 Well, hello, everybody. I'm Jonathan Citren, and I am a teacher at Harvard University on Internet and law and policy kinds of issues. And it's my pleasure today to welcome Brad Smith from Microsoft to have a chat for a while between us and then to welcome some questions from the audience using the various interfaces that Zoom has. I should say Brad joined Microsoft in 1993, which may be several eras ago in Internet history. He took up legal affairs in Europe for Microsoft when he first started, and then took a path that led him through being general counsel of Microsoft, later president, chief legal officer, chief compliance officer, some simultaneously concurrent rather than consecutive sentences as it were, and is somebody who has, during that entire time period, not just done all of those jobs with respect to the company, and it's both internal operations and external facing ambassadorial rules, but has been thinking a lot about the evolution of technology. I first encountered Brad at one of several sort of propeller-hatted legal and tech conferences where Brad would be presenting a paper along with everyone else, and joining the debate as fulsomely as everyone else. And I think he is considered these days indeed a sort of dean of the U.S. tech sector, and very pleased to have a chance to talk to you today. So thank you, Brad, for joining. Well, thank you, Jonathan. You and I have had the chance to, as you mentioned, interact so many times, you know, usually in person. You know, it's great to see you today, and I look forward to the day when we can be in the same room at the same time at Harvard or somewhere else. Indeed. Well, thank you. So just to start off, I want to go back to that sweep that I mentioned in your bio of just for how long you've been thinking about these issues and kind of in the midst of them. And I can't help on the academic side, but think of it almost as bookended by a 2001 article you wrote on the third industrial revolution policymaking for the Internet. I don't know if Klaus Schwab over the World Economic Forum just wanted to one up you with the fourth industrial revolution. I assume at some point you'll have the fifth. But looking at that article in your most recent book on tools and weapons as kind of bookends to this, I'm wondering if there's anything you would want to tell your former self back in 2001 or even 1993 with all of the benefit of hindsight from today. And I say that as somebody who in kind of looking over those bookends, there's a lot that's consistent between the two of them, including both a desire for kind of effective self regulation and failing that a willingness, even an encouragement to governments to actually play a role. But I'm wondering what you'd want to tell your former self that maybe you figure you wouldn't have known them. Yeah, I think the thing that is sort of interesting to consider is just how the issues that you've been working on that others at Harvard and people like me have been working on in the tech sector have just gotten bigger and more impactful and more an issue of broad public attention each and every year. I think you captured the phrase well when you and I first crossed paths. Let's just say it was a narrower and more geeky crowd. You know, and we intersected with sort of two sets of geeks, you know, technology geeks and legal geeks or legal and policy geeks. The 2001 article that you referenced came out of a set of lectures I gave at the Hague Academy of International Law in the year 2000. And at that point, it was a rare day that you would see something around tech policy and the New York Times or, you know, say something like Time or Newsweek, the major weekly publications of the day. If there was something in that space, it was a big antitrust case against a company like Microsoft. And what has been so interesting is to see two things evolve over the course of, say, 20 years. The first is these issues become so part of the popular public conversation for the simple reason that they impact everybody so broadly. And so, yeah, I would have given myself advice 20 years ago to think even earlier about how to make these ideas approachable for other people and not just interesting for the deep conversations that, you know, say technology geeks or academics need really to have. But the second thing that I think is interesting is to go back in time, so to speak, I remember in the late 1990s, there was no such thing as a privacy lawyer for the simple reason that there was barely any such thing as privacy law. You know, there was just a European data protection directive that was enacted in 1996. And now you meet people all the time who say, hey, I'm a privacy lawyer. And I think if you take those thoughts and you put them together, I think the real relevance for, say, students at Harvard Law School or anywhere else today is that we're seeing new fields born, including in the legal field. You know, there clearly will be people 10, 15 years from now who will say, hey, I'm an AI ethics lawyer, an AI human rights lawyer. I mean, just, and yet I will say the need for a broad perspective, even while these fields continue to proliferate and deepen will remain. And I think that's what you've always brought to your work. It's what I've tried to bring together with others. You're bringing a bit of a historical perspective to provide that breadth of thinking. And we're just going to see this all continue, I think. So let me ask specifically around privacy and perhaps around security, too. Of course, they're distinct. If I'm a member of the public, typically reading Newsweek. I remember Newsweek back in the day and its equivalents now. And seeing some of these tech issues occasionally pop into the broader consciousness. If I'm looking at that sweep, it's not as if privacy, quote, got solved. In fact, if anything, it feels like it's gotten more difficult and I'm feeling less secure online, despite the lawyers that have been working on it. Some maybe cynically would say because of them. But both from a security and privacy point of view, if we just went by headlines, it would seem as if we're barely holding the line or maybe even falling behind. And that's despite, for example, in the security front, Microsoft starting a trustworthy computing initiative all those years