 Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Georgia Bullen. I'm a field operations technologist with the Open Technology Institute here, which is a lot of technology in one sentence. But anyway, New America is a non-partisan think tank and civic enterprise dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age. Our experts work on a wide range of issues from national security to work family balance and, of course, technology and telecom policy. At OTI, we bring together policy experts, technologists, and practitioners to tackle challenges like promoting ubiquitous, safe, and affordable access to communications technologies in communities in the United States and around the world. Hopefully, you're able to grab a few of our work samples around leveraging social media for community building, data surveillance, and discrimination when you checked in. If not, they're available online on our website. We're doing this event in partnership with two other organizations. One is Future Tense, which is a partnership between Slate Magazine, New America, and Arizona State University, which looks at emerging technologies and their implications for policy and society. They host events here in DC, as well as in New York, and have an editorial channel on Slate. We're also very excited to be doing this with the Digital Diplomacy Coalition. And today's event is going to be focusing on the benefits and challenges of using social media for proactive engagement and monitoring, which LaVisa Williams from the DDC will introduce in a moment. Today's event is being live-streamed, and a recording of the panel will be available on the New America website and YouTube channel after the event. For those of you in the room and watching online, we encourage you to engage with us over Twitter using the hashtag Digital Diplomacy, as well as feel free to ask questions by tweeting at OTI, Digi Diplomats, and Future Tense now. And with that, I will let LaVisa introduce the event. Thank you, Georgia. Just wanted to take a moment to welcome you to the event this evening. Thank you for joining us. We appreciate that you're coming out. I know there's a lot of different events going on this evening in D.C. So we're happy that you chose us, and everyone in the live stream, welcome. We appreciate all of your tweets as well. And this is really a big month for the Digital Diplomacy Coalition. About last week, we launched our first chapter in Ottawa, so we're really excited to see what they're going to be doing with digital technologies and helping the diplomatic community better connect and use those technologies. And we're also excited that this is our first event with New America Foundation, hopefully one of many more to come. So hopefully you will join us for those as well. We'd also like to thank New America Foundation, Future Tense, and the Open Technology Institute for their partnership with this event. It could not be possible without their help. And with that, I'd like to introduce our panel today where we will be talking about government's use of analytics and sentiment analysis tools. As governments evolve and use these technologies and tools, they're moving from a reactive position to a more proactive one. How does this change and position impact their use of these technologies? We will not only talk about the challenges, but also some of the practical approaches to addressing them. And with that is my pleasure to introduce Josh Keating from Slate. Josh is focused on international affairs and writes the World's Blog, and Josh will be moderating today. Thanks, Teresa, and thanks to all of you for cutting your World Club Celebration Short to join us today for what should be a great panel. You know, in the world of online media where I work, it's becoming abundantly clear that the analytic functions of the internet is changing the way we do business as much as the internet's powers of distribution tool. You know, audiences may tell us that what they want is more foreign coverage and more analysis of legislation. We know you're lying. We know that what you really want is Beyonce's slideshows and cat videos. And unfortunately for us, our advertisers know that too. But, you know, this analytic function is equally important as public diplomacy increasingly moves online. The internet is not only a tool for governments and diplomats to reach the public, both at home and abroad, but it's an unprecedented tool for them to gather information on, you know, what those people are clicking on, what they're interested in and what they're reading. And while this, you know, is useful from a policy point of view, you know, as it also raises a number of legal and ethical challenges that I'm hoping we can get into as well. We've got a great panel lined up today to talk about this. We have Julie Vecaline immediately on my left who's a public affairs specialist at the U.S. Department of Health. Muhammad Nadjim is a adjunct fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and on the Middle East Task Force of New America. He's the founder and president of the social media exchange. Sorry, I got my order wrong. But Christopher Harvin is a global strategic and communications and public affairs advisor at Barbaricom and Sanitas International. And Alan Brandt is a legal and policy fellow at the Future Privacy Forum. Julie, as you're sort of the main practitioner here, I think we'll start with you. I mean, when we talk about proactive monitoring and government use of analytics and social media, I mean, what are some of the more interesting applications you're seeing out there right now and what do you think the potential is for these types of tools? Well, to give you a brief background on what I do as a social media community manager for the Department of Health and Human Services, I work for the Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs Digital Communications Division and we're responsible for a variety of priority sites. These are flu.gov, stopbullying.gov, and foodsafety.gov, which I'm gonna focus on as I talk here today. What I'm seeing with proactive monitoring is that by using tools that allow us to look at the analytics and the data of the number of visitors that we have, the search terms they're using, there's two parts to it. There's the social monitoring. What is the conversation out there? What are they talking about? And then there's also the whole data maintenance of our website. We use these analytic tools to find broken links to identify the topics that people are searching for. And just in the few years that I've been doing this, the number of tools available to us has really exploded. But on the day-to-day management side of it, we are really not doing anything differently than what the civilian counterparts are doing. If you're on Facebook and you manage a page, we see the same insights that you're seeing, same with Twitter. And of course, we also use Google Analytics, and we've also developed a voice of consumer tool. This is a tool that we've developed in-house, where we ask the public, how was this page on this website? And what are the things that we can do to improve your user experience? And so by having this variety of tools, we're able to really focus in on the goals, because when you're talking about analytics like this and community management, it's almost