Why Obama’s First CTO Is ‘Hopeful’ About DC, Loves Twitter – PCMag

Former US CTO Aneesh Chopra talks about big data, the importance of net neutrality, and why there's hope yet for getting things done in Washington, D.C.

For this week's edition of Fast Forward, I'm talking to Aneesh Chopra, the first Chief Technology Officer of the United States, but now the author of Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government and founder of NavHealth and Hunch Analytics.

We discuss how technology can change government, consumer privacy and most importantlyhis optimism about technology, government, and the direction in which the country is heading.

Dan Costa: I want to talk about the optimism that I have sensed from you about technology and government because frankly, that optimism is hard to find these days.

Aneesh Chopra: But it's grounded in reality. That's the best news. We have reasons to be hopeful we'll get into.

I will allow you to convince me. But first, you were the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. I understand that role is now open. Is there any chance you would like to serve again?

No. I will not serve in this role but I will say, I'm excited about the team that President Trump has already assembled in that office. His Deputy Chief Technology Officer [Michael Kratsios] is a phenomenally talented technology leader and has already begun making, I think, very positive moves to continue and build upon the work that we'd started.

So you were the first CTO. Can you just explain to the audience why the United States needs a Chief Technology Officer?

Well, let's begin with what the President had called for. President Obama ran for office and he basically said we've got to find a way to tap into the expertise of the American people to solve big problems. He didn't really believe Washington was going to be the center. And whether you voted for the President or not, that was his philosophy and he realized, early, that we have new technologies that allow us to communicate all over the world instantly

But...to influence [anyone in] Washington, you've got to hire lobbyists, you've got to be in some smoke-filled room in D.C. It didn't have the same sense of democratization, and so [Obama's] assignment on day one, when he was in the midst of the economic crisis, was to create a position called the Chief Technology Officer, who would help him advance a more open and transparent government. Not only to make the data the government held more available, but to listen to the American people's voices so we were more participatory and to find [a way] to collaborate between the public and private sector and nonprofit sectors to solve big problems. And that's exactly what we focused on in the first term.

We're going to get to the sort of government data sets in a bit, but I saw you gave a very optimistic speech yesterday. It's obviously a very polarized environment in Washington, D.C. right now, but your speech was filled with optimism that I think is really hard to find these days. Why do think things are getting better, at least in this particular respect?

Well it appears we're on a bipartisan trajectory to modernize the interface between the public sector and the private sector, and what that means is that both parties are in general agreement that we want to tap into the expertise of the American people, allow entrepreneurs and innovators to join hands. We may disagree on what we want them to focus on and we'll have a big political debate should it be on closing up our borders or advancing health care for everyone. That's a healthy debate. We're not going to see a lot of consensus potentially on an agenda, but if we have an underlying infrastructure that's open, there's no R or D highway lane.

We use it every day to advance commerce. So if we had that same construct in our infrastructure, increasingly our digital infrastructure, than I can bring my own device to school, I can have my kids connect their educational learning records to the Khan Academy so when they come home, we can watch the Khan videos that directly relate to the subject matter they're struggling with in the classroom and it can all work seamlessly. We're using these new technologies [to make] our personal lives better but [they can now] transform our health, our energy, our education, our financial services, the regulated sectors, and that's why I'm hopeful.

Are there more examples of common-ground issues that are not R versus D but really American ideals that can be advanced through technology?

I might be aggressive in suggesting that the strategy for American innovation that President Obama published and President Trump's new Office of American Innovation will likely have the same core elements. One, that the country's going to redefine its role in infrastructure, away from traditional roadways, railways, and runways but to expand it and include human capital, R&D, and digital infrastructure, which you can think of as broadband but can be more broadly, the digital electrical grid as well as the healthcare systems.

Second, that we have rules of the road. Whether we think they should be heavy or a light touch, there will be rules of the road to protect our security, engage on privacy issues, and make sure that we've got some competition policy that makes the digital economy work for everyone. Again, we may have differences of specific tools but the framework is that we need to have some collaborative view.

And then last but not least, this notion of opening up. That regardless of how we want to deliver government services, that the most efficient way is not to have everybody log in to one website but to have many choices. Some privately sponsored, some nonprofit sponsored, some public sector sponsored but with the premise of making sure people have all the information they need about the decisions in their lives, at each moment of a decision and at that moment, we have a country that's moving forward.

That's actually one of the things that I think you were most successful at during your tenureproviding access to these government data sets to consumers and businesses. Can you talk a little bit about that process, because we've come along way in a relatively short period of time?