ago saying, wow, we've really got to rethink these architectures. And I'm curious, is that just a kind of headline grabbing thing? Or how would you characterize as a possible characterize the slope of the curve for privacy for the average consumer today? Well, the first thing I would say, again, sort of drawing on a broader perspective, look, once something becomes important in public life, it very seldom ever really gets solved, which is to say the issue doesn't really go away. You know, civil rights hasn't been solved. Voting rights haven't been solved. Immigration hasn't been solved. You know, world hunger hasn't been solved. Certainly disease hasn't been solved. If you were to go back to the year 1900 and look at the questions people were talking about, especially at the dawn of the progressive era, you would find a definite similarity between those questions and the questions people are asking today. The nature of the debate, the advances, of course, there have been enormous. But the issues never really, in my view, typically get solved. Now, having said that, privacy has advanced. I mean, there's there's more than 100 countries that have privacy laws. And 30 years ago it was you can count them on one hand. So the the field has advanced. There are more protections in place. But of course, as technology has become more ubiquitous, I think you could also say that the challenges to privacy, perhaps even the threats to privacy have actually become more pronounced at the same time. And I think that explains why it hasn't been solved. Yeah, it's certainly harder these days not to have something recorded and shared than it is to record and share it. And that is a definite flip. And I guess maybe for many consumers, without even maybe having a worked out sense of privacy injury, there's often maybe just privacy surprise when, you know, a paper of record does a story about location data and how much your location data, it turns out as shared. I had no idea Farmville. I thought it was a virtual farm. Why do they need to know where I am at all times in order to play their game kind of thing? And it kind of conjures up a vision of the duck serenely going across the pond underneath the the feet are madly paddling, gathering data, processing it in what otherwise feels like an organic experience. And I guess just tie it back, of course, to the public health topic that looms over all of us at the moment. I'm curious if you have a sense of what it would look like to responsibly repurpose the commercial infrastructures built around data sharing and advertising and targeted and all that kind of stuff for which there may be some sense that it's time to trim that back. What would it look like to try to repurpose that for pandemic mitigation efforts of various kinds? Well, it's been interesting because I think in the current context, at one level, data has become the most indispensable tool in the world. I might argue for enabling public health authorities to seek to manage their way through this pandemic. And some of that data absolutely is a personal health information. It's personally sensitive. Yeah. And in some ways, some of the governments that I've seen be the most effective have frankly just been really good at managing their hospital capacity, knowing where their ICU beds are, knowing whether they're occupied, knowing how long a patient has been in that bed, knowing what that patient's ailment is, knowing in particular whether that patient has COVID-19. And I've had a conversation with the Prime Minister of Greece. He can sit in his office at his home and look at a laptop and see a dashboard that has data real time on all the ICU beds in the nation of Greece. You know, so that's one example. You know, there are other examples where you're seeing mobility data. You know, just aggregated and used in really important ways by governors in the United States, by mayors to try to know, well, are there social distancing measures working? In other words, are people staying home? And that is a very good indicator. Yeah. As we get more into this, you know, we're seeing additional questions emerge, additional tools created, including obviously things like apps for tracing and tracking and the like. And, you know, that's where you have potential tensions between privacy for people and the protection of public health. You know, that's what led us to publish seven privacy principles. You all have focused very similarly at Harvard and elsewhere. And I actually think that it's a really good indicator of how if you look at both of these issues together and take a principled approach, protection of public health, protection of privacy, you can start to synthesize these two at the outset. You know, for example, you can say, look, if you're only going to use if you only want data for public health purposes, then you can only use it for public health purposes, things like that. And I think you can then rely on the commercial infrastructure to support those kinds of principles. And I think Google and Apple have done a very good job in opening up their platform in this way. And then you'll get other issues where there is real friction or tension. And that's where I think public authorities need to decide based on their local values, you know, how they want to strike the balance between privacy and public health. And in assuring privacy, there have been tugs of war over the years. The encryption battles the classic case of the San Bernardino iPhone in which Microsoft weighed in on that dispute. Largely, if I'm not over simplifying on Apple's side in that debate. Yeah. And I'm just wondering if you have a sense of the blend of protections for privacy as against government abuse. How much of that blend is wise laws and agreements and sort of legal institutional structures versus just making the technology such that it's self protecting as much as possible that we've got various forms of technological separation, encryption, data minimization, so that even if a government was of a mind to go beyond whatever it had promised or to disregard whatever international consensus there might be, that government simply can't do it. How do you think about that kind of blend? Well, I think technology is a powerful tool, including for protecting privacy, but we do live