like standing at the edge of the ocean and wanting to talk about water. But there's so many parts to talking about water. There's the chemical components, or maybe you want to learn how much salt is in water. And so by using these tools, we can actually focus in on what it is that we're trying to do and offer to the American public. Now, Alan, the governments and private sector may be using analytic tools in very similar ways, but the constraints on what they do are very different and the legal and political environment in which they're using them is different. Can you talk a little bit about what some of the biggest issues are, what the challenges are that face governments when they start using these tools? First thing is, and I'm gonna talk as a privacy person like I was in your office or your agency, is what data are you collecting? And not just broadly, I'm collecting A, B and C, but down to field by field, what are you collecting and what are you telling the public? And I'm a huge proponent of transparency, of it eliminates what we call fud, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And so when you tell people upfront, and I've been with even private organizations that are doing biometrics and video surveillance of individuals and yet we tell people upfront, this is what we're doing. Here's a picture of what it all looks like and it takes away all the fear and all these questions. So the first thing is, what is it you're collecting? And is it for the purpose that you, and when you use this, is it for the purpose that you said? And it's a huge issue. And is there a secondary use? And this concept you hear now of big data of, well we wanna collect everything and just vacuum it up and suck it up because when you ask someone, what do you wanna collect everything? For what purpose? I don't know, for how long? Forever. That's what, right? Because that's what every one of your web people and product people in government or private industry will tell you. And so that will violate something. It'll violate the privacy act in the federal government and it'll violate your privacy policies that you promise people individually. So you have to find the balance of what that looks like. And the last thing is when you're doing, you're taking this data as Julie just mentioned, you're doing these analytics. And I heard a term literally earlier today and I will even tell you it comes from Dr. Latanya Sweeney from the FTC. She said, when you're doing analytics, you need to make sure you're doing algorithmic accountability. Are your algorithms in sync and in line with your society's norms and standards? And it was an eye-opening kind of thing because you can do all sorts of good and some cases bad things with this data that you're collecting. So the algorithms and what it is that you're doing with it, does it match your society? Well, I mean, that's maybe a good point for you to pick up on, Christopher. When there's a part of the challenge here is perceptional and sort of explaining and being transparent about what data you're collecting and how you're using it. I mean, what do you advise governments and clients when they're trying to communicate how these tools are being used? Sure, and my background's a little different than Julie's. I spent some time in the former administration at the Defense Department and also at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So I do have a background in US government work, but predominantly what I do today is advise foreign governments and foreign businesses on their reputations and various crises. And part of this is a challenge to them because in the US, a lot of this comes naturally to us. How do you communicate to key audiences through social media? What channels are they using? Whether we're collecting it for, whether they're doing research and you're trying to identify what messages resonate or what they're saying and what their behavior patterns are. For instance, I've done a lot of work in the Middle East. As mobile technology, as the internet becomes more prominent in Africa, the Middle East, and other emerging markets, there's this need to advise governments on how to utilize social media. They don't really know how to engage media. They don't know really, they're almost scared of social media. You see this a lot in the Middle East with some of the various Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Turkey recently with a lot of their uprisings. I was in Russia last year and I was advising a client and speaking at a conference and I said, how do you use your social media? And they said, well, we use Twitter and Facebook as a complaint form. Well, if you're hashtagging everything that's bad, that completely ruins your reputation. And I just kind of looked at them and said, well, we're going to have to change that. And they said, why? It works for us. So it was very challenging. So I think that a lot of this is that they don't understand the algorithms. They don't understand how to engage. You know, they take, you know, a lot of these governments are attacking journalists or they don't embrace it, that they can really harness the power of social media to improve two-way communication. There's been so much attention on how social media has been used by civil society groups, particularly in the Middle East in recent years. I mean, I think the role, how governments use it has gotten less attention. I mean, you know, as you've been observing this, what's your sort of assessment on how, I mean, both the U.S. government and regional governments are interacting in social media and using it as a tool or as a means of gathering information? Yeah, I look at the Arab governments and I see they look at the internet as this wild animal and how we can control it. And we want to put it in a cave somewhere so nobody can touch it. It's so different than what you were talking about, like we want to use it, we want to aggregate data, we want to really evolve the community, we want to improve the lifestyle. I see it so differently. Like I've seen a few weeks ago, there was a document that was leaked in Egypt that the government want to, they want to do some surveillance on social media. And one of the things they want to see, what kind of law has been breaking online? What kind of social ties? What kind of public moral? So it's all the idea of how we can control it and how we can imprison people. So the idea of social media, specifically now at this point, is really going into more legislation that is anti-human rights. There is more people in jail. The governments are so afraid of opening discussion with people. And I see this going more and more in this direction, unfortunately. Well, I'll start this as a question to Julie, but if anyone else wants to jump in, feel free. I mean, since in the wake of sort of recent leaks with Snowden, with WikiLeaks, there's been a lot more attention on how the US government monitors social media. And I'm curious if that, this sort of backlash has reflected it itself at all in how you talk about data monitoring and sort of policies, both in terms of how you conduct monitoring and how you communicate about it. Well, I think in order to look at this, the whole Snowden headlines and information, it's brought data monitoring to the forefront. For years, the American government has