell people facebook wasn't designed for what it is used for today, it was designed to be a social network and now it is in the middle of a conversation around algorithms. i mean it was an ad-supported model that morphed into something el. uber found a spot in there and the creating its own generation of wealth, own generation of workers, which is why we're sort of wrapped into this conversation which is so much more sophisticated. who are the people on the end that will become the fatalities of this digital economy? it is the 11% of americans that

are not online. they're poor, they're disproportionately people of color, they're disabled, their in rural communities. they will always be involved because their big data is what drives the new economy, even if they're not online. they're lacking of access to data drives companies to know where they need to deliver food or what kind of investments they need to make in smart grilled systems. they're still part of it, but they run the risk of becoming deeper and deeper in poverty and eventually becoming digitally invisible. to your point, i think -- the lesser point i think was the latest case to sort of debug and unpack what the digital economy looks like, but i think your question is really critical, particularly when government invests resources in r & d and don't get a return on investment or the technology designed to solve a social problem actually creates the problem. that's where i think, again, a lot of us are stuck in the middle. i know the next panel will talk about security. you know, how do you resolve and reconcile and create regulations that allows one part of the technology sector again to focus on civil society while another part of it continues to do what

they do but perhaps in a regulated context because, again, the communications act of 1934 wasn't designed for the telegraph, later picked up isps and broadband and didn't anticipate the companies we see today. i think your question is spot on that the wealth equity index will continue to widen based on where you are in the topology of the digital economy. >> that's a great question. let me just offer a couple of thoughts. sovereignty throughout much of modern history has been shaped by the concept of wesfeleyan sovereignty, which is a line on the ground that circum describes terrain and some number of people, often with a homogeneous identification, who provide their loyalty to the sovereign. that's a modern, relatively modern view of the concept of sovereignty. it is really about the capacity of a sovereign to influence. that's the traditional sense, all the way back to aristotle.

i think we need to think differently. i believe that the public/private partnership concept may be some of the nascent thinking about how in a world where tech giants, digital giants control the modern version of the power of ancient sovereigns, which is wealth and data and algorithms in ways that traditional wesfeleyan governments don't necessarily control them. i think we need to think differently about public/private partnerships ultimately morphing into what might be public/private alliances. when you think about some of the large tech giants with gdps, if you will, that surpass many of the countries on the planet, that can reach out and touch

people in the numbers of billions and influence their thinking for voting purposes, et cetera, that's a different way of thinking about influence and sovereignty in the modern digital era. because where it was in the past about terrain and numbers of population, today it is much more about the information that you control, the way you will wield that information in terms of algorithm and the outcomes that will flow from that, which will be prosperity and wealth. it is a different way of thinking, and i think we need to expand our view about -- i used the term a moment ago about the community of entity. we often talk about the community much nations. it is bigger now than the community much nations. if the community of entities joined forces in a public/private partnership or an international partnership, we have real capacity. i'm not sure we're thinking about it properly. i will leave it at that. >> do you mind if i build upon that? >> yes, please. >> i think what you have done is placed this concept of public/private partnership within the wider spectrum of how

we understand geopolitics and how we understand history. i think we can go further with the thinking in terms of how divinations have different government systems, and that difference will apply to how they use public/private partnerships and the nature of those relationship also. i think china will have -- already does have a very, very different approach to public/private partnership. when the chinese government deals with a company than we do and how our government, the u.s. government deals with a company like google. those relationship also will shift over time and that's what we're kind of seeing now and what we're talking about here. what makes it more complicated is these companies, as has been brought up here, are not necessarily just within a single governance system. google may have a very different relationship with the eu than it may have with the u.s., than it may have with china. it makes it very complicated to think about how all of the relationships are going to interact and evolve over time.

that will be the sophistication for us on the government side, is what do we actually want from these public/private partnerships and partnerships with these other entities, and then how will we get it. that's what we're all starting to think about right now. >> well, this is an important outcome for this panel. i think very importantly, my digital network capable device tells me we have four minutes left in this panel. i've been very disappointed in the right side of the room to this point. anyone, anyone? yes, sir, please. we have just a couple of minutes. i would like to get quickly to a question and quickly to an answer. this gentleman in the third row. >> thank you so much. i'm from china daily. i have two question also. first one is in terms of the cooperation between china and the u.s. could you elaborate on more areas specifically where china and u.s. can improve their cooperation to improve the well-being of all countries? the second one, you just talked about the areas where the

government on the one hand needs to set the regulations of the different industries, but in the meantime it needs to provide sufficient for different industries to develop. how does government strike a balance in terms of the u.s.? thank you. >> it is a very long question. a very short question, a very long answer. there comes to mind immediately where the u.s. and china in the context of the digital environment can cooperate would be in medical diagnoses, the capacity to harvest enormous amounts of information on medical research, and using the right kinds of algorithms help us to get more quickly to diagnoses now that we're beginning to see can be harvested and rendered with high levels of confidence relatively quickly. the other is in the area of security, of course, and the