in a world where the rule of law does override the code that people write. Now, ultimately, the laws of physics tend to trump everything. And if it can't be done, it can't be done. But if you look at what Australia did a year ago, you know, for example, they did pass a law that imposed on, say, cloud service providers and others, additional legal obligations in certain circumstances to decrypt. And so I think things like encryption have proven to be of fundamental importance. You know, the whole industry shifted rapidly to encryption at rest and encryption in transit for data, you know, in 2013, in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. And there's been this debate ever since about, you know, whether this was unduly undermining the effectiveness of law enforcement and national security. But I would just say at the end of the day, you know, governments do prevail within their territory and they can set the terms for whether a company can offer a service to the public there and they can put a company in a position of then just having to decide, do I go there or do I not? And the same is true for data. You know, we make careful decisions based on elaborate human rights reviews before we decide to put a data center in a new country before we make decisions about whether to store consumer data in the data center in that country. Because once the data is there, the government's law is going to be applied if the government so chooses. One possibly subtle distinction, but maybe worth briefly making is a sense that the San Bernardino case was really just kind of an appetizer in the sense that if a government had using exactly the power and authorities you're talking about ordered Apple to make efforts to get into that phone, Apple for that particular phone and technology was in a position to do it. Later versions of that phone and generally there is an evolution of technology. I can discern sometimes attempts by the companies to just design the technology so they're in no particular privileged position to decrypt if they're asked to that the data is stored encrypted and there's no key held by the company and there's new technologies to still make it useful even if the company itself can't get to it. I imagine the response to that if a government is feeling like it really wants access would be what you call technology mandate saying you're just not allowed to build a service or even a product that doesn't keep the keys somewhere in a back pocket at the company making it and I'm just curious just in your crystal ball do you think we'll see those kinds of technology mandates become common. I think it's a really interesting question and your thoughts for that matter as well because you've been involved in this obviously as long as I have. It is so interesting on the encryption debate because it tends to become an issue front and center. You think it's going to come to a head and then it dissipates and there is never really that much of a successful effort at least to even identify whether there's potential common ground. You know for people it is an issue that does tend to drive people into their corners. Yes. You know basically you know the privacy advocates and typically with the tech companies you know explain why we're opposed to technology mandates. You know law enforcement usually then is quick to parade it's horrible. It's parade of horribles you know in terms of terrible crimes that are indeed heinous that they may feel that they cannot investigate and prosecute. And then there's a lot of drama and then the chapter next chapter sort of starts the same way. I think the real question in some ways is why had we seen that for a decade without the kinds of forcing functions or you know even you know some meeting of some common ground is is it just a case that this issue is so binary that that's impossible or is there some other aspect and what do you think. Well I think that I find myself sympathetic to having in the blend technological protections that at the very least represent a bright line of paint on the side of the road so everybody's aware if that line is being crossed maybe with a warrant maybe not but you can establish boundaries and code that can reinforce whatever boundaries seem wise in corporate policy or ultimately in law. But it's also true that if too much stock is placed in the code as the last refuge of protection it also then creates a kind of digital divide that the people who know how to just tweak just so I mean bless something like PGP pretty good privacy or elderly plug-in at this point for securing email and other documents and the end but an average user trying to get pretty good privacy going it's hard and I think what it would mean is it might be nice to come to an accommodation about what would even be offered by default so you don't have to be a rocket scientist in order to enjoy the hypothetical protections you could if only you knew how to configure the technology I'm mindful of our mutual colleague Bruce Schneier who at one point security experts decided he wanted to set up a definitively secure laptop and ended up you know in the same place all of us have been customer support and drivers that don't work and all of that kind of stuff and that's a cross-platform kind of issue now actually that observation is important because I think it does explain why this issue doesn't come to a head I think you do see more tech companies create strong privacy protection features but they're not necessarily turned on by default yes and so and I think that it turns out that a lot of criminals are not the smartest people on the planet and so I think in on many days law enforcement is able to get what it actually needs to get because the user who is committing a criminal act in turn on the privacy protection yes strange analog counterpart to that in the American constitutional context is the famed Miranda warning that says any you say can and will be used against you in the 60s warren court and known to watchers of law and order worldwide is an important right you've got to say those magic words to a person under arrest or anything they later say maybe can't be used against them at the same time while that is a right as you say many criminals talk anyway you can imagine a station house lawyer whose only