put online our policies, our laws, they've been talking about personal privacy, information, protection, beginning almost a decade ago. And now people know Snowden, they know that whole situation, and now they're looking to the US government. Well, what are you doing? And it's giving us an opportunity, and when I say yes, of course, I mean federal agencies and departments, it's giving us an opportunity to take a look at the information that we're making available to the public, explaining what we're doing and why we're doing it and how, and embracing plain language and making it accessible and easy to understand for anybody who's looking for that type of information. So I would say I've seen more people, and that's being the general public, people who aren't exactly tech nerds or working with data all the time, your average citizen is now aware of these things and paying attention, and our mission to have an open government and to be transparent, this is a good thing. This is maybe a little bit bizarre, but I think there may be a slight positive effect of all this in that it brought, as Julie said, to the American public, when you see this on the evening news now, when you see the privacy even more so than any of the big retail store breaches and this kind of thing, that other governments who started off, everyone was looking at the US and look at all the bad things, and then now that it's calmed down a little, you could have a conversation that says, well, wait a minute, here's what the US government does and it's on the website, what does your government do and what surveillance are you doing on your citizens on the borders? And it's not nearly as transparent in a lot of parts of the world from some very vocal people as it has been in the US. And so it's changed the conversation a little bit even among governments and among the whole private sector also that, again, going back to what I said earlier about transparency is the US government was pretty transparent about a lot, not everything, but a lot of the stuff that was going on and it's now some other people around the globe are looking at it and says, oh, we need to emulate what the US is doing in that world. You know, I might even take that a step further because if you look at even some of the US's allies, you look towards Australia who was monitoring in Indonesia. There's a big debate going on in Britain right now about how they're worried about homegrown terrorism and how they're utilizing Twitter, Facebook, some of the other social media sites to really look at who of their citizens are going to fight in Iraq or Syria and what are they saying, how are they recruiting? And I think it brings up, it's not just the US that's monitoring this for security reasons. It's also other countries that are worried about terrorism and various homegrown threats. Well, I guess in light of current events, one thing that distinguishes ISIS or ISIL, whichever you call it in Iraq right now, is it sort of savvy use of social media and both the group itself and its supporters? I mean, I guess maybe there's a question for you, Mohammed, is maybe what role should the US government be playing in both monitoring this activity in line and maybe counteracting it or sort of using this sort of advocacy that these groups are using and countering it? Well, how I've seen what happened in the beginning of the attack is there was a real attack, ISIS or ISIL, they start using social media very smartly. They start using propaganda. There was a counterattack from the civil society groups inside Iraq. They were not giving the chance. The Iraqi government, they shut the internet down. They shut it mainly on their own citizens because ISIL, they are very sophisticated. They are having access to the internet so they kept using the same tactics that they're using on Twitter and other online platform and Iraqi government is not really listening what's happening online. There's like a Facebook page for Ministry of Telecommunication that it's not for them but it exists and it's leaking documents and they can easily, for example, request from Facebook to shut it down impersonating copyrights but they're not really doing that so Iraqi government should listen to their citizens. They shouldn't block the internet and the US maybe should help them doing that. They should push a little bit so they can open the internet, access back and they should train them how to be adapting human rights principles into internet communication. I also think that adding something, I think that by them generating so much social media coverage it also drives traditional press coverage. It makes them appear stronger on the ground in grassroots because a lot of this is for show to the west, show to the region because a lot of the local Iraqis don't have the types of internet penetration that the west has. So they end up recruiting additional fighters, financing and then driving press and that's something that the local tribes and the ISS are having a very difficult time because the tribes are actually interested in pushing them out but they're also waging their own battle against Baghdad, central Baghdad. Well, pushing for internet access and internet freedom in authoritarian governments has been a priority for the US in a while but one case we saw recently there was a bit of a backlash in Cuba where the USAID to a certain degree was involved in promoting this application that was at least from the press coverage seemed to be gathering user data on Cubans who may not have been aware that they were using a US government supported program. I'm curious, does that case raise any, what are the lessons of that both for how we push for internet access abroad and how we communicate about doing it? And I guess that's a question for anyone who wants to bite on it. I can talk generally about this point that I think the best thing that the US government should do is to lead by example is if they wanna do, if they wanna really protect internet freedom they should do it in their own country, they should prove it, they should, an SA program is one of them, one of the things that other governments are using to also do surveillance on their own citizens, mainly the Gulf. They should also do some pressure on their private companies not to sell all the surveillance softwares to governments that abuse human rights. They should also open the communication on software communication on countries that they don't have access, they're all citizens to the US telecommunication like Syria, Cuba, Iran and other countries. But I mean, well I guess to come back to my point, I mean is there a risk when pushing to engage with civil society groups abroad that can we ever go too far and risk these efforts being sort of tainted by the very fact of US involvement? That's a question for you Christopher. So I think that there is a, I think there's a double, it's kind of a two-way question here and I'm just kinda thinking the right way to position it because I think sometimes from both a political or a military standpoint of view and I spent over a year in Iraq working the communications aspect and a lot of what we did was hearts and minds. How do you win the local hearts and minds of the Iraqis? How do you promote the good things America's doing? And I think if you're not engaging the local communities