whole business of countering terror. there are lots of reasons why china and the united states need to cooperate in this regard and there's real capacity in that regard as well. i would simply say we haven't seen it play out yet, but we're all very interested in seeing how president xi's objectives with respect to the outcome also of the 19th party congress and china's intent ultimately to surpass the united states in 2030 in terms of emerging technologies, how that will play out. china has in some cases advantages, some people would say disadvantages in that it has at its core the capacity to create great cohesion between the objectives of governance -- government and the objectives of chinese companies. there is much more capacity there than perhaps in our system, and i don't call that a strength or a weakness. it is just different and we need to acknowledge that will be

different for us. anyone else? >> i just also want to say in the area of ai. clearly the artificial intelligence side of what we're seeing the chinese do is really interesting and outpacing some of the things we have here in the u.s. but when it comes to global decisionmaking or problem solving, i think some of the applications there should warrant some cooperation because -- particularly when the u.s. takes on big issues like a couple of years ago when the white house was trying to solve the ebola crisis, for example. some of the new applications and emerging technologies could have been more helpful if there was more cooperation. we are starting to see the u.n. do more of that kind of cooperation as an international entity when it comes to digital and civil rights. i think they should move into the conversation around that. i was going to say to your second question around who funds that. i think the interesting conversation we had at the table that has enlightened me is how

do you incentivize, you regulate but incentivize this type of digital investment, hopefully we will begin to see more models. where are there cases where we can incentivize that fit the vertical also around the public interest. unfortunately i don't think any government has enough money to support the local gdp of a company that's, you know, surpassed the gdp of a small country. i think having more of that, i also understand like for example in africa with mobile there were lessons there we didn't pick up with in terms of the wireless that you were talking about. you have to incentivize those type of experimentation or projects to balance the regulatory framework. >> nicole, rich and anthony, i want to thank you for participating. ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us at brookings and would you help me to thank the panelists.

while mike does some housekeeping, he's providing water. for us. i will introduce the topic as well as the panelists. so we're going to continue the discussion started by john and his panelists on technology transfer. i do have to say the first panel set a very high bar in terms of both substance and humor. i'm not sure we're going to be competitive at least on the latter part of that.

we will try to get to some equally important r issues. i want to remind the audience both our c-span audience and the people in the auditorium if you wish to pose questions feel free to do that. so we're going to focus on the angle of transfer. we'll be get iting into questio such as when should technology be transferred and some sort of products need to be protected. very us is free trade of

information. we are joined by a set of distinguished experts. to my right is heather roth, she works on the ethical aspects of artificial intelligence. the responsibility to protect. if they had arrest stot the we have kant here. michael is a senior fellow of foreign policy at brookings where he holds the junior chair. he's the author of numerous booms the head of geotechnology at the group. . prior to joining that firm, he served in several senior policy positions within the u.s. government over more than 25 years.

chris is is a fellow in the center for middle east policy at brookings. so why don't i start with heather. you have argued that many technologies are dual use in nature. meaning they can be used both for good or bad purposes. how should we think about technology transfer in expert control with dual use technologies. >> i think to answer your questions, there's two ways to think a bt this. one is to talk about b kant and wasn't is to talk about hobbs. the primary purpose of this

state from a security purpose is to secure the rights and lives and protections of its citizens. the job is to protect the body of politic. so when we want to talk about dual use technologies, what we're really talking about is civil applications of a technology and peaceful purposes. and something that's used for military purposes. so we have to be careful about how we draw lines around heez technologies. one way to think about this is is through a series of arrangements we already have in place. we have international treaties in place like the missile control regime. so the mctr. we also have is a rovoluntary arrange the of like minded states that want to ensure that the technology developed and

exported is when a dual use starts to become so precise in what it can can do, it can become more con sus deucive to military applications. so thinking about hardened systems or systems that can withstand a nuclear attack or extreme temperatures. when those things start to happen, those begin to become what we would consider dual use in need of export control. so the good and bad purpose is one way to think about the hook. but the other side is military and civil. and then it depends on which side you think is good or bad. what i would say about technology is that the new et emerging technologies are not very amenable to the current structures that we have for export control and dual use.

if you look at the arrangement, you have within about 190 pages, all sorts of discussions about what needs to be regulated at what rate and if it's this time of technology, if it's nuclear or software or enabler, sensor, frequency hopper, all sorts of different types of technologies that are enumerated throughout that 198-page document. within three lines of that document, i found something very athomas louse and interesting. that is voice encoding. so if you can voice encode, you can take continuous speech and then you can make it into zeros and ones and encode it into a digital frame and come prez it and compress it and transfer it at a slow rate. that's a very slow transmission rate. for some reason, they find this a duel use good that needs to be

regulated for export control. i don't know when they decided this was the case. and i don't know exactly why. but what i do know is six months ago an academic decided that he figured out how to do voice encoding and he dropped it open source on the internet. and so that kind of move really pushes us to think about how we do our regulations. and how we can be more foresight about our regulations when it comes to military applications for security purposes. another thing that i would really briefly draw attention to is not only do we need new government structures and new ways of thinking about these types of security and military technologies or technologies that i want to regulate this algorithm, that's the same on your phone running siri, and then you're going to stifle innovation and stifle the ability of other states, particularly. developing countries to gain that technology, to boost up