job is to sit in the police station and as the people arrested or brought in says hi I'm willing to be your lawyer and here's my only piece of advice I'll put it on a card don't say anything and that would probably have a material impact on what the police could elicit from the people they arrest and my guess is simple libertarians who among us feel very supportive of Miranda would all right we got to think through additionally whether we would really want it to work that well understanding though that we fight for is a right it's a kind of similar thing about defaults and and that sort of thing yeah that's good now there's another area just worth bringing up that if it had been if we were in 2001 would probably be the first one and that's copyright and open code and intellectual property which maybe over the years has receded even though as you pointed out it's not like it was ever definitively settled and there's such a provocative interesting quote from tools and weapons in which you say Microsoft had been on the wrong side of history and what a just kind of fascinating sort of observation kind of reflection to make and I'm just curious looking at things now how to think through the role of copyright or even later patent I remember once at a conference it was surprising to me at the time you said yeah we're not we're not thinking so much about copyright for code but patent that's kind of interesting and I'm just curious as you think about the development of intellectual property law with respect to code and maybe for data protection if you want to just unpack a little bit more how you're thinking has evolved yeah the first thing I would say is one of the interesting things about intellectual property is that it has four distinct fields patents copyrights trademarks and trade secrets and it for many works it's very clear what your field is you write a book I write a book it's called copyright yeah the and yet as software code was created interestingly you know actually all four fields became relevant to software you know copyright to copy to protect against literal copying you know patents to protect the obviously the novelty and utility of certain inventions trademark is and remains important to fight counterfeiting and and you know frankly if all three fail you tend to keep your code secret through trade secret protection what we've seen over time is a little bit of a battle almost if you will between the importance of copyright and the importance of patents and you know as you'll remember in the 1980s and 90s people first thought oh everybody's going to use copyright you know they're going to protect not only against the copying of literally of code but you know of the you know essential expression in it and then the supreme court was less than enthusiastic about that and people shifted the patents you know when I started at Microsoft in 1993 there were probably only two patent lawyers and you know it wasn't just because we were a smaller company it's because patents were not thought to be as important and then the early 2000s saw an explosion of patent law and then slowly but surely the the power of patent protection and for code was sort of whittled back through a combination of judicial action and congressional reform and I would say zone in which Microsoft is both the hunter and the hunted right I mean Microsoft could just as easily find itself defending against a patent infringement suit is making one well one of the things I've always really liked about working at Microsoft is because our business is so diversified on any one of these issues we sort of have a you know a foot in each shoe and that forces us to think about it from both sides it definitely doesn't mean we get it right but it's a really a positive thing they have to do you know the specific reference I made in our book it was that we were on the wrong side of history and I personally was definitely on the wrong side of history it was really you know a reference to open source you know and you know Microsoft as a company in the early 2000s leaned in on patent protection specifically to protect what we saw as the valuable features in windows in terms of what it meant to see something like Linux you know and ultimately we ended up concluding that you know it wasn't just about getting on the right side of history it was just getting it right and getting it right basically meant becoming part of the open source community even if it didn't mean that all of our code is open source look at any big tech company not all of its code is open source you know but we now contribute more code add to more projects that are open source than any company on the planet and I think as you look at data and this whole next trend in terms of where technology is going you know we're now advocates for an open data movement we launched a campaign a week ago we call it the open data campaign we published open data principles we committed ourselves to 20 open data collaborations in the next two years uh yeah and you know I would say broadly speaking uh success in technology these days is about innovation meaning moving faster it means about building an ecosystem and that means collaborating more broadly you know all of this is much more likely to influence success than the ability to sort of lock up so to speak your inventions doesn't mean that it's not important to have patent protection in a variety of spaces or fields but I just think the indicators of success have really changed let's just talk harmful content for a moment and again a kind of evolution from the early days as best I can tell it's almost like a couple eras the first I'd describe in American terms as a rights era in which often the sensibilities among the technical folks and among some of the companies was we're here to empower the user and then kind of get out of the way we give you an operating system you want to load Napster on it that's your business like maybe we don't approve of it but don't you know the recording industry don't come to Microsoft expecting Microsoft to shoot down Napster on Windows installations as if it were malware because that's that's not our job and maybe starting around 2010 I'd identify a new thread that is now sharing the space with the rights sensibilities which I'd call first