hello and welcome to worlds apart of data mining is crucial for doing business these days but should the same tools that companies use to influence our choice of consumer goods be applied electing a president well to discuss that i'm now joined by harper lee who served as the chief technology officer for president obama two thousand election campaign thank you very much for your time sir now i know that before joining the obama campaign you're worked as the chief technology officer for a clothing company and you seem to have made

a very smooth transition but some people would fill it be that lazy about applying some of the tag it makes and marketing tools to politics because some of us still sort of fill down that politics should be conducted in the same way as commerce is that too idealistic yes it was that well i think it i mean i think ultimately when you're talking about a politician you're talking about something i mean it's been marketing forever yes i mean it's all about going in knocking on a door talking i mean in the. ages of go it was very community based but it was all about marketing you know what this politician is the best for this reason and so i think it's what we're seeing now is instead of us you know the digital technologies that help elect the president we didn't all we did is kind of help distribute his authenticity and the genuineness that he brought to more people but at the same time in the united states as far as i know the every turn policy on goods. very

liberal you can always bring a product that you don't like back and get your money but unfortunately if politics and doesn't work this way you have to wait another four years but i think that i think i think you're pushing too hard on the narrative that it's that it's like a product i do think that. it's true that you need to make sure that you vote for the right person and you can't return that vote but it is a permanent forever you know in the u.s. it's four years other countries have shorter and many many places it's for a mayor a congress person it might be a year or two years but the thing that's important is. the candidate themselves you cannot use technology to make a bad candidate good you can only elect a good candidate and mr reed let me push you on that you just said that four years is not that long of a time but to me when you are sitting around the room when it will. happen big country can get through anything i don't like look at syrian for you know difference between life and death so a lot can happen in that period if that's where you have to make sure you elect the

right president how do you really make sure if as you just agreed that you are applying all that marketing tools to the political campaigns but you're making the jump and i think this is an important jump distinction is that even with a product we're talking about a product i can say that this is the best stereo and i can use all the marketing in the world but if the stereo sucks it doesn't matter how much money i pour into marketing i think that happens a lot with candidates where you have candidates that aren't very good and you've kind of it's they're very good and the people largely choose which one they want regardless of the marketing the marketing helps get the message out to a wider group so it's more especially in the us this is a this is huge is that we did not convince any republicans to vote for the president we only got democrats to vote and so in the us it's much more about turnout than it is about persuasion so using these marketing tools which were marketing tools that's exactly correct what we did is we were my people that they should go vote but if people are not. from the very beginning that they have to

show up at the ballot box why do they really need all of those people especially in the world because but it's not about persuasion once again it's only about turnout so they already are persuaded to vote they just happen to not vote maybe they are in a disenfranchised area where they are unable to make it to the polls or the polls have been pushed further away maybe it's about education so making sure that people aren't lied to a lot of it is we have a very big department in the campaign that was called voter protection specifically about making sure people got in line that they were eligible to vote that they could vote in the us the most important thing is turnout and if you remember that after the campaign after we won a lot of the dialogue was about how we got so many black african-americans or latinos to vote well that shows that what we did is we stepped outside of where the republicans were able to go and we and we convinced more people to go vote these tools that we built these marketing tools were much more about reminding people to

vote and sadly democrats are kind of lazy we always forget to vote now i know that you volunteer in two thousand and eight campaign. in two thousand and twelve and in your previous interviews you said that you did it because you believe in barack obama what is it in his candidacy that pill to you personally in two thousand and eight it was a i mean we all remember george bush and george bush you know in some cases was good some cases bad i think more bad and i wanted a change i wanted to change from that kind of status quo and the president came in he gave us a lot of things that we wanted health care repealing don't ask don't tell all sorts of really good things i think a very positive first term except it was it was the promises he made were to two term promises and so for me it was it was successful in the first term but then i wanted to make sure that we got the job done so that's why the second term was so important and it also i think it's a testament to his gray hair is a testament to. hard of a job it is you look at all the past presidents of the u.s.

they apparently instantly turn gray when they become president now interesting that you bring up the subject of hair because any newspaper story that they're resident on the you commented on your hairstyle you know your choice of clothing your glasses your hipster look and i think president obama i wouldn't call him hipster but he looks and talks in did a little bit different from the their american president. his predecessor but i wonder if the way he conducts his policy was really all that different and i think it was more centrist i think a lot of people had hoped but if you look at the voting records and you look at kind of what he said during his first campaign he didn't promise to be super left you know he didn't he didn't say i'm going to be the most liberal president in the history of the u.s. he was very centrist and i think it was one of the problems that we saw it was we all kind of put our hopes into this hope campaign individually saying this is what i think it should be about and in some cases it worked in some cases it didn't but