their civil societies well being as well as their economy cans. you have to be able about where you draw those lines. but there's another question actually that's equally at play. where do we draw the lines and do new governance and forward thinking on really hard questions about these duel use goods, but another one comes when these public and private partnerships happen in the security realm. and i think one of the things we can look at now that's been in the news recently is the potential for a cloud computing contract for a single company to take all of the dod's data and host it on the cloud for. the next ten years. single company contract, ten-year span, that's a lot of money. in the news what we have been seeing is amazon is up for that contract. we don't know if they are going to get it, but there's been lots of discussion about amazon cloud and the web services hosting that. and then we have questions about that public and private partnership. what that does from the civilian

side of things is when a public global company like amazon starts making bets it's going to host a defensive state's military data, what that does to like where amazon operates in other countries that they say maybe i don't want amazon to have my data if they are feeding it to the u.s. government or those types of things. how are we going to keep that export. how are we going to keep that duel use goods and make sure the partnership is for the good of everybody, particularly if those entities are global in nature. we have some really hard questions when we start thinking about technology, civil, military and securitization of all of this when they are running together in really difficult ways. thank you. >> thank you, heather. so you work on great competition, particularly with regard to russia and china. what are your thoughts on when products need to be protect ed?

>> thanks, daryl, and good morning, everyone. i won't try to rival john allen on humor or anything else. but i maybe will try to rival him on saying something surprising from a brookings podium. i think much of what president trump is trying to do towards china is actually justifiable. and not necessarily in every details, but the general thrust of pushing back on china in particular, because let me try to have an historical perspective as well. not art far back, but if we think about the last 100 years, we have seen european powers in particular rise and then fall fairly fast. partly because they couldn't protect their advantages because their economy didn't have barriers to transfer or theft of intellectual property, which is an age old phenomenon we have seen long wildfire. the internet. and just in the last 100 years or 150 years, britain lost its advantage in industry and

advanced technology to japan, germany and the united states, among others. but those three in particular. luckily one of the three was us and we ultimately were in a position to help bail out the rest of the western world in world war i and world war ii, which resulted partly because of this technology transfer happening pretty fast and germany in particular catching up faster than it might have otherwise. so i put all this in ers aperspe because the more recent reference point is the cold war. and we had very little economic interaction with the soviet union and very comfortable putting up the barriers, some of which earth hadar talked about and done for nonproliferation purposes to get from other countries, but many were et designed to keep high-technology conventional weaponry out of soviet hands. now we're living in a world in which our most likely competitor over the medium to long-term is

china, which is so fully integrated into. the world economy. et we made a gamble in strategic terms 30 years ago. we decided to try to bring china into the western economic world as fast as we could, including membership in the world trade organization. the gamble was on economic ask security fronts this would help china liberalize fast enough that the risks of seeing china grow fast would be outweighed by the liberalization of china and become a more rules oriented participant in the international order. this sounds like china bashing. i'm not a china basher. we wrote a book a few years ago about a strategic vision for how we could try to get along better with china and do some things on the u.s. side that would promote that process and republic newsing china's historical rise. but in some ways, it's become a little too fast for comfort. and especially because of the means that china has been using. you and i talked about the idea for this panel. i want to thank you for the concept of this event, but we talked about this originally a

few months ago when we met with michael brown, who were from the diux unit in silicon valley. they wrote a paper, which is very compelling. how chinese investments in et a chinas access. they went so far that we we think how many visa we give to the students studying in ts united states. they had drastic, i'm not sure i spoertd all of them. but their analysis is pretty compelling. it's recommended reading for all of you. and i'm just going to begin to wrap up here by saying that at least some of the ideas that have been put forth to try to force china to socomply are actually appropriate. specifically trying to make sure until china will allow equal access to their economy and their country for western firms, we should slow down their ability to acquire and access

american high tech giants and jewels. that's not enough of a strategy but it's certainly a viable beginning. and that's why i support much of what president trump is doing. what i'll finally say is i'm just going to tick off, i know i'm throwing out a lot as a fire hoes methodology here for presentation, but i wanted to tick off a few of the technologies beyond the ai, big data, and cyber worlds where we have to keep our eye on trends. because these are going to be the areas where much of the other parts of key military competition occur over the next one to three decades. first of all, anything having to do with nuclear proliferation remains important. so advanced metals and machinery, precision machinery, advanced timing devices, sorts of things that are needed to make sen tree fuging and bombs themselves, we have to keep a close eye on these things and not lose sight as we try to hasten technology transfer in other domains for good and

positive reasons. and then within the areas that i do think are important regarding china in particular, we have to keep our eye on a few things, such as submarine quieting technology which has been traditional american strength, stealth technology for aircraft, same thing. many aerodynamic and aerospace capabilities hyper sonics where china in some ways getting ahead of us, where we can reenforce. directed energy, including lasers. and then finally nano materials, micro scopic materials which are important from everything from the batteries and structural materials that we build systems out of these are among the areas where i want to interject a note of caution in a conversation that very appropriately is thinking about how do we share more, how do we especially in terms of the first panel, how do we promote economic growth between private sector. i also want to remind some of

the areas we have to be particularly cautious in my judgment. thanks. >> okay. thank you, mike. so i think we have the head line on the event now. michael hand lan endorses donald trump on some topics, not necessarily o necessarily on every topic. paul, i want to come to you. so mike mentioned the china connection. and one issue there involves the so-called forced tech transfer where companies claim they have to share their corinth electric you'll property. so i know you work with many companies. so could you provide a perspective from the commercial world on how companies view the intellectual property issue. >> thank you. this is a huge question. and i think the other panelists have sort of outlined a lot of the themes that i'd like to touch on briefly. i think i agree with michael on the, in general, on the trusthr of some of the actions taken. so i think it's important to