metaphorically and today it's hard not to be literal about it the public health sensibility which says instead of it being paramount for companies to let their users just do what they want have encrypted conversations with the people they want to talk to run the software they want to run collect the data they want to collect now it's gosh these companies they shouldn't be abdicating they need to be taking a moral stance about the behaviors they facilitate and should do something and as you say Microsoft has so many different services and areas in which it operates maybe the one most clearly amenable to feeling the sharpness of that debate would be in a search engine like being and I'm curious how you think about what role the company's own sensibilities should have on good content bad content misinformation not versus just being a vessel for window onto the web and what people find is their own business well I think there's two broad themes that are worth reflecting on the first is that not all technology is the same and the second is that even the same technology should perhaps be treated differently as technology evolves in different moments in time when I think about technology today and the obligations either informally or legally under the law a technology supplier should assume I do tend to think of three distinct categories you know one is platform space a second is especially when you're talking about content communities really social media and the third is search and we're in all three spaces not with equal success but we're in all three spaces you know we have windows in azure as you hugely important platforms linked in and github are both really popular you know community oriented spaces as is something like xbox live you know so we have a number of places where people share comments and even content with each other and then of course we've got bang with the search engine space and yeah then if you put this in the context of time in the 1990s you know the sense was look let's give all technology pretty much a pass that's what section 230 of the communications decency act did and I think it did it for good reason at that time these technologies were young uh nobody really had a model for how to impose any kind of balanced regulation on them there was a real danger that regulation would choke them off before they had the chance to grow certainly in 2000 you saw the pendulum start to shift I would say 2019 was a watershed year it was a watershed year I think for two reasons first and most importantly in the wake of the christ church terrorist attack the austrian government and then others really move forward with much more aggressive regulation so much so that if you don't get extremist violent content off of your your service expeditiously under austrian law your executives risk three years of imprisonment and your company risks paying a fine equal to 10 percent of its revenue worldwide potentially so that gets people's attention and then second I think really led by frankly good reporting by the new york times there was more scrutiny of the tech sector including microsoft asking whether we were really doing a good enough job to combat child exploitation and the answer was no we needed to do more we continue to do more and we continue to need to do even more so I do think search in particular has certain sensitivities because I think if you can't find something on the web you're almost denied your place in the public square and I think that councils I think for a less restrictive public policy for search I do think that in the social media space and we saw it after Christchurch whether it was for twitter or or youtube the two biggest platforms but also for those like linkedin you know we did recognize that there were certain places where we needed to impose the ability to interrupt live streaming exercise you know some more control over the nature of live streaming and yet I think we've also wisely decided that it probably doesn't make sense to impose the same granularity of obligations on the platforms because then you have two people trying to police the exact same thing yeah so I actually think there's been some interesting progress there's been more you know sort of new ideas emerging some new consensus the Christchurch call for action has more than 50 governments on board as well as really the whole big sec the tech sector at least in the big tech companies and you know it's not a section 230 model it's a model that says we do have certain responsibilities and we're going to follow through on them what's been interesting to me is to see maybe a company in the era of rights and public health is an emerging third era I call it doesn't have the best name process or legitimacy which says that as companies say all right we've got to maybe be more involved here and we've got to apply principles and those are inherently value laden what are some of the external sources the compasses we can turn to so that not every value laden decision is sort of treated as a customer service issue internal to the company and I think of Facebook's still standing up external review board for its content decisions as kind of a first effort in that area of seeing how it still might be a decision effectuated by the company but one very much more porous to outside decision making in this case literally taking some of the authority Facebook would otherwise have and having an outside group populated to make it so I don't know if there's anything in your mind that would I think that's an interesting insight I think what it really suggests is we're on a path towards greater regulation you know if you're going to surrender your decision making responsibility to a group of unelected officials does it make ultimately more sense to have elected officials or at least people who are appointed by government officials who in turn are elected to reflect you know the public will obviously and especially in democratic societies because these are ultimately say timeless values and something like that review board is an interesting way of trying to run down the middle and say well maybe it won't be a government body doing it and of course the kind of speech restrictions that private companies might impose on social media at least in the American context would