and social media, you can't tell the story of the, whether it's the military or USCID or US policy and if you're not engaging the local communities and you're not monitoring what they're saying and offsetting what our opposition's doing, then we're gonna lose that battle every time. So we have to monitor, we have to be involved there and I think from a, from a homeland standpoint, I think we have to monitor because there is a security threat and there's a terrorism and for all of us who were part of 9-11, I don't think we ever want that to happen again. I mean, Julie, from your point of view, what are you sort of most excited about? What are some initiatives that you think show the potential of this kind of monitoring? Well, I know across the federal government, we've now shifted to focusing on digital communications and making it a priority to build up these products that engage with various communities, American and international as well, to discuss these very topics. Right now, it used to be how to dot gov, but now it's digital gov dot gov and it's becoming an online resource where we talk and discuss these various topics and I think as more people join in the conversation, we're able to flush out the things that we could do better. We are sharing best practices and gaining insight from panels like this and organizations like the digital community here. So I think that's very exciting. We're always growing and always changing and having done this for a decade, my background, way background, is also military and the Air Force and just seeing how it used to be. We all had websites and we all focused on traditional media outlets and how that's grown. It started off with YouTube and MySpace and I'm sure some things are before that and just how rapidly it keeps growing and expanding. And to what extent is there sort of engagement with the social networking companies themselves with sort of private sector internet firms to sort of work with them on developing these tools? Yes, absolutely. So we have contacts and liaisons with the various platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Google comes to mind very quickly and we engage with training sessions. We invite them to come in and speak to us and likewise they've had us at their organizations too where we do simply this, we talk, we ask questions, we talk about success stories and then stories that maybe didn't do so well and it's all about training and making sure that the people who are working on my team, of course, understand the policies that are in place and the tools that they have available to them for this. Well, Alan, one thing we've seen recently both with the NSA case and with sort of recent legal cases involving Google is that the understanding of privacy especially in Europe is maybe a little different than what it is in the US and the legal environment surrounding it. What kind of challenges do you think the US government gets into when it attempts to put forward these initiatives in countries where the legal and public understanding of privacy is a little different than what we're used to? It's a huge challenge because in Europe there is a directive as it's called that among the 28 EU member states they all have to implement this directive. The problem is that means there's 28 different implementations of what does a privacy law look like and so to move data from one country to the US, you can do consent but we all know that no one reads your privacy policy and everyone checks the box or it's pre-checked and you can look at how often or not often anyone actually hits the page and how many seconds they're on it before they realized that's not where they wanna be. So I think what you're starting to see is the next era of consumer engagement. In other words, before it was yes, I don't know what your privacy policy says, I don't know to whom you're sharing my data, it's just okay. And now I think because of these NSA revelations because of some of the retail and other things everyone in this room has probably received multiple letters in the last year from some of the big email houses that lost email or credit card companies, whatever, that so now it becomes a technology issue. How do you get the notice just in time or in the right place or what does it look like? How do you do a proper notice on a mobile device? Is it 50 screens that you have to scroll through or here is the 40 words or 30 words that I can see it as I'm about to do something. And so I think that's healthy because I think again it's changing the relationship between the consumer and the website, the consumer and the government, the consumer and the company. So I think that's what you're seeing. There is some, a lot of discussion that's going on on how to move data for example from Europe, the European Union back and forth to the US, that the Europeans are not happy with us right now because of these revelations. There's a lot of discussions going on between commerce and the FTC and the State Department all summer for the last number of months. But it is coming together and you're starting to see also for the first time something different, very unusual, a risk-based approach. In other words before I consent and that's the end of it. And now companies and governments are starting to look at this and saying what is the harm of this and how likely is it? And that's changing the whole way that you're presenting this type of information. And both individual companies, private industry in the US is starting to do with the European Union is starting to accept that and to start to factor that into, well every notice doesn't have to be the same and every use of data is not the same. Some things matter, health data, very sensitive, that's what it's called in Europe. That's a big deal, I need to make sure I do different things than just my name is Fred and I'm in the DC area. And so people are starting to understand that and the technology is starting to help that along. Mohamed, has there been any change in the perception of social media tools and social media companies in Middle East civil society since the early days of the Arab Spring when we saw all this excitement have subsequent events dampened that enthusiasm at all? You mean the relation between users and companies or governments or? Well, both really, I mean users and companies but also the sort of role that what seems to be a large role that US and Western governments are playing in sort of shaping the social media messages. Sure, I mean at the beginning there was a lot of misunderstanding of principles and rules for Twitter and for Facebook, the community standards was really hard for people to understand why my content has been deleted and there was a lot of challenges on this part and I think the company even though there's a lot of things to improve now but they did some work on translating things to Arabic making sure they have more staff in Arabic so they can communicate the message it was really challenging at some point and there's a lot to learn in terms of contexts. For example, now Iraq it's a big lesson for any company to work with, it's very challenging. That's from one angle, from another angle. How Arab governments look at social media there was the phase before the Arab uprising which was totally ignoring the online activities. They didn't