i think that compared to the alternative it is it has been incredible now you mentioned what attracted you in president obama and i assume you were converted to his camp in an old fashioned way i mean that you saw him probably on television you read maybe some of his articles or his bucks if. you were converted in that old fashioned way why do you think other people need all that sophisticated use of technology q i don't think it's a. conversion once again i think that it's really important to understand that the us campaigns are very very much not about persuasion and so it's really not about i'm going to go out and knock on someone's door and tell them something that they haven't heard already with the twenty four hour news cycle that we have in the u.s. specifically about politics it's very hard to find someone who who is undecided we talk about undecided voters a lot in the campaign and none of us knew any of the. like we would reach out to

all of our friends and try and find an undecided voter we could never find them what you did have is people who are maybe a little less interested in the republican side or a little less interested democrat side and i think that's where the president came in flourish where after gore and after kerry a lot of us were a little bit less interested in the status quo democrat candidate just less we were we were suddenly you know libertarians are we certain suddenly republicans we were just kind of like. and i think that's what you see a lot with the republicans right now in the u.s. where they're not excited about some of the candidates that are excited about the their candidates holding the government hostage various things like that and so they're just kind of so i think we're going to see in this upcoming election actually a very interesting race between very moderate i would say normal republicans very moderate a normal democrats trying to find a candidate that they can agree on because at the same time when i think about the

middle america the normal not the louder you know fox news america the middle america it's pretty reasonable and they just want someone who they can agree with and they just want someone who won't send their people to war they want someone who will have good economic policies they want all these things and we found a lot of that in the president but. nobody knows it's going to happen a lot of these things that you just mentioned about not all the promises that i made on the campaign trail but actually on the you know fulfillment of those promises and some would argue that you know that's the use of technology puts a lot of emphasis on the elections as if it is some sort of political transaction rather than focusing on changing the nature of the process with the use of technology i mean. the president has done a lot to do that he has c.t.o. right now todd park the previous c.t.o. as well and c.t.o. have done a lot to help make get more transparency to the various organizations that are in

the government up to the white house but the todd park right now is the one that i'm excited about because what he's doing is he's bringing in some people from the private sector to come in as innovation fellows to help guide this change because you're absolutely correct you can't just use high technology to get elected you have to also use it to lead you also mentioned that one of your main objectives was bringing people to the polling stations and one of the methods that you used if i'm not mistaken was to actually. you know reach out to people who didn't vote at that time and maybe do that through you know their facebook friends or through you know some most of their values to me as somebody who was born in soviet union this sounds very quickly because if you can use that to encourage people to vote you can use that for all sorts of last you know an example of this is you know how it worked so my brother lives in colorado colorado is about a ground states was very important for us. when you go to the polls they would shadow your name and so someone would cross your name off the list so the. unlike

other countries the u.s. has an open voter registry that we can all see and so as a candidate you get access to the voter rolls and you can look at that list and you can say ok this person lives in this part of colorado and then when they're crossed off you can cross them off the list then at that point we know that we don't have to go knock on their door to remind them to vote because remember it's all about turnout now with that said if arius organization could if they wanted to do the exact same thing to try and stop people from voting yes however that didn't happen but could that happening of course but we could also get hit by meteorites and we could be hit by lightning and we could all die in a helicopter crashes you know all sorts of things could happen but. it doesn't give you any reason. and so lost even if you were one of the first to pioneer data is that they. did is a tool and it's a tool that can be used for good or bad like all tools i choose to use data for good and we did use to data for good and so to to kind of wax poetic on whether it

could be used for bad as we have the same conversation about in life mr reed we have to take a very short break now but when we come back the clever use of technology can help leticia get elected but can be thing to acknowledge g.b. used to how the voters keep those elected in check that's coming up in a few moments on a well to part. leg it was terrible they weren't very hard to take out. once again there is a place that has sex with her right there no legs don't want.

to. play. live. a. lot of wonderful strong arm and a lot of. new knowledge base just like you and mona. lenny.

pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i roll researcher. welcome back to worlds apart from really discussing politics and technology with harper reed who used to work for president obama as the chief technology officer mr reed i know that at some point of your life you go to addicted to the so-called personal informatics tracking your way to. what have you stopped and i wonder if it's possible to develop. some sort of application that would allow or did they were both politicians performance on the yardsticks that they are personally interested in you know. there's a few really good organizations that are doing this right now one of my favorites is pro publica and the united states is doing a lot of work to build software around journalism and politics to try and make sure

that the people we're electing are actually doing the things and saying the things in our fact checked i think that's a really good summary of it because a lot of times especially when it comes to congress you have a lot of words that are being said and there's so much just kind of b.s. you never know what's real and so there's a lot of good organizations that are doing this excitingly it's all third parties you know there are some for republicans or independents and there's democrats and so it's you can you can really find a good amount of software and data about whether the people you're electing are doing the job that you would like to do now i was following the recently over the. website fiasco and for those of our viewers why not familiar with that there's been a major difficulty. here is health care website and and thousands and some possibly even millions of people haven't been able to register and get their services now you wrote in one of the tweets that you gave in the device to the government quote