be non-starters under the First Amendment if the government did it but still again finding having it both be external to the company but not an artifact of the government and I don't know if that's the best or the worst of both worlds well I think what you're pointing out and I think it's a good point is the you know the United States is really unique with the First Amendment if you if you take you know 200 nations and you know rank them from left to right in terms of you know which is the most protective of free expression and which is the least it is one area where the United States is always the most protective of free expression because of the First Amendment and there's a lot of great things that have come out of that but I actually think in the world today if you're a global tech company yeah if the UK and Germany and France and Australia and New Zealand and Japan and Canada all pursue a common path and they all regulate content more than the First Amendment would permit the United States government to do yeah I think frankly most companies are going to snap to a global standard and you are going to see regulation and in fact we are seeing regulation it's just less likely to be driven by the United States government especially at the national level it calls to mind the observation I forget if it was John Perry Barlow or John Gilmore who said on the internet the First Amendment is a local ordinance one last question before we turn to some of the questions that have entered the queue and that is another comparison between all those years ago and now and you said they're just a handful of patent lawyers and we're also a handful of government affairs folks at Microsoft and I think the American West Coast whether North or further South had a sense of being apart from all those games in Washington kind of thing and I think maybe one of the kind of big milestones in your professional career and in the development of Microsoft as a company in the wake of the antitrust case was saying you know it's time to make peace it's time to actually take seriously what's going on with governments and that's even reflected in many of your reflections today and I see for example this is worthy of inclusion in your bio at the outset you chair a nonprofit kids kids in need of defense providing pro bono free legal support to unaccompanied immigrant children facing deportation in eight of the largest us seated cities that is both a clear couldn't be a more classic pro bono activity for a lawyer to undertake it's also a political act in this environment and I juxtapose that with the observation you've made that when acting in the political realm getting things done means you have to deal with the world of politics and politics is about pragmatism not just principle alone and I'm just wondering how how you're thinking has evolved in squaring both corporate political activities donations looking to be able to be an effective actor in the company's interests and its values when that might mean supporting politicians that have a very different matrix of commitments and priorities and further um you referenced heading up Microsoft as kind of being more dean or provost of a university rather than CEO of a company that there's a lot of views under your roof that the employees might have so I don't know either if there's any thoughts you have on those external relationships with government and when it's time to act on what you'd view as principle and when it's time to be able to bend and not break and be a pragmatist and what it means to have corporate values knowing that you've got a university's worth of people underneath that may all have very different sensibilities well I you know I think you've just captured so many really interesting and important elements and I I guess I would just offer a you know sort of three pieces to it first I do think it's just really important in a in a company today at least as we aspire to lead it you know to have good listening systems into here from our employees as well as groups outside the company including groups like the Burtman Center which have been really important and influential in terms of our thinking over time it doesn't mean that you agree with everyone because you cannot agree with everyone the diversity of views is so vast but you want to listen to everyone because I think when you do you come to understand and better of the problems you need to solve we try to go from that understanding to then the articulation of defined principles that will guide our work and those principles always mean that we will do some things and we won't do others and you know there are always people who disagree with the decisions that we make and they do it for all the right reasons out of great sincerity but I do find even when they disagree with our ultimate decision they do value the fact that we have sought to articulate principles and they know more transparent way where we're going so that's the first thing the second thing is this blend of principle and pragmatism I think has been a really interesting challenge I'll say especially during the last four years of American politics with even a more polarized public and electorate and obviously leadership in the White House that is say very different from I'll just say the opinions that we tend to hold on something like immigration and what I've found is the best way in that particular context to blend principle and pragmatism is to get comfortable just saying what we think not hesitating if it will lead to a disagreement but frankly always staying focused on the policy and the merits and not on the people or the personalities and always to give credit where credit is due but also be quick to identify where we want to take a different stand and so like even over the last month you know every time we've gone to the White House in the last month and asked for help to get surgical supplies into the country to expedite an importation process to solve a practical problem the team at the White House has been quick to respond effective in its efforts and we've been quick to say thank you not just privately but to acknowledge that publicly that might be Monday but by Thursday there's the latest immigration proposal and you just sort of go oh my gosh you know do we have to do this