really consider anything could happen. Organizing online was really not an interest for the governments which was a mistake and then the other phase which is after the Arab uprising which the governments are taking it very seriously they are really cracking down on a lot of online activity especially the one that is linked somehow to online organizing to offline action, in person action. And now we're on the more extreme phase which is the government is really trying by design to stop all this era by legislating new laws and breaching other laws just to stop what's happening, unfortunately. I think we're about the halfway point so maybe I'll open it up to questions now. If I could ask, if you could raise your hand and when you ask your questions please give your name and where you work and please keep your question short and in question form. I'm in the blue shirt here, yeah. I think we have a microphone here. I'm at the University of Southern California. Could one of the panelists please develop the idea of what the difference is functionally between some benevolent useful data monitoring so the flu.gov example for instance versus some of the more egregious human rights violating examples. There's a large middle ground there and I think there's a gray area and it would be really great to hear your thoughts on where the red line, if there is one, lies. Maybe for you, Ellen. Yeah, I guess. Well, yes, way to knock it out of the park, right? The very first question. So, okay, so this is very interesting and with flu.gov, this website, if you haven't been there, it's all dedicated to the flu. Of course, with the Department of Health and Human Services we can write about all kinds of diseases and illnesses and things like this but this one is specific to flu and it's in partnership, of course, there's the headquarters level where I work but there's also the CDC, provides a lot of information, FDA, across the board, all of these agencies have very specific missions related to the flu and so we created flu.gov so that as a consumer, as an American citizen, you can go and find the information where the flu outbreaks happening, when is flu season, what schedules my flu vaccination, when should I get it? And in that aspect, as a website, it's really no different than any of the other websites in that we're not collecting information. You know, there's a tool there where people can put in their website and it'll draw information and show where you can get a flu vaccination. If there's any updates about the flu vaccination, we also have resources on that website where we can take very basic search terms and information that the user wants to put in there. We don't retain it but it just helps pull out the information that they're seeking and making it available. Of course, we are operating under federal policies and laws about the type of information we can retain and how we use it but I would say with flu.gov, since that was the example, it's very different than governments that are collecting information and using it to harm people so I hope that sort of answers your question. I want to take it to the dark side. Right. Here he is. Let's say it's not flu.gov, let's say it's an AIDS website or breast cancer survivor site or something and it's one thing to say how many people in what city are doing research on AIDS symptoms because that might help a government to put resources there for education and whatever they might want to do but it could be monitored and the same exact data, now you want to track individuals, particularly if you get them into very small populations. I get three people, this one inquiry, I can make it very quickly down to a part of town with this exact browser and all of a sudden, I know I can identify this person and now do I have, it's very easy to have a discriminatory impact. Oh, a potential employer knows that this person is looking at the breast cancer survivor, I don't want to hire her because I'm going to have medical issues or I have an AIDS person and I don't want to do something with it or it's another, you know, those type of issues. So, and that goes to where I said very early, it's very easy because everyone wants to collect data, it's actually cheaper to collect it than it is to dispose of it. So, you've got your vacuum, you're sucking up all this data and you're storing it and you've got the tools now that you didn't have even a few years ago to analyze in all sorts of different ways. So, somebody needs to stand up and say we're not going to do this. In the US, for example, it's not illegal to look at someone's social media site if you can, you know, the public site before in the hiring process. As an attorney, I would say that's a dangerous thing to do because if anyone finds out about it, they may have an issue, but it's not illegal. I've worked for companies that say, as a matter of policy, we won't do that. We'll look at LinkedIn because we consider that a business site, we're recruiting on it, but we're not looking at Twitter, we're not looking at Facebook, we're not looking at anything else because we don't want to know. But, you know, there's all these cases of people, you know, teachers, elementary school teachers with the beer getting fired or something because somebody looked at a social media page. So it really comes down, it's the same data, but it's how do you use it and what's the ethical line within your organization or with your agency to stop somebody from using it in an incorrect way? Yeah, I was gonna say about the darker area, which is if you look at Egypt after a military coup and 41,000 people in jail and then the new military government, like after the coup the government decided to do surveillance, like a new surveillance bid that was also leaked, nobody knew about it. And then you read it, you see like the government want to get information to really know who's really talking differently so they can imprison them. That's a clear, it's a black, this is not great. But I really question, like what if NSA was not revealed? How would we talk about this now? In my opinion, we should not trust any government, we should really question every single element in any picking up all kind of information of data and that should be clear. And I think a key point in that is how is it collected and how is it gonna be utilized? Yeah. And we also, speaking from the government website, we encourage people not to share personal health information with us. Unfortunately, we do get these heartbreaking emails and engagements, comments where people are sharing their very personal health information. Sometimes we get social security numbers and we as community managers delete and we don't retain that at all. And so to be proactive to prevent people from sharing, we don't really need that information, thank you very much. We say on our sites and in our policy, this is who you're sending this to and this is the information that we can take from you but please don't share anything more. And of course, that's just a candid summary. Another question? Well, we'll start with you. Oh, no, the two. Brink, my question, you mentioned connecting online communication to offline behavior. I come from a marketing background where that's like gold if we can figure out where that conversion is. There's also a conversion, it's a good word for it