THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2019 NY F3C MYK NYxx,2019-09-19,F,003,Cs-4C,E1
Brad Smith began his career at Microsoft in- Aside from serving as its president, he
is the company’s chief legal officer and the
co-author of a new book, “Tools and Weap-
ons: The Promise and the Peril of the Dig-
ital Age.” Andrew Ross Sorkin, DealBook
editor and columnist for The New York
Times, interviewed Mr. Smith at The
Times’s first DealBook/DC Strategy For-
um. The following excerpts have been
edited and condensed.
The world of technology and Silicon Valley
now feels like it’s in the cross hairs of Wash-
ington and regulators in a way that it has
never been before. And the question I have
for you is, having lived through the past 10,
if not 20, years and the turnaround of
Microsoft and everything else, I imagine you
get phone calls and you see other execu-
tives at rival companies. I’m thinking of
Facebook and Apple. I’m thinking of Google
and I’m even thinking of your neighbor,
Amazon. When you see people like Jeff
Bezos in Seattle, what do you tell them?
How do you get in front of this? What would
you say, given your experience, that they
should be doing?
I think that there’s a few things that we’ll
always need to think about. I think the first
thing you have to step back and think about
is: Why is this company in this situation?
And to a very large degree it’s because tech-
nology has become a tool and a weapon. It is
creating rise to so many broad societal con-
cerns. I think the hardest thing for anybody
in this position is you have to step back and
you have to look yourself in the mirror and
not see what you want to see but what other
people see. I think you have to acknowledge
the problems, because until you acknowl-
edge the problems, you can’t solve them,
and nobody is going to believe that you’re
trying.Right now, Silicon Valley is in a very defen-
sive posture. I think that’s probably fair to
say. There was an article in The New York
Times just this week about whether Apple
was placing its own apps higher in the App
Store than everybody else’s. Which, by the
way, I think you could make the parallel with
some of the issues that Microsoft was deal-
ing with when it comes to the web browser
war back in the day. To acknowledge up
front that, yes, we’ve done this and it’s a
problem, does that create more of a prob-
lem or not?
It does both. Having lived through it in the
’90s, having been a lawyer, being still a law-
yer, at least in part of what I do, you really
have to take very carefully all your advice
from the lawyers. That’s the first thing I
would say because there’s actually a real
tension between a statement that a lawyer
will say will constitute an admission and
saying things that, frankly, everybody
knows to be true and puts you on the path to
solving a problem. And as I argue inside
Microsoft anytime such issues arise, in the
long run you’re better served by solving the
problem than by trying to win a lawsuit.Chris Hughes, who’s famous and one of the
founders of Facebook, wrote an Op-Ed and
is now, I believe, working with the Depart-ment of Justice arguing that Facebook
should be broken up. And part of his argu-
ment isn’t just the monopoly issue, it actu-
ally relates to privacy. And I believe that his
viewpoint is even broader than just Face-
book itself. It’s all of big tech. What do you
think of that, well, in terms of the way we
look at antitrust in America today?
I think it’s a really important question, and
I’m not here or anywhere else advocating
that anybody be broken up or sued for that
matter. I do think one of the more interest-
ing developments in antitrust law has been
people — first from a scholarly perspective
and now the head of the Justice Department
Antitrust Division — embracing a broader
approach. For many years, the prevailing
theory was that the only kind of harm that
mattered, that was relevant in the world of
antitrust, was purely economic harm,
which fundamentally tended to relate ei-
ther to driving people out of business or pre-
venting them from entering or prices rising,
with prices being the ultimate test. And this
new school of thought, which I think is a log-
ical one, is that actually, given the role of
technology in society, we do need to think
about the impact on our privacy. We need to
think about it in terms of the impact on our
democracy perhaps more than anything
else. And so there is more in the world of an-
titrust than economics alone.You had a meeting with President Obama inthe Oval Office in 2013. You write about it.
But I think it’s probably worth sharing blow
by blow to the room. He effectively said this
was coming for Silicon Valley. What hap-
pened?
Well, it was a fascinating meeting. It was in
December of 2013, just basically a week be-
fore the holidays, and it brought together
just over a dozen of the tech leaders, the
household names people everybody would
recognize. And it was all about the Snowden
disclosures. And we were there for a very
particular purpose, which was to make the
case to President Obama, Vice President Bi-
den, the senior staff at the White House, that
there needed to be more checks and bal-
ances on the data that was in the hands of
the National Security Agency.
And you know, as tended to happen, peo-
ple went around the room and there was a
moment when President Obama, in addition
to listening very thoughtfully and frankly
having issues, made a different point. He
said, “I have a suspicion that the guns will
turn.” He said, “All of you have more data
about people than the government does, and
the kinds of demands that you are making
on the government when it comes to privacy
will eventually be made on you.” I wrote it
down because I thought at the time that it
was prescient.
And as we say in the book, in a way, Cam-
bridge Analytica in 2018 became the Three
Mile Island for data and privacy and tech-
nology — meaning suddenly people woke up
and almost overnight the political climate
changed.
So here’s my next tech question: What do
you think it means to be a patriotic company
in America today? And the reason I asked
this question is because we have a number
of big tech companies that have said, we
don’t want to do business with the govern-
ment. And I’m thinking of Google on Maven.
You’ve seen the protests at Amazon. You, by
the way, are participating in a project with
Washington State, I believe, on facial recog-
nition that some people would consider
controversial. So where is the line, and when
is a company supposed to say, I’m doing this
with the government or I’m not?