understand the 301 action that we are in the middle of it is not about trade and it is about tech transfer. so i recommend reading the tsr report, 215 pages, but i think the section on tech transfer is very important. tech transfer is mentioned 227 times in that report. and so really i think we are in the midst of a reassess mts in the u.s. of how we do both export controls and how we handle things like technology transfer. because china has for a variety of reasons has become sort of the poster boy of industrial policy, overreach in the view of many, including the u.s. government, terms like mercantilism is used. and force tech transfer has become a key issue that is really driving, in part, this trade action, the so-called trade action. two important parts. one is issue how do you deal

with country that has an elaborate set of measures designed to compel or -- in some cases legally involve tech transfer, about you a whole host of other gray areas, things that are not unwritten rules or unwritten documents and ka jol joling of companies to do tech transfer and cyber es pie and age which is long-term issue gaining access to technology. so in part the process we embark in now is effort really to try to roll back some of china's policies, and it's a very complex edifice that the 301 report calls essentially china technology transfer regime. and i think it's going to be a very difficult thing to do because some of these issues are structural, industrial policies like made in china 2025, things like the national integrated circuit fund which is a huge

fund which was once videscribeds u.s. person as critical structural issues. ha happens is u.s. companies ocean hally aee essentially are in the middle of this. they are trying to regulate things to do business there. so a lot of our clients are multinational kms involved in china and want to include china with their global operations. i think the companies we work with by and large view the situation that they can control the amount of tech transfer that happens in their operations in china and can protect the sort of secret sauce, if you will, of a company. but that's, as you'll read in the ustr report you'll notice how complicated that is because

each company will have a different type of problem and pressure to do tech transfer so difficult to manage in that market. so in part there is mixed feelings about this whole action that the 301 investigation has started because some companies have been successful in nach gating that and protecting corinth electric you'll property and some has not. so it's split on this. so the other piece of the process that's important is investment. major effort in u.s. to revamp the legislation, that's a process that's happening now. and another whole piece of this action against china will be some sort of proposal of arrest pros conspiracy reciprocity regime. so this will cloud steer advises which has become huge issue in terms of this idea of

reciprocity. al baba can build ten sent centers in the u.s. but oracle and microsoft and google and amazon all have to have a joint venture partner and that usually allows some tech transfer as part of that deal. so we are embarking on a difficult period, i think, in u.s. china relations which encapsulates all these issues. at you're asia group third risk was global tech trade war. and what we call the ugs china tech war is a piece of that. because again as we look forward to things like fifth generation mobile, china will be a big player, and countries in developing markets are going to be looking for the technology leaders, for example, for 5 g, and the u.s. is looking at how to build a 5 g network china free which is whole another topic we can talk about. so with the advanced technology like 5 g and ai there is a lot

of sense we are moving into the world where there is going to be more competition in these areas than collaboration, and i'm also a technology optimist, but a little worried that we rhetoric, for example, in the media has tended to focus on the competition and not so much on the collaboration. for example, in ai there is a tremendous amount of collaboration between china and u.s. and that could also be jeopardized by some of these actions coming up. so in any case, the bottom line is regulatory system is behind on this. wto hasn't worked, that's one of the reasons we are embarked on the u.s. government actions as focused on 301. but we are in for a rough period. hopefully at the tunnel there will be better sense how the system can deal with u.s. system and chinese system and the global system can deal with these really complex issues related to tech transfer chblt i'll stop there. >> okay. great. thank you, paul. so chris, i know you work on

social media usage by extremist groups. now, until recently people did not think of social media as a sensitive technology. but you show how terrorists have used it to recruit members. there is a similar issue in terms of off the shelf drones that can be used by hobbies or terrorists. so do we need to broaden definition of technology, and if so how. >> thank you, darrell for the question. and for including me on the panel. i think a lot of tech transfer dough bates assume it's between states. one thing we have discovered over the last decade is really that ha the lo of the big geopolitical conflicts in events we have seen has been driven by tech transfer nontech actors and ability to use new technologies for ways their authors and originators never really considered. i want to just situate a bit

social media and off the shelf drones are really uses of commercial technologies. and i'm going to mention briefly in a bit get back to the use of dual use technologies which is what the core issue is with these. but i want to situate a little bit how tech transfer happens to nonstate actors tan tore wrist groups in the first place. because they don't have the resources to have a big research and development budget, they don't have the resources to acquire cutting edge technology. so they are really left with three options for getting desent technology. one is the open source moment. they can go on get hug and download ebbs and flow and build out their own sophisticated building models. another option is just leaked code. one thing i'm worried about is what happens when some of the leaked cyber weapons that the united states has built get into