yet again and it happened on your green cards over the last couple weeks and we were equally quick to say we don't think this is the right course you know even interestingly on the issue of DACA we're the one company that has sued the federal government not just as an amicus but you know as a plaintiff we are a plaintiff with Princeton University and a Princeton now alumna in the Supreme Court and yet we're able to balance those two and I just find as people get you know if they know what you're going to do if you're predictable and you don't make it personal you can blend principle and pragmatism I will say you have this added feature in the United States as we all know US politics is based to some degree on people writing checks for donations including from a political action committee like the one we have as a company and the hardest thing there is almost inevitably almost everyone who helps you on one issue is not someone that will help you on every issue and so you know there are some members of Congress the House or the Senate you know with whom we vigorously disagree on something like you know H1B issues or DACA or the rights of women or marriage equality and the like I mean we've had vigorous disagreements and sometimes continue to do so and yet you find that on a particular green card reform bill you know where we have thousands of employees in a green card backlog because they're safe from India or China you know the same senator is the key senator who is working to advance the legislation on which so many of your employees depend and you know so we try to think broadly ourselves we do focus on you know values and the like but it is a world where you know we do frankly sometimes feel that hey look we've got to work with people and we've got to use that work over time to nurture a relationship that we hope just might enable us to change people's minds when we persuaded Washington state to become one of the first states in the country to recognize marriage equality back in 2012 it was because we were able to persuade four republicans in the state senate that was the difference between victory and defeat they had long been opposed to it we had worked with them anyway on other issues and we had trust and we used that to persuade them to change their views and their votes so I sometimes just remind myself remind the people we work with you know the views that somebody has today does not necessarily guarantee the views they're going to have two years from now and we're only going to have an opportunity to change their mind if we actually know them thank you so much so we should do some Q&A and knowing that there's a hard stop in approximately or maybe even exactly 10 minutes we'll think of it as a lightning round and for all but one I'll just sort of read the question on behalf of kind of Vox Populi but for the very first one our mutual colleague David Wilkins I think is able to pop in and kind of surprise cameo and ask a question himself our colleague professor of the legal profession I know David Welles it'll be great if you see or hear him David over to you well thank you so much and Brad it's wonderful to see you and thank you for your amazing leadership not just in the on these issues but in the profession in general and at our center we're so grateful to have you as on our advisory board I'm gonna my question really is about the legal profession and what role you see lawyers playing in these sorts of matters and at the center on the legal profession we've actually been watching a trend that we wonder whether it's going to be accelerated because of the current crisis like so many others I mean I like everybody else we're all working virtually technology is so important again we have to thank you because we're working on teams and Microsoft which has been incredibly important for our team to stay together but the trend I want to talk about is lawyers like you taking on more capacious responsibilities around these big global challenges you're kind of a patient number one and Jonathan brilliantly talked about your career but you were the first one to really become not just general counsel but then chief legal officer and then president of Microsoft but if we look around we see Kent Walker for example become at Google becoming senior vice president of global affairs or Amy Weaver at Salesforce becoming president and in charge of global security or Sarah Moss not in the tech industry but at Estee Lauder becoming now the vice chair of the company and I wonder why you think this is happening what role what are the skills that lawyers bring to these broader roles and do you think this is something we may see accelerate in the coming years thank you so much David over to grab for the lightning round yeah and I'll try to be brief well David first thanks for everything that you personally have been leading in the center and you know I've always been so personally passionate and Microsoft has been for your work I do think it is a trend that has been ongoing that will continue to accelerate you know part of it is you know call it the rise of the in-house legal department something you perhaps more than anyone better than anyone has documented and recessions actually tend to lead typically to more work coming in-house because people are looking for new ways to economize if you look at the lawyers in the profession and say the 60s or 70s you know the really influential figures in the world of public affairs were in the great law firms and the great law firms are still great but you also see people playing a very broad role in a lot of different other organizations especially say companies and nonprofits I absolutely continue to believe that if you want to change the world go to law school at least think about it because at the end of the day and the democracies of the world it is the laws of the world that will continue to have the most impact on societies and as laws and companies intersect as companies use their voice through the kinds of government affairs efforts that Jonathan was describing as we do and strive to do in a very transparent way it does give us the opportunity to think broadly just as people sort of documented outside lawyers in the 60s and 70s who sort of aspire to be not just great lawyers for their clients