It is a fundamental question that I don’t
think is something one answers with a sin-
gular approach to everything. But I can give
you a very concrete example that reflects
how we thought about it. We asked our-
selves what would we provide to the Penta-
gon, and the answer is everything we make.
We feel it is our responsibility as an Ameri-
can company to ensure that people who are
literally putting their lives at risk to defend
our country have the best technology that
we can create for them. But that’s Step One.
Step Two is we’ve also said in a democracy,
like this one, we have a voice. We have a cor-
porate voice, and it is right that we think
about the broader ethical and policy issues
that the use of technology in the military can
raise. What does it mean to deploy artificial
intelligence for weapon systems? These are
fundamentally important questions for the
future, and so we said we would engage, we
would think, we would meet, we’ll be public.
And I think that, in our view, is the right ap-
proach in the democratic nation.Let me ask you this: You also write about an
experience where an adviser to President
Trump talks to you, I think, about using
Microsoft to spy elsewhere in the world, to
which you say no. What happened?
Well, this relates to another aspect of what it
means to be thoughtful in a democratic na-
tion. First of all, we all live and are fully com-
mitted, I think, to the rule of law and the pro-
tection of certain liberties that are en-
shrined in our Constitution and the Bill of
Rights. And, you know, those rights are not
rights that are enjoyed by Americans alone.
There are certain fundamental rights, hu-
man rights, that, in fact, are enshrined in a
global set of principles and even documents
that have been endorsed by our own gov-
ernment. So what we’ve also made clear in a
wide variety of contexts is, even for our own
government, or for that matter for any gov-
ernment, we won’t voluntarily sacrifice the
human rights of our customers. We have to
put that first above all else.O.K., but let’s speak to that, because on one
end you’re willing to give the technology
over to the Pentagon. On the other end, we
had the situation with Apple and San
Bernardino several years ago and the phone
that the government desperately wanted to
be opened, and you took the side of Apple.
Well, first of all, I would say what this really
points to is two distinct things. There is ac-
cess to technology, and there is access to
people’s data. We create technology. We are
prepared to provide it to the United States
government. There may be times that if the
U.S. uses technology in a way that we think
runs afoul of the law, we will use our voice.
We sued the Obama administration four
times over the surveillance issues. Now,
when you get the people’s data, the first
principle is — unlike the technology we cre-
ate — the data that people store in our cloud
does not belong to us. We are not the owner
of it. It is their data. It is our customers’
data, and our first responsibility in our view
is to ensure that their rights and their data
are preserved.Let me make it a little more complicated.
You have a founder named Bill Gates who is
very anxious about the issue of encryption.
He is very worried, talks quite openly and
has implied, at least, that he was not neces-
sarily on board with the view of Microsoft
when it came to that Apple phone, and he
has real concerns that in a world where
everything is end-to-end encrypted — when
Facebook encrypts its entire system — that
actually it’s creating an even bigger prob-
lem.
First of all, you’re absolutely right that
there’s a variety of views. You know, there’s
a thorny set of questions around encryption
that will continue to merit thoughtful con-
versation. There are certain propositions
that we would sign up for readily, and then
there are aspects for which there should be
more conversation. For us, the right answer
is not to create back doors. I’ve said before,
the path to hell begins at the back door of a
software product, because if you create
that, you basically undermine people’s se-
curity and privacy.ON STAGEMicrosoft’s President on Silicon Valley in Crisis
‘Until you acknowledge the problems, you can’t solve
them. And nobody is going to believe you’re trying.’
Brad Smith told
Andrew Ross Sorkin
that his company
has thought deeply
about when to share
its technology with
the Pentagon and
when to fight to
keep user data
private from the
government.SAMUEL CORUM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESsame, does it matter how it is reached? And
therein lies the real debate.
All of which raises the question of what it
means to be a business leader in today’s en-
vironment, especially now, when chief exec-
utives are increasingly being asked by their
employees and customers to develop policy
positions when there is seemingly a void of
leadership in Washington.
Business leaders are taking positions on
topics like foreign policy, immigration, guns
and other issues that once were left strictly
to lawmakers. Many C.E.O.’s say they have a
moral duty to speak up.
But it has, in many cases, put business
and government at odds. Technology com-
panies, like Google and others, have ended
certain programs they worked on for the
government, objecting on ethical grounds.
Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft
and author of “Tools and Weapons: The
Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age,”
told me: “We asked ourselves, what would
we provide to the Pentagon? And the an-
swer is everything we make. We feel it is our
responsibility as an American company to
ensure that people who are literally putting
their lives at risk to defend our country have
the best technology that we can create for
them.”
But he said it was not simple: “We’ve also
said in a democracy, like this one, we have a
voice. It is right that we think about the
broader ethical and policy issues that the
use of technology in the military can raise.”
Mr. Friedman, even in the 1960s and
1970s, was thinking about C.E.O.’s speaking
out on political issues and he had a clear
view.
To him, if corporate executives want to
use their influence, “then they must be
elected through a political process.”
In other words, he was suggesting that
business should stay out of politics. It is a cu-
rious view for a free-market champion. In-
deed, today’s C.E.O.’s — far more than poli-
ticians — seem to be listening to the market.“Ultimately, a business’s
job is to deploy the
capital correctly and to
make profits.”DIFFERING VIEWS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL COHEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESTop, the
cybersecurity task
force at the
DealBook
conference. Far left,
Gov. Gina Raimondo
of Rhode Island. At
left, Abigail Disney,
documentary
filmmaker and
philanthropist with
Grover Norquist,
president of
Amercans for Tax
Reform.