Well, it started with what we've already known to be a successful case study, which is the weather industry. Going back 50+ years, there's been this consensus, not sure exactly if it was sort of master planning or just serendipity, but there had been the notion that we would invest the billions the country invests in satellites and sensors and other equipment, bring that information into an environment and then expose it. It was a judgment made going back over the last several decades that that information should be freely available.

At one point there was a debate, 'why do we need to have a weather.gov when we have weather.com?' That was sort of a naive understanding that weather.com is 100 percent powered by the open data sets that power weather.gov and that it's not an either or but it's reference of limitation that we compete on making it better. When we realized that that model works, we said let's shift the default. What President Obama's instructions to us were and our directive back to the agencies was three things.

One, immediate culture change. Make three data sets in your current environment openly available in 45 days. Two, develop a plan and engage the American people in the development of that plan so that you're listening to the data sets they value. And then three, we wanted to build some celebratory best practices and sort of honor those who've done it right to scale what works.

It turns out my successor, Todd Park, was the first awardee of our Best Practices because he didn't really focus on the supply of data. Can we add another data set to a website that no one ever heard of? But he went out and visited developers and said, 'Hey I've got a whole menu of data sets. Why don't you begin thinking about using it.' So he emphasized the use, not the supply, and that led to this movement. There are now thousands of people that convene in Washington every year in Health Datapalooza, and it's because people are now being engaged on the use of that data to build better products and services for people who need healthcare and that's something that we're seeing scale in every domain.

So that's the private sector taking public data and innovating with it and creating products and businesses?

That's right.

Does it flow the other way? Do private sector companies like Uber share their data sets with the cities they're operating in because it's got better traffic and commuter data than the cities themselves?

Yeah. Well, Waze struck an agreement with the City of LA exactly for that purpose. When we were grappling with what to do in the wake of emergencies, FEMA said, 'Well, what if we collaborated with utilities and others and we said let's crowd source information so that we can be smarter about what happens at every moment in time.'

In fact, data collection has always been a role of government. It's been a regulatory tool in government but we hadn't thought about it in the context of digital products. I just want to drive home in the fastest, safest way possible and if getting there is a combination of sensors in the roads when they're being built that can communicate speeds in combination with crowd sourced information, collected by a private entity or a group of them, the marriage of those two data sets could help me live a better life. This isn't the private sector doing it outside of the role of government. It's in collaboration with.

Thanks to the digital economy, there's no scarcity. It's not like I give you a copy of the data set and therefore I cannot give it somebody else. There doesn't need to be a single owner of the data. Copies can be made available more widely and let the marketplace decide how and where the best methods of information sharing might be.

So, it is most certainly coming back. We had a national broadband map where people began telling us where and how they were not getting access to broadband and that was informing policy about gaps. So this notion of crowdsourcing and collaborating can be done at the individual or corporate levels.

One of the things that often gets left out of these conversations is the idea of consumer privacy. It's great to share, but there's so many privacy issues that get brought up. Is that an area where we need more regulation?

For sure. President Obama asked our team to look into modernizing privacy in a digital age and we called it our Internet Privacy Bill of Rights. In the early parts of 2012, we put up a framework that said, 'Look, we need to move to a baseline regulatory standard.' And we used the Fair Information Practice standards inside government ... That's a basic principle that you've got to communicate and honor the wishes of your customer. So we thought one way to do that would be to shift the world from notice and consent where ... Have you read a user agreement online?

I have not. I have clicked through a ton of 'em.

It's like how fast can I find the agree button to move on? But if you have settings panel ... So if you go to Netflix.com/settings, it reminds you of all the places you've authorized to gain access to your Netflix account. Now, that may be sensitive to youlike what movies you watchand that may not be something you want advertisers to know when they hit you up on your magazine's properties. We did put forward a framework. It didn't make it through Congress, but there are two other ways we've had influence.

One, there are existing regulations for health privacy, education privacy, financial services and teller communications and so we said, 'Okay, in the regulated domains, let's get each expert agency to begin advancing the ball.' What we're starting to see is a more voluntary alignment. So let me give you an example. In the medical records space, when your doctor or your hospital holds your data, they're regulated. If you ask for a copy of that data and you want to put in your computer or on an app on your phone, unregulated. What that app does with your data might be benign. 'Hey, I'm just going to give you information about the time you have take your medications.' Or maybe a little bit untoward, which I'm going to sell the fact that you've got this health condition to advertisers so that they can more directly influence you.

Well, we put up a model privacy notice and what does Apple do? Apple says that any developer that wants to touch HealthKit must sign the Office of the National Coordinator Model Privacy Notice, which says 'Disclosure and choice on I'm going to sell your data or not, etc.' Doesn't dictate what knobs and dials are set but it just describes what you have to do. And if you do it and lie about it, the Federal Trade Commission can bring you up on existing statutes about not lying to your customer.