hands of some pretty bad actors. the third is commercial applications and many of these technology decreases more and more become accessible to nonstate actors. and the challenge for nonstate actor is that even though some of them do have technical capabilities, it's still very hard for them to incorporate new technologies in the same way as state would. because they just don't have the same level of technical expertise or technical resources. so i was just presenting at the u.n. a few weeks ago on tech and terrorism conference, and the question was are terrorists groups go to download and build their own mod elels for ai to target u.s. soldiers in syria? i would be skeptical of that the way ai works. the algorithm you need to couple with data, and if you don't have

access to massive data and compute as well it's going to be hard to build your own model. what they can do is take the post train algorithms that google and incorporate it into an off the shelf drone. i suspect that's where we'll start to see this in the next couple of years. and i think it's something we'll have to pay more and more attention to. the advantage that commercial products have is that they tend to abstract away the complexity of the underlying technology. so if you think about the big app social media we all know about twitter and facebook and use of social media. a few years ago, currently most of it is happening on apps like telegram that are end to end encrypted. what is the the real break through is, we have had this endescripti

encryption what's new is you can get it through the app store. they are taking weigh so really two taps on your phone and suddenly you have access to secure enscripted device that previously really only the pentagon or some other places would have had a decade ago. and so when we talk about the use by nonstate actors of these new technologies, the sensitive technology question, i'm not a lawyer so i don't want to get into the fine details of that, but i do think we need to start thinking very hard about the use of new communications technologies, new robotics, new drones, that are commercially available, very cheap, and easy to use. and think about the dual use nature of them in advance of their product release. i think if you talk to developers at facebook or google today, they would probably admit that they made a mistake five or ten years ago when they set up their platforms and didn't really architect them in a way

that would make it difficult for abuse. and i would say that going forward, for a lot of the commercial technologies like off the shelf drones, there is a lot we can do to make sure they are not abused in the same way that isis and other groups abuse twitter and social media. so i have more to say but leave it for there. i think we've already gone over our half hour. >> okay. thank you, chris. i never thought about the app store as a means of technology transfer, but you are right, that is an important point. so i have a question for all of you, then after this question we'll open the floor to questions from the audience. so some of you have suggested the need for additional limits on technology transfer. on the first panel, richard mentioned that 70% of nasa research now is taking place outside of the united states. so the question i want to pose is, if we put new limits on technology transfer, is this going to encourage other country toss do exactly the same thing? and with a lot of the r and d

taking place outside of the united states, won't this end up harming our ability to innovate? and whoever wants to jump in, feel free to do so. >> i'll start. maybe create down the row dynamic because i'll be brief. to say i think these a valid concern which is why i want toor get the technology areas that we are most concerned about into roughly the kinds much groups i mentioned earlier plus maybe a couple others. but not general lysed more than we have to. recognizing that if we were to try to do so we wouldn't be successful, in first instance slow down kmeeconomic developme and growth. and not realistic, if you try to limit it. so we'll try to slow china down, a number of specific areas. and even there, i don't want to slow them down as a matter of permanent policy. just try to force them to play by the rules a little bit and maybe by us a little more time so their political system matures more before they truly reach our level of super

powerdom. >> yeah, i think that's a good question. again, ai provides a good example, which we are just sort of grappling with. so for example microsoft and google both have hundreds of engineers in china developing ai algorithms. so is that u.s. company? is that a chinese company? how do we look at these types of arrangements? and then companies like ten cent,al baba have research in u.s., they are hiring u.s. engineers and software developers in the u.s. and ai is inherently dual use. so i think we are just coming to grips with that. i think the report that michael mentioned focused in particular on ai. and there is a sense now that ai and other things like automation robotics are now becoming part in the u.s. national security

innovation base. and, in part, that's what things like the new syphilis legislation syphilis -- ---new legislation is better protect. but i think part of the interactions between communities. and i think ai, i've done a lot of work on that and looked at sort of the collaboration between china and the valley, for example. and it goes very deep. most of china's ai engineers and solve wear developers at their leading companies came through microsoft in beijing, have close ties to the valley, a lot of chinese investment as the report points out in startups in the valley that are driving innovation. so we have to be very careful in developing new ways to protect real national security concerns and assets that we don't stifle innovation inadvertently. in particular in area like ai

which is still very new in some ways. so the idea of the u.s. government, for example, jumping in and determining through that what investments a chinese company can do in a company in the valley gives a lot of people heartburn to say the least. so i think these are really valid issues to be grappling with, but i think the danger in extending out some of the, and revamping u.s. legal and other measures to control technology, is that we end up stifling innovation in key areas. >> i'll kind of maybe be the debbie downer. so it's a good role. i play it often. so i think there is a couple of things to think about. and most of my concerns are about artificial intelligence and related enabling technologies. i think one we really have to

think clearly not just about ai as a data compute and algorithms but also the kind of back bone ai runs. if we are thinking about g.p. use or various types of glitches at the current level, if you think of spector and melt down as indicative of ways of siphoning off technology and other types of secrets and enscript shuns, whatever you want, these are going to affect worldwide the way in which we can keep secrets and things we want to keep secret. so thinking about the stacks and thinking about everything from the chip to the instruction base to the software to the firm wear, to the hardware, to everything, right. so i think that's something that we need to take into consideration quite heavily. and then when we think about artificial intelligence, i mean the sensitive technology thing,