for what you guys were talking about with Iraq and different foreign nationals. How do you determine that? Where is that connection drawn? Is there an algorithm that can tell you when the online communication will determine offline behavior? I mean, I can, great. So a couple things there. I think the first is that I'm a big believer in technology and media is only part of the solution. Particularly when you talk about assessments and analysis, 80% of technology can get you there but the other 20% is human intelligence. How's the data analyzed? Who are you talking to? How's it cross-tabbed? Everything like that. I think that from a communication standpoint, everything I do starts with research and whether it's open source research, a heavy part of that is social media, consumer data. All of this, as it's analyzed, you can take key messages, develop key messages and you really know what messages resonate with your key audiences and that's kind of what we develop is, if you wanna create, like I mean if somebody really wanted to put a million people in the streets in Terear, that's not always, there's a lot of people that argue well, social media caused it. I'm one of those that argues social media didn't cause it. Social media fueled it, empowered it, made it faster and made the world more aware of it. And so I think a lot of this is, social media is just another tool, it's another medium for reaching a key audience and so that two-way communication is what's very powerful and then how do you use that data then access those audiences? If that answers a little bit of it. I mean, I think if we take Egypt and Mohammed, I hope will back me up on this, but I think a lot of it was frustration with the government, frustration with the middle class, frustration with jobs, frustration with fuel taxes and really the economy and part of it is just a, it's a different generation and that's not your father or your grandparent's generation and so social media empowered it. Social media allowed the world to see it. When you have an internet that shut down in Egypt or Turkey, these groups have gotten very creative. I mean, if you look at Egypt, you had the BBC on TV, you had satellites that are so powerful in the Middle East for TV and they're putting up numbers that satellite phones can call and you have people then tweeting that out and so there's this creative communication with these groups to get around the internet blocking. You're seeing it in Syria very effectively, you're seeing it in Iraq. I mean, Syria is another, the other way of example, which is like everybody is on Facebook now, nothing happened in the country. Like social media is really the medium only. Egypt has been using technology since 2006, 2007. There was a lot of protest. It was really just famous locally in the Arab region, maybe Egypt mainly and then there was this guy who was killed, Khaled Saeed in 2010 and then the momentum started building and there was a lot of hate for the police and still is and people went on the street not because of social media because there was really injustice happening. Yeah, I think taking out two examples I have. One is you look at the fight with ISIS and some of Syria. They understand Western policy. They understand what the White House is doing what the State Department's doing. They understand what Downing Street's doing or Brussels is doing and they know that if they're driving public opinion in the States or in Europe with social media or they're utilizing social media to access reporters and create articles, they know they can push policy and that's what you're seeing a lot of and to a point a lot of the assessments and the analysis social media also gives the traditional media at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal they're even utilizing policies where you have to have three sources or you have to have an official spokesman that comes out and ratifies this information before they print it because of all the hoaxes that are going on because people could see something printed and just accept it on the internet. I think in Egypt you saw this not in Egypt but in Libya. We have a team of Arabic digital monitors that are always on the internet and always looking at social media because some of our clients are in the Middle East. These guys were saying, well, what video was in Benghazi? What's causing this? These guys, most of them are from Egypt or Iraq and they're going, well, what's this video? What's going on here? And they were really confused about it because nobody saw it online. So you can actually look, if you look at the data going out in the tweets and where things are coming from, you can then try to figure out what's facts or what's fact or fiction. I'm in the green shirt here. John Handechek, I'm a consultant and a master student at Georgetown. I think privacy gets touched on every once in a while but I think it's probably time for us to really talk about what do we mean when we say we're going to protect privacy? Like the idea of notifications telling you what's going to be done with the data. This is a stopgap. Ultimately Snowden, like you brought up, we wouldn't even be having this discussion without the surveillance that was Snowden, that revealing of these secrets. There's a huge imbalance right now in secrecy and it's all well and good to hope that you can be transparent out of the goodness of your heart but for individuals it's really not guaranteed there's so much information about people. Privacy is essentially over as we've known it. Secrets are no longer, it's very difficult to keep a secret today. So I guess the question becomes, I want to hear from everyone, what do you think privacy means in the future? What are we protecting when we protect privacy? Very good question. Good question, yeah. Personally, and someone who's been living full time in that world for more than a decade, I think it's going to become some, and I don't even want to say control of your own information because that's clearly not the case but some ability of the individual to have some impact on what the use of their data is or some, and again, control in the standpoint of at least you have a clue what's happening with it because you know you've got what the FTC calls data brokers, they have thousands of points of information on virtually every person in the United States. They know your loyalty card from the grocery store gets sucked up into it, your car, if you vote, what party you registered and your income and your zip code and all these other things to build a profile and they know where you shop and all the things about that. And so I don't see in the near term that's not going to change but as we build the technology in, as consumers get more sensitized to this, I think you're going to see a different relationship between consumers and websites which whether they're government or private that there's more of an understanding of I'm doing this for this purpose and personally I'd like to see more enforcement because the enforcement side makes people more accountable like oh someone goes to jail or they get fined to where it actually hurts because I think at some point that needs to be the ultimate stick but yes, you're correct. Privacy as we knew it, I hate to say it's dead, it's not quite as one of the internet folks said a few years