So that'll work in regulated industries.

That's right.

Do you think we need something that's broader?

Our opinion was, we're no longer in the administration, that a base line FIPS [Federal Information Processing Standard] for everyone in the internet economy and that led to questions like do not track, which was sort of a manifestation of that policy in action. I do think we still need to have that consumer internet privacy bill of rights, there may be a new framework besides the way we've described it. The new FCC approach to privacy is to deregulate and shift the responsibility over to the Federal Trade Commission so voluntary enforceable codes of conduct might be the regulatory path. I don't know. But again, we're going to see flavors of different parties' prioritizing different aspects, but we do think there needs to be some regime, even if it's light touch, that advances the baseline privacy principles.

Sticking with the FCC, Ajit Pai has announced his intention to pretty much dismantle all the neutrality regulations across the board.

Cray-cray. What's he thinking?

It's not unexpected, since it's been his position for a number of years. But now he's putting that position into effect. Can you explain why consumers should care about net neutrality protections?

So we have believed, universally, in a free and open internet. Frankly, both parties have been committed to a free and open internet. And their only debate is whether a preventive regulation might retain what we live today or whether we wait for a crisis to emerge and then respond.

Now, thoughtful people can have disagreement about the threat but what I would say to the American people, and frankly to those around the world, is if you believe a core value of our internet is that you can say what you want, you can consume whatever you want and it's your choice how and in what manner you engage, then why not instantiate that in our global framework? Not so much whether the US is more or less aggressive around this but also to protect our free and open internet when we travel around the world.

So having a baseline governance framework that says 'This platform is meant to be neutral.' Not to play favorites, one against the other. Then it give us more leverage around the world to say, 'Where there are developing country-specific internet infrastructure, that that's actually in violation of this broader movement.'

I think the consumer who wants to protect that right should rise up and tell the Federal Communications Commission to stand down on the dismantling of what I think is a really critical piece of regulatory infrastructure for free and open internet.

What's the worst case scenario? How is it going to affect somebody who goes home and logs online? How could their experience change if there are no net neutrality protections?

Well, let's begin by saying, let's presume you enjoy watching your videos on Netflix but your internet provider also happens to be your cable set-top box provider and they make the judgment that the experience, the speeds, the quality of the transmission will be worse if you stick with the Netflix path because you're hurting their revenues. Maybe you even choose to threaten to get rid of your cable account because you don't need it now. You can cut the cord. If they respond in the manner in which there is no net neutrality regulation, they may subtly weaken the quality of service that you have on one application to the betterment of the one that is preferenced in their economic stack.

That's not how we want access to our internet controlled. The internet is an open resource. It's free. It's available for us to connect. App developers have built products and services and if you believe in competition, free markets, entrepreneurship, you're going to want to retain that level playing field. And not have the person who you pay to provide the pipe to your home somehow dictate in what manner you can consume that information.

I think it's safe to say that Netflix would not exist if the cable companies were able to shut it down at an early level and prevent access.

They're in a very difficult spot because once you make it and you become a much needed application, the ability to discriminate against Netflix today is very, very hard. The consumer outrage would be off the charts. The fear is not Netflix, it's the second, third, fourth iteration of it that doesn't yet have scale that might give us a better experience that we'd never know because it was squashed prematurely and treated unfairly in today's market place. That's the fear.

Look, as far as I can tell, when the Title II regulations were promulgated, it's not like the internet stocks all crumbled. It's not like we saw a massive devaluation. It's not like anyone threatened to actually cut back their capital investments to build out networks. Quite the opposite. I love the transparency of our publicly traded markets. You have to report to your shareholders facts. No fake news allowed to your shareholders. They were asked explicitly, 'Does this regulation harm your growth plans for capital investment.' And it was an unequivocal no across the board.

Yeah, Verizon is on the record saying it had no effect and they don't think it's going to hurt their earnings at all.

So here we have rules of the road that we all broadly speaking, agree with. It didn't have the negative effects we were worried about and now we want to rip off the bandaid and start over? #Fail.

Let's talk about another disconcerting topic, which we talk about a lot on this show, which is automation. The technological revolution we're living in is amazing but the truth of the matter is, we're doing more with computers and automation and it's costing jobs. Entire industries are getting restructured because of automation. How big a problem is that? What is the appetite in Washington to actually deliver solutions?