you know, i'm looking at this from an application base, and maybe not an investment base. so thinking about applications that are you know maybe not good ideas. so, for instance, we have the ability right now to generate fake audio and we can -- so going back to my voice encoding example, i can take any person's voice in this room and get about 20 hours of data of you talking, and i can create an artificial intelligent agent that just i can make it say anything. and no one can tell the difference between your voice and the computer's. so those ai agents can say anything. right. i can make it say anything. and no one can tell if it's really u or the computer. not only do we have artificial audio generation, we have video generation, using gans. i think that when we start seeing the coupling of things like fake video and fake audio

of somebody anywhere in the world saying things, that could be es calla tore i or inflammatory, and no one can tell the difference if that's actually the person saying it. that's an application in my view which is weaponization of operation. if we want to talk about operations as area of armed conflict, something we have engaged in for decades, more than that, really, like mel enyeah, but we call it operations for decades, we have to be very careful about those types of technologies that enable those types of military campaigns that are based solely on information. and information in this new era, right, is really the heart of it, right. when you can weaponize information and use information to get ahead, when you can think of using information technologies to do this, right, we have to be very clear about

what we are regulating, how we are regulating, and when we think it's crossed a line. so, again, i would walk back a little bit from questions of structural things where you can go to school and where you can invest to just think about the application base and where you would use that application for any good reason. it might be a fancy little toggle on my android phone, and is it really necessary and what are the risks to going to nonstate actors, just your angry neighbor down the road, right. so thanks. >> okay. why don't we open the floor to questions from the audience. so if you have a question, raise your hand. we have microphones. and just give us your name and organization. right up here near the front. >> thanks. my name is jessica lehman.

i recently was working on certificate ee us with department of defense. emerging technology and ai where there is foreign acquisition, particularly from china, for startups that receive government funding initially. and so how do we address issues of basically u.s. taxpayers funding foreign countries or companies taking over the use for acquiring these technologies? >> tok. who would like to answer that? don't everyone speak at once, because that's really rude. >> okay. i'll take a first stab at it. well, i think on any of these issues on that the devil will be in the details. so, for example, what sort of government oversight would be adequate in looking at something

as complex as ten vc companies all having minority investment in a start-up that may not have developed a technology that's viable yet but looks promising. so i think part of the challenge, and one of the challenges of the dox report and recommendations is converting that into sort of useful legislation, and then actually enabling a process like certificate ee us to actually make intelligent decisions on this without balancing the security and commercial concerns. and my concern is that structured right now it's on the national security side, obviously, and so may not have the the right personnel or resources to really evaluate some of these more complex challenges that involve sort of earlier stage investment in companies that are doing some cutting edge technology. so i think there has to it be a lot of thought given into how

that process works. i think we'll know when we have an example of that. i think the first time that we hear it reviewing early stage investment in a company that involves chinese minority investor, we'll have a better sense. of course, what the reality is, and mentioned in the die objection repodix report has served as deterrent partners from having a chine hechine -- chinese partner. and getting companies to help deal with it. >> i'd also say the devil is in the details as well. so it depends how far back you want to go. so talking about like early stage technologies and early

stage companies or companies formed right out of university, right, so if you look at a lot of engineers labs, they are going to come up with some sort of new great new widget and they are going to patent it. and then they are going to form a company. and probably much of the money that they got to do the research on the widget came from the u.s. government. right. we look back at google, right, when you look at the founders of google, they took money from the u.s. government through various types of grants. so thinking about sbir, getting money from darpa, onr, afrl, army research lab, there is so much money from these labs going into university labs that prop up the colonels of these ideas. and they get to a patentable technology and they patent it and they form a really small start-up with the lab manager and guy who invented it, then

they go out and seek vc support to do startups, then they have to think about. so if you are going from the generation of the idea funded by the united states government all the way down to vc investing in series a, then you have to say maybe series a, b, c, all of a you had is enby the time you go tote c you've got external investors that you didn't even plan on having in your portfolio to prop up your technology that you don't want to have this about, and you start being maybe a little more open to other types of investors. and that entire kind of patch work of how an idea gets funded and generated and all the way to ipo, now it's ipo and i need a market, and now have to go into a market like china, this is tech transfer, this is such a

bee hive, hornet wenest. >> it's a bad situation. >> yeah. so the incentive structure, if you are phd student in the lab you need grants. and grants you are going to get that will fund you for serious types of, if i need to build a reac tor, i'm not going to get that from the national endowment of humanities or something. i'm going to get that from darpa. i'm going to get that from others. >> okay. go ahead. >> the one thing i would add to that, building on one of heather's points, it's fundamentally different when the tech investment is for the product versus a talent. and if you look at ai in particular, which you can map out as a function of again algorithm, data, compute resources and talent. algorithms are a wash because most of them are open source. so china and u.s., neither is going to have an advantage. china probably has an advantage

in data for a whole host of reasons i won't get into. they also are at parity or maybe pulling an ahead in terms of their compute resources. only advantage that the u.s. has in this game right now is talent. and so to the extent they are funding our companies to acquire or absorb talent is something that we need to think really hard about. the one example that immediately comes to mind is andrew ink and going from google to bidu. >> stanford. >> stanford. so i would imagine he got a fair amount of government funding while he was at stanford. you know, to complicate it further, i would say we need to not just focus on the technology, but the talent itself. >> and on the talent side, with our current interest in cracking down on immigration, it could drive the talent further abroad which will make this problem

