 April's Schieffer series broke new ground at CSIS. Former and current government officials discussed how technology is changing the public diplomacy landscape. Public diplomacy has become a controversial term in foreign policy circles. No one really knows what it encompasses. What exactly is public diplomacy? Well public diplomacy is diplomacy that's aimed at publics rather than at officials. And it is an attempt to inform them, to engage with them, to understand them, but most of all to influence foreign publics in pursuit of American interests. So that's the standard definition of public diplomacy and the means by which public diplomacy is exercised tends to use vast amounts of media, but it's also very important that it be done in a personal way as well. And the State Department has been doing this for, certainly for at least the last 60 years. In a time when terrorists are using new media in increasingly significant ways, government officials are constantly looking for ways to push back. We're in a very new and different world now aren't we? I think you're absolutely right and I think we have focused often with how the bad actors end up using the technology. We have to remember the technology is neutral from a policy perspective and with respect to morality. Certainly terrorist groups, al-Qaeda, others use these technologies to communicate, to fundraise, to radicalize, to recruit. But I think what we're finding now as we talk about public diplomacy in the new digital age is trying to think about the other side of the ledger. The government is increasingly collaborating with the private sector. They are working together using technology to advance U.S. national interests. The important thing is that there's actually, you know, people often talk about government being behind the curve. When it comes to technology applied to foreign policy challenges, I would actually argue that it's a rare instance of government actually being with the curve. And in particular, early on in this administration, whether it was Iran or Moldova or the Uyghurs in China, we saw a demand on the part of this broader definition of civil society taking their advocacy into cyberspace. And cyberspace is not something separate from the traditional civil society that we know. It's an extension. And so our feeling inside the government, and in particular the Secretary of State's feeling, was if people are taking their advocacy into an extended version of civil society, then our policies that are empowering them, protecting them, and enhancing their ability to get around things like human rights violations, politically motivated censorship, you name it, need to also expand to a broader civil society. We just came back from a trip in Russia. We had the CEO of eBay, John Donahoe, Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, Pedmastery Warrior, the CTO of Cisco. Really because of Jared reaching out to the private sector, and you know, back to this point, it's actually one of the rare instances where the government has been ahead of the curve. I'd say the private sector has been behind the curve in the sense of using and understanding the role that we could play within public diplomacy. So it's not just us creating services and letting them, you know, go into the wild and evolve, but also engaging us in the process. And that trip was, I think, for all of us, an eye-opener in terms of the role that we could play. As technology evolves, the government's greatest challenge is to find innovative ways to apply that technology to foreign policymaking. For full text and video, as well as other resources on the Schieffer series, visit csis.org.