So, three points. One, it is real but it is an area that has upsides and downsides. Industries that have been automated for 50+ years, i.e., manufacturing, [like] building a car in the era of the Model T, pre-automation [versus] building a car today. We still employ tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people across the automotive supply chain. Just the scope of work changes. More creativity, design, programming, quality assurance, less rote repeatable tasks.

We can produce cars with fewer people now than we could 10 years ago.

Yeah, and what that means is it unleashed the creativity of those who might've worked in the auto industry to now move from just being a worker, one shift and one role, to potentially being an entrepreneur, to take what they've learned and apply it to build out a feature that now could be part of the global supply chain. So there is a dynamism to the economy.

My second point would be if you look at the effects, one could either stall them, i.e., weaken the pace of change, or I would argue, double down and take those very same technologies and apply them to help us find the next big opportunity in our lives. We all have passions, talents that are unique to us and if we could share them with the very same automation tools that are going to help our industries be more productive, then they might say a niche. Every day there's a job opening somewhere in the country that's been built for you. Someone involved in a corporation could say 'Enough people in that region have so many talents. I might want to open up a new company just to take advantage of the human capital.' I think if we find a way to double down on the use of those technologies to help us make work force development decisions, that is a great role of government.

Last but not least, there is a movement to decouple the social safety net from a single employer. So the more we can say you're going to have some baseline income, you're going to have some access to health insurance, you're going to have some worker's compensation that's built around your needs, whether I take two or three jobs, start my own job, join a big company, I can have the stability and safety that I need while responding to the increasingly dynamic economy that might result in me having 10, 12, 15 jobs over the course of my lifetime. We need to have a more agile, personally driven social safety net to make these pieces work.

And part of it's the way the labor force has shifted to where unemployment's at a five-year low.

That's right.

But a lot of those new jobs that have been created are 1099 jobs. They're part-time jobs, they're gig jobs. They're not W2 jobs that come with a 401K and healthcare. And there doesn't seem to be something that's replacing that gap for that new class of worker.

Yeah and bipartisan leaders, including my mentor, Senator Mark Warner, are really focusing in Washington on how to think about a social safety net in the 21st century and again, I say to the point, my sense of hopeful optimism about where we're going, that may not make the headlines. The Russian investigation and the Comey hearing took over the oxygen this week, but that very same Senator Mark Warner, who led the Democratic response, if you will, to that hearing, has been working with his Republican counterparts on building a social safety net in the 21st century and you can have both Washingtons, the popcorn, kind of sugar high on the news, but the more fundamental collaboration that we so desperately need.

Before we get to my closing questions, I want go back to that initial point, because I think it's a really important one. You've got access to a lot of the government actors and agencies that are operating below the political level that are just trying to get stuff done. People look at all the noise and all the politics and all the recrimination, can you let people know what's really going on here at that next level down?

Let's take healthcare. We know we're having a raging debate about the future of healthcare reform yet there's a program called healthcare.gov that, by the way, is still operational and one could've made the case and I think politically many on the left are making the case, that the Trump administration is actively undermining the program. It's cutting marketing budgets for healthcare.gov, it may not be investing in its capabilities. Yet, quietly, only two or so weeks ago, the Trump administration announced, 'We're going to add application programming interfaces, APIs, so third-party health insurance online brokers can directly enroll people in healthcare.gov.'

So we may lament the weakening of marketing dollars for the website healthcare.gov, but we should be celebrating the Trump administration's decision to open up APIs. So if Governor McAuliffe in Virginia wants to build McAuliffe's healthinsurancestorefront.com, in partnership with one of the online brokers, we might increase our own marketing budgets and collaborate to get more Virginians enrolled this year than ever before, even if the Trump administration weakens the website.

So our view is, in the trenches, we proceed in promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in opening up of government, even in the Trump administration, and I think that should be celebrated. We may have a debate about 'don't cut Medicaid $800 billion' and let that be a healthy, vibrant democratic debate. Be hopeful that, 'Wow, this decision actually will increase the chance that people that need that health insurance subsidy will get it.'

That's a great example. Closing questions. What technological trend concerns you the most? What keeps you up at night?

Cyber security. We have very real, nation-state actors who are dedicating incredible resources into disrupting the use of our digital assets, whether it be in our elections for our democracy, our banking systems. Frankly, the operations of almost every sector of the economy are at risk. While the private sector can respond to private sector threats, private sector response to a nation-state actor is quite different.

I am very afraid that as we proceed to aggressively digitize every sector of the economy, including regulated sectors, that our capacity to protect our networks may not keep up with the pace of the attack vectors. DARPA called this asymmetrical warfare. You only need to write a few lines of code and to convince a few people to authorize you to get access to a network and disrupt a great deal of our global infrastructure while our defense systems have to be aware of the many, many, many versions of those small attacks. We can only build but so many moats, and I'm anxious about that issue. But I'm hopeful that we'll continue to collaborate to solve it but anxious.