ago but it is clearly in a different mode. Everyone in this room has a personal tracking device. You all call it a smartphone. The industry calls it a PTD because it has GPS and it knows everything about you and it knows where you've been and knows where you go every day and who you speak to and who you talk to and everything else may have your banking information in there and your insurance information and what you eat if you do those kind of things your Starbucks card it even probably can figure out what you ordered. So all of that information is getting sucked into something and unfortunately today the technology is so far ahead of the law and it's so far ahead of what any one of us could think of even how to do this and the companies are pushing the limits because they can and because they monetize it and all the other reasons and it's cool. I mean everyone here every single person you see walking down the street they're face first in their phone doing whatever and so I think it's starting to change and like I said I think and I hate to use his name but I think Mr. Snowden's revelations really did change the conversation and some of the giant data breaches and I hate to throw target under the bus because but they are probably most of us got a letter from them and the target and the other retail stores who had a problem right around late last year early this year and the number of times proactively I'm getting new credit cards in the mail which is coming in at an accelerated pace lately just because. I think that's now changing the conversation. You know from a privacy perspective I think you know what I tell people if you don't want your life private I mean if you want it to be private don't get on Facebook or Twitter because one you always think about controlling your friends who are posting a picture of you or somebody's tweeting about you or something like that I think it is a fine line and how consumers or intelligence operations or they are monitoring your credit cards looking at behavior patterns they are monitoring your social media it only takes three cell phone towers to find an exact location of someone. So you know but if you don't if you are not on those social media and you are not putting information about yourself someone easily could duplicate you and you know part of what we tell people is to control your message control your you know people's opinion of you or your brand and so it's kind of a do if you don't you know it's kind of you know maybe it's going to hide in the mountains and being part of a militia in Wyoming or something I don't know but it's a you know I think people have to think hard about what they're getting into when they get on there on social media platforms but also think you know what do they get into if they don't get on there. To speak up you asked what is the future and I think it's easy for our generation to say of course privacy as we know it is dead if you think about the future generation I'm sure many of you know friends who put ultrasound photos of their babies their babies aren't even born but they already have an online presence they have a baby registry you know what brand this kid is going to wear before the kid is even here and I think they're being born into this data-driven society with all this technology my children know how to use my iPhone better than I do right so they're growing up in that environment and they are aware of things that I didn't become aware of until just recently till I'm clearly an adult now and with that there's going to be an expectation level set this is what they've always known and I think they're just going to grow up being more aware of how connected they are and it's going to be on us not only as parents but also as a government and as these organizations to sort of teach them how to or what to expect when they visit a website or what does it mean to use a credit card at a grocery store and then that credit card information is stolen what is that? I know that my 10-year-old was aware of what we were going through when we were working with our bank to get our cards replaced and things like that so I think the future is it's not going to ever revert to how we grew up and what we know of privacy but the definition is going to constantly be changing and they're going to be more familiar with it and whatever that looks like I don't know of course I don't have my crystal ball here but I think it's going to it's neither good nor bad but that's just the way that it's going to be I think it was Good question back there? Smith from the State Department but asking as an individual I'm finding this a little depressing because a lot of this is about how institutions seem to control technology and I'm either passive or an object whether it's marketing or surveillance I'd be interested in hearing stories about engagement, government, corporate foreign government where we are using technology to better assess market, community, social needs better deliver services have a more nuanced understanding of how to engage and provide public service where technology is being used to empower and draw out sort of collective opinion and have better public policy outcomes Thank you Well since I'm government here on the panel I'll throw my hat in on this one So a recent example was on food safety when we had a hard winter the entire country seemed to have a hard winter there were constant blizzards and power outages and when it comes to food safety people want to know is my food safe to eat when my fridge has been powerless for days and through our data monitoring we could see on regions based on weather reports we could sort of predict as humans seeing the trends what areas should we be I don't want to say targeting but engaging and proactively sharing well here's our emergency information here are the checklists that show you if your power has been out for eight hours you're going to be okay as long as you don't open your fridge and if it smells bad throw it out that sort of information we could look and hit up weather.com and see where's the blizzard going to hit about what time so let's proactively put up these links through our social media platforms or let's use these hashtags there was snowmageddon each major storm had a name that was something that we could latch on to we don't have a bottom line we're not making a profit and so it's sort of hard to determine was this a success or not and just an easy way to do that is how did our website spike and we assumed that because our website visits spiked people were finding the link on these specific pages and that they were using the resources that's our goal is to make these resources and information available to them so hopefully that's a nice story where we were able to use these tools and provide a service to the American public which is really what we're all about I don't have the exact details but I know during was a Hurricane Sandy there was use of social media to find people who needed help so to me that was the purest example not the original use no one would have thought about it but everyone would have said why of course you're gonna use it for that purpose and it's a secret that anyone in the tech industry knows as soon as there's a disaster everyone picks up their phone whether it's a cell phone or a landline and nothing works