but also statesmen yeah I think you know the people you're describing are statesmen they're stateswomen they're real leaders and I think it's all about breadth of perspective and I think if people can think broadly think about the public interest even put the public interest first and forward yeah I think it is a powerful way to contribute to the public good as I always like to say you can be a public service even if you're not employed in the public sector thank you David for that question and that actually captures a bunch of the questions many I think are from law students or others who are law adjacent asking about the role of the lawyer and the legal profession in this from a different angle this from we invoked his name earlier I did Bruce Schneier he says I taught your digital Geneva convention and your tech accord last week in my class at the Kennedy School now a few years later what's your assessment of the initiative what's changed today what would you do differently if you were starting over I continue to be a big believer in the need for the international rule of law to govern the actions of nation states when it comes to cyber security attacks I continue to believe that we are going to need stronger rules and more formalized international laws in the future I continue to believe that there are gaps in the legal system today that we need to fill in and I think the nation state attacks around disinformation including in the COVID-19 pandemic and especially around threats to democracy really shine a light on that when we started down the path I gave a speech in 2017 calling for a digital Geneva convention I just sort of put off limits these kinds of nation state attacks on civilians one of the things I said was this was going to be at least a decade it will be at least a decade you know I think that you know we sort of understood going into it that it would be complicated that it would require persistence that it would be hard on certain days to get people off the sidelines to actually join the group the moment the movement that I think is needed to protect people around the world maybe I would have advised myself to be prepared to be even more patient and persistent and pragmatic as well it goes back to your point Jonathan you know you got to be principled you got to be idealistic but you got to be pragmatic I'm glad we undertook what we did we are making some real progress I think that's good the Tech Accord is a good example 120 companies around the world having signed that we're going to have to be persistent and just keep at this every year to be honest that's certainly a high mountain to climb but a worthy a worthy challenge I think this will probably be our last question and then we'll be sure to bundle up all of the questions that came through I see just under 60 of them so that you can have a look at it and be aware of what people are asking about and thinking about afterwards and this is again from our quite strong student contingent what's your advice to law students to best prepare themselves for the digital economy including skill sets and knowledge beyond the traditional JD education and a bonus question of talk about a broad question if you had to pick a topic to start a PhD today what would it be I don't know if I'll have the chance to reflect enough to answer that one well but let me just say generally of course you know take the courses in law school that have always been important in law school if you have any interest in using digital technology or working in a digital world and the whole world is becoming digital I would encourage you to take a course or two that might be outside the law school or more informally you know to acquire some background not just in computer science but increasingly statistics and data science I think the future is going to be about data as much or even more than code if I were back in law school I probably would have found a way to take one or two courses in the business field just because it doesn't matter what you're going to do I find that business thinking helps you organize whatever you want to do in life and you know I find a lot of classic business school thinking needed right now in governments around the world to manage COVID-19 I would definitely be a strong voice for the liberal arts I constantly encourage engineers at Microsoft and elsewhere to think about ethics to think about history because all of these issues need to come together because we need to ensure that technology actually serves people and is governed ethically but I'd actually conclude with the phrase that you use Jonathan in describing about the digital Geneva convention you said it is a high mountain to climb my number one piece of advice might request climb high mountains you have a whole career ahead of you it's going to start in a valley the valley of COVID-19 but that valley isn't going to last forever we'll pull ourselves out of it you are the people who actually will play such an important role in the decades to come in not just influencing but defining the high mountains that we climb as a country and as a world and they will be hard to climb we will often falter or fail but we will not climb any higher than you aim to accomplish so have high ambition that's what I say to our folks every day at Microsoft it's what we bring together when we recruit people to join us it's just more fun to climb high mountains than to go through every day with low ambition and know that if you do it in a smart way your impact will be felt and it'll be great for you personally and I really do believe for the world well what a great long-term reminder while we're if we're not medical professionals in the short term being told that our best contribution can be simply to stay at home and what a nice counterpart to that to be thinking about how we can I will just say in closing I heard someone say this morning he said I don't know whether I'm working from home or sleeping in the office the lines are blurred thank you again Brad so much for this conversation and for no doubt the other interactions that will follow and to all in the audience who came forward to listen and to suggest your questions and we will keep climbing the mountains great thank you thanks Jonathan good to see you thank you cheers everybody