focus on the user experience little wins the buz or is the filling of progress meanwhile spend time fixing the bad hands and i think that's ultimately a recipe for an the government in any country just focus on the user experience if you want to be a success. we hired the first i think the first user experience full time professional on the campaign twenty eleven in the history of campaigns and because user experience is one of the most important professions that you can have in technology and the reason is because it it turns out that is functional it just works you know it works but it makes it usable so it makes it that people want to use it it makes it's open people use it they tell their friends about it and health care doc of is so important you know it's so important to give all these people health care that has to be usable and i don't think that user experience was sure it was thought about but i don't think it was thought about a lot and now that it's not working what can they do to make it so when i go there

to try and sign up but i don't feel like i failed at it you know maybe it just pops up a thing that just maybe a little more friendly there's a lot of ways to do it and it's you know that comment although it was about health care doc it was mostly targeted towards of people would be armchair kind of quarterbacks who are sitting back and kind of thinking about how to fix things but given the difficulties that the obama administration had rolling out the obama health care website they said to be one area where they experience absolutely no glitches at all and i'm talking about the n.s.a. spying on not only the american citizens but also the rest of the wild i seemed that something on this scale would require access a lot of expertise in the fairly wide pool of talent where you personally surprised by how elaborate and sophisticated that scheme is especially given again the difficulty of rolling out

a decent healthcare website i don't know anything about the insides of either one so it's really hard to actually compare them but i know a little tiny bit about government procurement and how to get work in the government and i'm guessing this is purely a guess that the n.s.a. stuff is just as bad. i mean because if you link about when you log in to a government website in any country it's never good is it. but my my and my id i mean not have expressed it eloquently is that it seems that whenever you're dealing with services that are required by people millions of people you're having and i say. to you so your question is more why is it the n.s.a. can apparently roll out mass surveillance and not have bugs i think that i don't know anything about either of them enough to comment really but if i were to guess i would say they probably both have as many bugs except the n.s.a. when you can't log into so you don't see them because government technology doesn't work procurement doesn't work when you have these giant organizations building

things they oftentimes fail but they were able to maintain that program for quite a number of years and you know we will keeping its secrets much easier than building software and so building good software that users can use and if you think about let's let's let's just imagine if i was to build software described by word stoughton. very few people would log into it yes not hundreds of millions very it would integrate with very small number of systems with just because acting data this is all i mean so i think it's really worth comparison but the question you ask is interesting but i think the answer goes back to procurement who is building these things and the problem with health care dot gov is that the people building them have maximized their talent on getting a contract not maximize their talent on getting technology don't seem to be focusing on the technical side but in one of your previous interviews are currently are saying that one of the most exciting things for you about president obama was

how he proves he's values into the you know how his values they reflected in the people he hires you try to also build those values into the way you conduct the campaign do you think his values are maybe also reflected in the massive surveillance operation that is going on we don't know any specifics about the n.s.a. stuff which i'm not for by any means however we do know that it started pre september eleventh. so since it started that long ago i don't think that the entire program is based on the president's values now the question is and this is a question that i put to anyone is when we're talking about defending against terrorism which ultimately i think is it's a catch twenty two right because you don't want to take a program away that is saving people and creating a safer environment but at the same time you know i truly believe that we all have a right to internet freedom i believe we shouldn't be surveilled except but it's

very hard for me to say there should be none of that if it is in fact creating making the world a better place so the question i have for anyone is how do we prove that that either it is working. because if it's working the conversations suddenly very different and. if it is working my worry then is scope creep because we have a data when it comes to mass surveillance has not necessarily played well when we look at history and my worry is that you know if the scope creep is my worry well. leads me to my next question in one of your recent all pads in the new york times you said that they've done things doubt elections but we now need to work to carry out transforming the government and i wonder how far do you think that process should go it's one thing to build a good campaign or a functioning health care website but would you be in favor of for example of a digital democracy a way in you know in all sorts of subjects i think that i am

a big believer in hope and so i think that we could we could take a very negative view of many of these things and we could say yes if we offer if we allow everyone to comment it's just going to be terrible but i don't think that will happen i think that it could be very positive i think that adding more technology allowing more people to participate will be positive and if you look at what the internet has done all over the world worldwide. it has democratized access to information and so the fact that we can that i can post a blog and you can comment on it my mom can comment on it and some young person in south africa can comment on it but it's not just about commenting it's about it's not a way of well you know we're talking about two hundred sample i mean that's a social so let's get to that point we're not at the point now we can't use the internet to do digital democracy why not. the technology is not there but the mood of registration of it and all of that we can have an idea a digital age you can have those usual elections once every four years but aren't

you worried about digital i.d.'s i don't know i'm asking you i'm not so i think we can get there but i don't think we get there today because i don't think it's going to work today because i don't think that the establishment of all can. want that but in principle do you think it's even possible not just for the americans but for democracy in any other country to actually get people involved in that process on such a substantial level yes because it could make a politics totally dysfunctional or could make it work for a much better. i mean i think that there's this there is a very i think in the us we we come from a different place when it comes to data and the internet and we don't have a lot of the aggressive historical cultural history that that that shows how data can be abused and so when we come to do now we know what we don't mean sorta but we don't have any no one sees the ramifications in the u.s.