much worse. other questions. here's a question from the gentleman on the aisle. again if you could give us your name and organization. >> i'm francy from china daily. as you may know, eye cloud service has already been transferred to cloud company in province in far south china. and this company will be responsible for the operations starting from february this year. and i'm just quite curious about your thoughts and opinions on the risks on it and what's the consideration of such a deal. thank you. >> yeah, i think that's a complicated set of business decisions on ts pathe part of apple this involved. two pieces to this. one is the jv requirement in china. apple is essentially operating a cloud service there with icloud. so they were forced to enhance

their local partnership arrangement. and in this case they chose this company that's associated with municipal government. i think also apple sometimes anticipating some of the provisions under the new cyber security law in china which are still not finalized but which may require certain companies involved in critical information infrastructure provision to localized data, and that would include some foreign companies. although it's still not clear that apple would fall under that definition. so i think though from commercial point of view, apple made the decision also because it made sense in terms of customer service and other issues, so i think it was a complicated decision to do that. i think the media pass portrayed this as a security issue. apple will be keeping control of the encryption keys for users

there and has said that it will be very judicious and respond to legal requests. so i think there is a general sense that this is a problem, but i think we haven't seen an example yet of the chinese government requesting data from apple that isn't appropriate. i think the broader issue of law enforcement access to data is part of the whole picture here. so the cloud act was just recently passed in u.s. which is an attempt to provide a mechanism for law enforcement to gain access to the data in the cloud globally. it's going to be very tricky though for countries to be approved by congress as part of the cloud act. and have a bilateral executive relationship so that data, law enforcement data can be smoothly passed. so i think your point is well taken. i think there was an earlier

panel talked about issues like data localization and how that's become a big issue globally. but in apple specific case a number of considerations that led to that decision to move there. >> i'm curious how other countyryes are handling technology transfer. are there lessons we can learn? good or bad examples. you guys can get back to me in a few minutes if you'd like. but if you want to pass ks we can do that too. >> i want to get back to the topic of a minute ago on our standing in the world competitively. and just had a broader perspective, in addition to the other points already made, this is not just about complacency. chris made an important point what we have over china is talent which i interpret the

entrepreneur spirit silicon valley and designing new concepts and applications and software. and i agree. but it's not just those people, of course, it's the fact that first of all they live in the richest country on earth, which also is the center of a western community of more than a billion wealthy consumers. by the way other people that speak english on this planet include forth billion indians increasingly wealthy and much of africa and rest of the world speaks english as second language. chinese is long ways away from being able to compete in these terms. if you had an opportunity to make 10 million bucks you would rather prefer to make it in u.s. than china because you have more confidence hanging onto your own money chblt which gets to nicole points maybe we can let people hang onto their money too much in the united states or core sen traiting wealth too much. but nonetheless that's strong

environment. even as we try to erode them through dysfunctional washington, still some pretty strong foundations in place. so this is, again, not to encourage complacency, and put them in a broader context. >> also just to get away from maybe this consistent discussion of just u.s. and china doing this, right. i think we should also think about, what i think about is artificial intelligence is really the global spread of talent. when you are looking at like where you have major sources of investment as well as major sources of talent, there is going to be a giant sucking noise going to france, with macron's new ai initiative, with the fact that france will be giving lots of incentives for companies to go. you are looking at deep mine just opened an office there. you are looking at london as well, right, mayor of london has

said things like he wants to make london the center of artificial intelligence. you are looking at silicon valley, of course, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the place. canada, right, i mean canada is putting so much investment in artificial intelligence. looking at montreal, waterloo, which it's one of the best universities in canada for engineers, where rim initiated with blackberry. but also toronto being a major hub. then if you say let's get outside of this five eyes or western world or eu side of things, no one in this world has talked about israel. if you want to talk about major types of investment in ai and cloud robotics, you should look at israel. and they have massive advances in ai. in you want to look at security applications in particular. so i think again we need to

expand our view outwards from this very narrow western conception as well as very narrow western conception of it's just going to be a power play between russian and china. because all you've done is set the frame and you'll guilty blindsided and, you'll be what, iran has really good computer scientists? yes, this at the did. so this is something we need to take into consideration. >> thank you. that's a good point to broaden the discussion. we are just about out of time. but we'll give nicole the last question. >> nicole turner lee, brookings. so i actually want to bring this conversation, just get all of your feedback on the cambridge analytica facebook scandal. i'm sorry, i'm listening to you all, and chris talking about isis won't develop algorithms, i'm not so sure about that. but the question i have is, you know, universities have typically been under strict

scrutiny when it comes to products and services, certain stipulations taking government money. and cambridge analytica it was laid out it was done with intention of research. even though it got past alexander guy, it really went to cambridge analytica, but sort of repurchase posed along the way, which has been put up this conversation around guard rails, when it comes to the commercial sector engaging in research around it. they may not have access to -- they do have access to concealed algorithms which was demonstrated in this cambridge analytica piece. so i'm curious from all of you, should we start thinking about, tech transfer, more scrutiny personal engaging r&d own terms who sort of feel like permission is for giveness, we are sorry this happened, we'll come back and try to revisit this, which