because the system is built for about 25% utilization text messages tend to go through because they're on a different channel and it works a little bit better you're seeing the 911 system is now about to start except text messages across the country because that's now coming into play so I think that's a valid use people have used social media, Twitter and particularly I've heard when they're trapped in a building and they're trapped in some kind of natural disaster and that's the only way that they're found so there are some positive it's not all ugly and evil there are good things that are happening in a lot of ways and particularly in the disaster area Chris are you seeing things that other governments are doing? Sure, you said you're asking from a personal perspective or state department He said first we're doing a lot of work in Africa and right now in Afghanistan on elections and a lot of our work is helping look at individual voting boxes or districts and have training and teaching the local communities how to use mobile and some of the social media to tweet about fraud or irregularities or even like in Zimbabwe when we were working last year we helped do some training with the opposition and how do you take a picture of they actually post the ballots for the precincts on the wall and how do you have somebody go down there take a picture and then tweet them out and then the media picks it up and people can tally so then you can then track fraud so we're trying to open up promote democracy in some of these more difficult areas in Africa and Asia How's it going? Nazley Confessor I'm a graduate serenity at University of Southern California I'm also a military photojournalist and I did a I was in Afghanistan in 2011-2012 and I was in charge of the unit social media and I'm trying to get into the federal government's public affairs what's how does like government web contact manager keep top of policies and laws relating to data sharing or monitoring you know what's right what's not right Well, first it's attending events like this, right? As a web content manager it's all about training and making sure that your team is familiar not everybody can be an expert because there's just so much knowledge out there but to go back to the original question are people aware of what this means data monitoring and as long as your team has that basic understanding and they know where to look for resources and they network and they engage with both federal organizations if that's who you work for as well as civilian organizations and departments then you know that that's a good thing and reaching out to others and asking the questions and just seeking it out and staying on top of it that's the way the way to do it and also most I don't know a lot of federal agencies have an in-house privacy officer full-time DHS have the first one it's now you know HHS has one Department of Ed has one a lot of the big agencies that are very public I know for a fact they all do and state and commerce and the federal trade commission and so those staffs there are people within that organization that this person focuses on social media this one focuses on the different type of outreach someone else's and there's part of the privacy office some of it is internally facing these type of things and some of it they work externally yes sure I was at the Pentagon for several years at DOD in the public affairs shop and it was on the early on debate on you know internet you know Facebook Facebook actually wasn't even around then but you know how to you know who can see what on the internet you know can use your mobile phones it was it was that kind of debate um and it's evolved since but GSA came out with some regulations and and and particularly with the army that there's a lot of uh... I mean your your local command usually has guidelines on that I'll plug quickly um one of the reports that we had is about the use of a hashtag for community building so if that's another good case study if people want to see that uh... but my question for you guys is one thing we haven't talked about uh... is sort of the we've been talking about privacy with respect to who's monitoring the data but we haven't talked that much about the fact that the platforms we're using are all actually companies and corporate platforms that are they're using all of our data for their own purposes I talked about data brokers a little bit but I was wondering if we could dig into that a bit more like what the implications for that are especially as governments are using them as engagement platforms not to mention individuals choosing to engage like what we need to do around education and literacy and policy to really start to tease that out and maybe push the bar further like actually give us more rights on those platforms so from a government perspective uh... the third party websites that we use uh... we use under a federally compatible terms of service agreement and that's where our information technology privacy and legal team they look at the terms of service they determine that yes it falls in step with our federal policies and guidelines and we are free to use that platform but that's not always the case and uh... there can be discussion between the platform and you know it has a surge of popularity we really want to get on board but it takes a while to hash out a terms of service agreement for these official platforms uh... that is something that is constantly happening uh... both at the gsa level and the individual departments the department of human services of course we have online our complete list of terms of service agreements an example of that where we are mindful of it uh... happened with instagram about a year and a half ago is when uh... after a lengthy discussion uh... we determined that their terms of service was federally compatible we encourage other people to create official accounts and then instagram changed the terms of service and if you remember that big firestorm of headlines and people not being happy with it uh... that included the government because it wasn't in step with what we're allowed to do and so those official accounts shut down until an agreement was met in a new terms of service was negotiated and now instagram is one of our most popular uh... platform is not necessarily for food safety but uh... for other organizations and departments and you are seeing uh... in the education space is when you mentioned uh... google has been very public lately saying we're not scanning student emails we're not selling that data the gmail account that you and i might have as an individual is not the same as an elementary school the k-12 student because it falls under a different system so they don't have that issue because you have children's laws you know called copa if you're thirteen under thirteen and all sorts of other things so it's just easier we're just not going there and it was a good uh... pr move frankly so there are different terms you know the commercials terms that you might see for service of microsoft or amazon or google are not always the same as a government agency i guess we'll leave it there then uh... want to thank all of our panelists and uh... thank the digital diplomacy coalition and new america for hosting us and uh... uh... thanks so much for all of you for coming out