What does the government need to do in order to protect itself?

I think it's three-fold. One, we've got to open up more information sharing and collaboration so the tools we have to protect our government network should be as widely available to protect commercial networks without it being a burden. Two, I think we need to keep investing in research and development to promote next-generation models. As an example, even if an attacker gets into your network, tools to mitigate the impact once they're in may be as important, if not more, than just protecting them at the edge. Building up a new cyber-security insurance market that builds standards so that we know who's a better or a weaker performer in this market, could clean up the system.

And then last but not least, I think we need to have a new understanding of digital infrastructure. India has given a billion people a unique digital identity. That means they can register for a bank account, schedule a physician appointment, maybe even vote in a future election, using their unique digital identity. And if they can do it for pennies on the dollar for a billion people, certainly the rest of the world can begin to think about digital identity as core infrastructure and that we find a way to get out of the user names and passwords rut that has been a complete disaster and a weakness of almost any application.

Politically, that would be labeled a National Identity Card.

One can do it in the private sector. You can have a national identity standard that's an acceptable standard so that today, when I want to use TSA Pre or I wanna get fast tracked through airport security, the private sector company CLEAR allows me to be identified and vetted to bypass the lines. So CLEAR is not an arm of the government. CLEAR met the industry's standards that were required of the government and were participating in that market place. So I think there is a way to do this that isn't Big Brother but a competing network of privately selected products and services that are acceptable forms of identification in the digital front door. That's the hope.

On a more optimistic note, what technology do you use that inspires wonder?

I will say Twitter continues to be my application of choice because I'm able to see and witness and learn from voices I don't normally interact with in my private personal life. So the delight I get from following the Twitter feeds, capturing the zeitgeist of the moment by particular hashtags, that just gives me delight and educates me in ways that I'm very thankful for. And for a whopping zero dollar investment, right? We get this free public utility that is Twitter.

That's caused them some problems.

There is an argument to be made about Twitter as a utility because I'd be happy to pay a utility fee to get access to this unbelievably powerful resource.

You don't find the conversation too coarse or too noisy? How to manage the trolls?

It's funny, you know. You sort of witness what's going on. You figure out who you can avoid. You don't read a lot of the comments back. At the end of the day, I know the network of people whom I trust that tweet thoughtful information and they have a network and then they have a network and so you get exposed to sources of information that delight you every day. I think it's an unbelievable resource.

Other than Twitter, is there any other technology or device or service that you use that's changed your life?

Slack. At the end of the day, the internet is a communications mechanism and you think about the way we communicate in these regulated sectors. Could you imagine communicating with your doctor? Today, it's like you have to schedule an appointment eight months from now to do something and I just want to ask a question. Can't I just Slack my doc a question? We have not brought that simple, elegant communications experience, which is thriving in the commercial setting, into our interactions with teachers, our interactions with doctors, our interactions with our banks. So I think bringing Slack to the regulated sectors of the economy would be a phenomenal gift.

How can people find you online, track what you're doing, and keep up with you?

So I wrote a book called Innovative State and I keep on innovativestate.com updates about my policy proceedings and my points of view.

I also have a company, an incubator we call it, Hunch Analytics. So if you have ideas on what we should be investing in and focusing on [let us know]. We really hatch our own ideas, but we're informed by partnerships.

We also have a healthcare program called NavHealth that I'm currently putting the bulk of my time on. And we're trying to bring this open data framework to life, to help patients make better decisions at every step of their care journey.

So my hope is that if anyone who is interested in those areas, to engage among Twitter @aneeshchopra. I'm on LinkedIn, and I'm very keen to connect with as many people as have interested in this shared vision of the future.

For more Fast Forward with Dan Costa, subscribe to the podcast. On iOS, download Apple's Podcasts app, search for "Fast Forward" and subscribe. On Android, download the Stitcher Radio for Podcasts app via Google Play.

Dan Costa is the Editor-in-Chief of PCMag.com and the Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff-Davis. He oversees the editorial operations for PCMag.com, Geek.com, ExtremeTech.com as well as PCMag's network of blogs, including AppScout and SecurityWatch. Dan makes frequent appearances on local, national, and international news programs, including CNN, MSNBC, FOX, ABC, and NBC where he shares his perspective on a variety of technology trends. Dan began working at PC Magazine in 2005 as a senior editor, covering consumer electronics, blogging on Gearlog.com, and serving as... More

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Why Obama's First CTO Is 'Hopeful' About DC, Loves Twitter - PCMag