again i think places universities and other actors sort of outside of the realm of being more innovative but also additional security risk. >> that's a great closing question. any thoughts from our panel? >> we need another panel for this one. this is such a great question. yeah. the way that i think about it is that i think we do need to push the tech sector to think much harder about negative externalities what it's doing. and i think ts risk with facebook, i view that -- let me back up and say when we are in d.c. we tend to think of policy maker as higher thing that happens. and rooms like this, because we are oriented to view governance as political institutions. but as soon as you go into digital governance, policy is baked in at the level of code and baked into the very architecture of how these technologies work. and so facebook made a decision

ten years ago to effectively growth hack its platform by how they allowed api to be used and they allowed basically they allowed your friends to have consent over whether or not your data was going to be shared with a third party. and they did that because they knew they would grow faster. and they were afraid if they didn't do that, someone else would come along and do it and they would out perform them. what we need to it be able to do in conversations like this is begin to communicate to a lot of the tech companies as they are building their products themselves, not ten years down the road when they already have massive network effects and 2 billion people, but early on in their product development cycle to think about what could go wrong here. and there is obviously we can come up with legislation to target things like what cambridge analytica did. my fear with that is that technology moves so fast that we

always end up a couple years behind always perennially. so i think the bigger issue is that folks like yourself, we need to go out to silicon valley and having conversations with them early in the product development cycle. i think you probably would have flgd that api choice was a bad idea. and doesn't seem like it was flagged internally. >> and i just expand on that i think if we don't legislate, i think the europeans will. i think the eu with gdpr coming up, a lot of people were of the opinion this happened after may 25 that facebook, and facebook still might be facing some action under that, which is going to set the standard for data privacy, which may or may not become a global standard but drive regulatory drive in europe and regulatory change elsewhere. >> just to follow up on that nicole. so one as a fellow at cambridge

analytica i have to make a disclaimer university of cambridge was not part of that, so let's make sure my peeps at cambridge are no, no, we didn't do that. so, one, i think also cambridge analytica they knew what they were doing. they noticingly broknowingly br. one side, they were shady enough they knew they were breaking the law cambridge analytica. facebook on the other hand was so negligent in thinking about, oh, whatever, i don't know what you are doing, fine, have the data. there was gross negligence, probably some gross misconduct from other types of things from the platform, and then just knowingly breaking the law. that's something we ahave to kep in mind. other thing i have would like to flag the work professor of

washington who said maybe we do need an algorithm at institutions when commercial sectors and if we need to start thinking about whether or not it rises to a dual use or expert controls or things like that, we need to have some sort of federal institution. so i think ryan's work is really amazing on this. and then, finally, to again put my hat on as debbie downer, gdpr in the eu is already making everybody kind of just like a little bit crazy, how they are going to comply with all this stuff. cambridge analytica aside. but even in the case we might be able to prosecute cambridge analytica under gdpr but won't have arbitration for average person. so gdpr says you have a right to data and look at these things and have a right to bring basically arbitrate if things become wrong. but they have actually not set up any institutions for right of

recourse. so you say it's so great on painter. oh, yeah, you broke the law, i'm going to go to a judge. what's a judge? right. we don't have that. we don't have the court or expertise on this. so unless the institutions are created alongside gdpr and you don't have contradictory things being said, you know, section one here, section two here and contradict themselves in some ways, gdpr good start but not hang my hat on this this is the regulatory system. >> mike last word ton the panel. >> tiny thought much broader perspective with less knowledge than my copanelists, the last few years private giants are really becoming more scrutinized. because for 20 years they were super heroes of the modern economy and you couldn't walk down the street without seeing a book celebrating bill gits or steve jobs or whoever and they could do no wrong and creating this new economy. and they are amazing people.

but the edward snowden and government debate about wikileaks that was taking all the scrutiny and hits on what big data was doing to our lives. far east way, extent of the debate through early part of the century. and dot com world was getting credit for the spring. just being good and betterment of humanity with other questions being asked. and very last thing i'll say if you want a general overview of cyber ai read darrell book future of work, and partly about future of work, but nice summary of a lot of these other issues we are talking about today, so early plug for your forth coming book, my friend. >> all right. mike. lunch is on me after that.

we are out of time. but i want to thank you all for ta very enlightening conversation. thank you very much. >> tomorrow, president trump goes to michigan for rally in mccomb county. the president is going there in sfeed of speaking at the white house correspondent dinner in washington d.c. which is happening at the same time. c-span will have at 7:00 p.m. eastern. then white house correspondent dinner. this year headliner will be comedian mitch shael wolf con trib tube for for the daily show. live coverage saturday 9:30 p.m. c-span. >> then pentagon papers case. in 1971 former military analyst daniel elsberg released top secret study to the "new york

times" which fought the mirks son to publish. restricted power over the press and broad end journalist first amendment protection. our guests are two of the top litigators. flad abrams representing "the new york times" in case against the nixon administration and ted olsen former solicitor general under george w. bush. watch landmark cases monday 9d eastern on c-span and join the conversation. our hashtag is landmark cases. and follow us at c-span. and we have resources on our website for background on each case. landmark cases companion book. link to the national constitution centers, and the landmark cases podcast, at c-span.org/landmark cases. >> acting irs commissioner david kautter appeared before the senate finance committee to address his agency