is it because people are just not and formed and therefore they simply don't care no i think they don't care i really don't know i don't understand it but if people don't care and you give them all god's power in making those very consequential decisions can you imagine where it's going to lead all of us not just your country but they were asked as well i mean i can't i can't comment on it because i mean i don't know right with but i do know that i am i am a little disappointed in my peers in the u.s. because many of them don't care as much as others do and there's a lot of people who do care like you there's a there's a group of people who are standing up doing a lot of documentation a lot of that but i do think there are opportunities for the internet to continue to democratize access to everything and so we can we can create a world where we're democratizing access to all the good things where we can create a world where it's only fear and being driven by fear and i choose the positive right now i know that you are and in favor of the monetary of the internet for

everyone but i wonder if you think that's really an achievable goal at this point of time because there is a lot of digital inequality in the world some countries have far had technologically than others and i wonder if you can really and sure that. when you put it when you make a list of all the countries with fast broadband the united states is not number one so i think that there is a lot of digital inequality in the world i think there's also a lot of general inequality in the world and i think i would like to increase you know i would i would hope that by giving. more access to more information more access more education more access to early childhood education etc that we can create a better world for everyone and you know i mean obviously you know we they also people also need water so i mean there's a lot of problems in the world that need to be solved i personally can help solve technology well you can solve technology for political campaigns and hopefully the way you change this world a stroke politics but you mentioned some of the reservations about americans and

holland formed or involved they are and while the ferrous do you have any of those reservations money you are allowing at a candidate of your choice to take it to take power because you're very adversarial about somehow i allowed the candidate. for the best candidate that we had which i supported one hundred percent and there's many choices that the government has made that i don't necessarily agree with but there are a majority of the toy choices that the government's made that i do definitely agree with and so do i like everything no do i like almost everything yes my happy that i have friends that are in afghanistan. you know do i hope that maybe that will make the world a better place yes. could i have made a different choice sure but i think i made the right choice so we can go in the circle where apparently i made the wrong choice for you and i don't think it's going to get anywhere because i disagree well you're entitled to your choice of

regardless of my opinion but i guess my point was that you know going back to be an essay probably program we are dealing with your country is the leading democracy and well then obviously the fate of different me you may be. somewhat dependent on who is elected in the united states so if you felt so passionately about him back down obvious did that entitle see him to some sort of responsibility even though i don't say that in the adversarial way i think it titles me to some responsibility and i'm not i i'm not claiming that i think it's important to note as i said that this program started well before the president came into power and so the response that i have is to make sure the best person is the is the in control of this of this power and so if i am if i'm constantly guessing myself then that's not that's not like being a leader you look a leader so that you hope that they will do good once they have that power. and of

course i can say you know i wish things would be different like when the patriot act happened in the early two thousand and i was very frustrated you know when all of the surveillance obviously started when i got outed in two thousand and six or two thousand and eight very frustrated when edward snowden's revelations came about yes of course very frustrated that doesn't mean that the president is suddenly about president it means that the president has more responsibilities than we thought and so i hope that he makes the right choices and i trust him to do so well mr reed thank you very much for your perspective and please join us again same place same time here in the world. china for example they're growing exactly. credit in the system they creating more

debt in the system the rich are getting richer and the poor poor eight hundred million people live less than fifteen dollars a day in china and that doesn't seem to be changing it's the number one problem the chinese government has right now you know it seems to me that what the rich have done is that you know they made themselves so comfortable but in the process of destroying the entire process of where they got their wealth from the first place the government student people. these. days. i think if you are. going to be the. top of the. majority what to do. how do you operate. as proof not an olympic hockey. league.

by fire. the headlines for march international rioters that received a convention center in the ukrainian capital have allowed the police inside the building to get out there are reports that opposition leader vitaly klitschko helped that happen but the interior ministry says it ordered the police to leave. this as two police officers kidnapped by rioters in ukraine's capital have been released both were allegedly tortured as it fears are mounting of radical protestors derailing the concessions of the authorities. and in other news up to twenty nine people are killed in street clashes with security forces across egypt meanwhile a powerful explosion is reported outside a police building in the city of suez on the third anniversary of the two thousand and eleven revolution.