Tech and politics — and the politics of tech

Three were notably absent: Elon Musk of Tesla, who quit from the White House business advisory council after Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement on climate; Travis Kalanick of Uber, who earlier resigned as a business adviser to the president; and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook due to “scheduling conflicts,” as for the company.

“Facebook execs have been critical of Trump on some fronts,” CNBC pointed out.

In January, [Sheryl] Sandberg criticized the administration’s travel ban on citizens from several Mideast nations, saying that they “defy the heart and values that define the best of our nation.” And Zuckerberg said in a June 1 post on Facebook that Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord “is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk.”

But similar concerns didn’t stop other tech leaders to participate, noticeably Bezos, who came out against the travel ban, and Cook, who critized the president’s decision on the Paris accord in an email to Apple employees saying it was “wrong for our planet.”

The New York Times highlighted however that only few technology specialists from the White House attended.

The administration has not filled several major science and technology positions,” the paper added. “But the business and economics team closest to the president attended, including Gary D. Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, senior counselor for economic initiatives.

At the meeting, Trump explained that the goal of his administration “is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government’s technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens, stronger protection from cyberattacks.” Also on the agenda issues like cloud computing, analytics, big data, purchasing and contract reform, talent recruitment and retraining, government and private sector partnerships, H1-B Visas and future trends.

We’re embracing big change, bold thinking, and outsider perspectives to transform government and make it the way it should be, and at far less cost.

In addressing the tech crowd at the opening of the event Kushner said: “We have challenged ourselves to pursue change that will provide utility to Americans far beyond our tenure here. Together we have set ambitious goals and empowered interagency teams to tackle our objectives. It’s working and it’s very exciting.”

“Together we will unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services in a way that has never happened before,” he added while asserting that his goal is to make “an effort to bring business sensibility to a government that for too long has relied on past practices as an automatic justification for their continuation.”

Kushner was the organizer of the event — as head of the Office of American Innovation — together with Chris Liddell, the White House director of strategic initiatives and former chief financial officer of Microsoft.

In a tweet, Trump’s daughter Ivanka echoed her father’s speech and stressed how “innovation has and will continue to transform the world — and the way the US government works on behalf of all Americans.”

Liddell told CNBC on Monday that the summit’s focus is on cloud and cybersecurity. The government has more than 6,000 data centers and spends $86 billion a year on technology, figures that are “orders of magnitude” higher than the private-market equivalents, Liddell said.

And cybersecurity and the fight agains terrorism were also one of the agenda priorities of the recent G7 Summit in Italy, attended by president Trump.

“While being one of the most important technological achievements in the last decades, the Internet has also proven to be a powerful tool for terrorist purposes,” reads the G7 joint statement on the fight against terrorism and violent extremism that came out of the first day of the G7 Summit last month.

G7 calls for tech groups to fight terrorism online_The G7 leaders gathered in Taormina, Italy on May 26–27 for the 2017 G7 Summit._hackernoon.com

The G7 leaders — CanadianPM Justin Trudeau; Emmanuel Macron of France; Angela Merkel of Germany; Paolo Gentiloni of Italy; Shinzo Abe of Japan; Theresa May of the United Kingdom; Donald Trump of the United States; and Jean-Claude Juncker of the European Commission and Donal Tusk of the Council of the European Union — called upon the technology groups and social media platforms “to substantially increase their efforts to address terrorist content.”

We encourage industry to act urgently in developing and sharing new technology and tools to improve the automatic detection of content promoting incitement to violence, and we commit to supporting industry efforts in this vein including the proposed industry-led forum for combatting online extremism.

Yesterday’s White House meetings, however, seemed to have focus mostly on Trump’s job agenda and services for citizens.

Microsoft’s leaders explained how they made the case “high-skilled immigration and investments in education.”

Cook told Trump that “the government should be focused on its citizens” and he pushed for education, in particular, he said: “Coding should be in every school.”

Bezos encouraged the president to use commercial technology whenever possible and emphasized the need to retrain workers and said it was “impossible to overstate” the importance of artificial intelligence, according to The New York Times.

“State and local governments are meant to be a laboratory of democracy,” OpenGov’s Bookman told CNN. “It’s important to not just hear from tech titans but from folks who are growing rapidly and in the trenches. It’s happening in Silicon Valley but also in all the Silicon Alleys and Beaches with small groups of engineers who are rethinking old processes and disrupting markets.”

At the meetings also Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of Code for America, who explained in a Medium post her decision to participate.

“This is not a decision I have made lightly,” she wrote. “I personally believe that, outside of the issues discussed at this meeting, the policies of the Trump administration are dangerous and harmful to the American public, and that the administration has shown a frightening disregard for the principles and values of government, public service, and the rule of law.”