When we're splitting our time between a physical and digital world, you have to stay safe online the same way you stay safe offline.
Jared Cohen
We live in a world where all wars will begin as cyber wars... It's the combination of hacking and massive, well-coordinated disinformation campaigns.
When people think of digital diplomacy, they think of government tweeting. It is not what it is. That is public diplomacy.
Cyber weapons won't go away, and their spread can't be controlled. Instead, as we've done for other destructive technologies, the world needs to establish a set of principles to determine the proper conduct of governments regarding cyber conflict.
The intensity of cyber conflict around the world is increasing, and the tools are becoming cheaper and more readily available.
I think, when I wrote 'Children of Jihad,' I wrote it with a very optimistic view of what technology can do. Today I maintain that optimistic view, but I'm also aware of the challenges we have. So I would say I'm not a techno-utopian, but I'm a techno-pragmatist.
When you work at Google and tell these engineers that their skill set is relevant to somebody in Iran who doesn't have access to information in their country or the rest of the world, it really inspires them to want to do something about it. There is a genuine altruism that exists at this company, and that's why I'm here and not anywhere else.
Iranian young people are one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East.
It is difficult to predict technology more than 10 years out with any certitude, but what I observe is that change and innovation happens earlier and faster than we expect. We are constantly surprised at what technology can do.
I think companies need to put up tools that put privacy and security in the hands of their users and make it easy to understand those tools. In Google's case, two-step verification is a perfect example of this.
It's not a panacea: there are problems in the world that technology can't fix. You can't fix water shortages. You can't storm a Ministry of the Interior with a cell phone. You can't magically create leaders and institutions overnight. You can't eat it. You can't shield a bullet.
Technology is a tool, and it's a platform. Nobody gets arrested for being a blogger; people get arrested for dissent. Nobody gets arrested for putting information about themselves online; they get arrested for being an activist. I'm a strong believer in the fact that you should not blame the tools; you should blame the circumstances.
Name any issue in the world, I can tell you how technology is intertwined with it. I can tell you how technology will make it better. How it can make it worse. It needs to be part of everything that we do, whether you are a government or a company or a citizen.
For people involved in pre-meditated crimes, whether it is terrorism or robbery or something else, their use of technology means that they leave a digital trail, and the room for error goes up dramatically. In the future, it will be easier for violent people to make mistakes and get caught before they commit their crimes.
Privacy and security are the ultimate shared responsibility, and everyone - including governments, companies, and citizens - have an important role to play.
I want to use the best technology we have at our disposal to begin to take on trolling and other nefarious tactics that give hostile voices disproportionate weight. To do everything we can to level the playing field.
The big unknown is, at what point is a cyberattack so significant that it warrants a physical-world response.
The number of people who believe in stopping violence in the world is wildly greater than those that want to perpetrate it. When everybody has a smartphone, the ability for people to actually do something about violence goes up significantly.
The virtual world is a 'public square' much more vast than Tiananmen Square. And you can't send in the tanks to crush the netizens.
While the specifics of Russia's interference in the 2016 American election remain unclear, no one doubts that Moscow has built a robust technological arsenal for waging cyberattacks.
Since most cyberwar is conducted covertly, governments avoid any public acknowledgment of their own abilities and shy away from engaging in any sort of 'cyber diplomacy.' Statecraft conducted in secret fails to create public norms for deterrence.
I often say Policy Planning is very analogous to a venture capital firm. A venture capital firm sees an interesting idea and puts money behind it; in Policy Planning, we look for promising ideas and then put contacts and relationships behind it.
I dislike the phrase 'social media.' 'Social media' is merely a way to describe new tools in an old and narrow paradigm where we measure success by how many people are reached.
Part of the responsibility of the technology industry is to anticipate the challenges of the vast majority of its future users and proactively start thinking about them now and proactively build products that address those challenges.
I'll say that technology will make revolutions start happening faster, but it'll make them harder to finish. Technology can't create leaders and cause institutions to appear.
Essentially, it's not that technology or cyberspace is some parallel universe that operates tangentially from the world we know; it is simply a new front in the international system.
Technology can be useful to organise a large number of people online and offline against the common goal of getting a particular dictator out of power. But at the end of the day, somebody still has to run for president with a different last name and deliver for the population.
The 21st century is a really terrible time to be a control freak.
I always say that the largest party in every country - the largest opposition group in every country - is the youth party.
My job is to put as many ideas out there as possible every day. Some of them will get traction, some won't - some of them shouldn't.
Every single young person is reachable. Ask them what dating is like in their country. Ask them if they have a girlfriend. Ask them what their type is. There's nobody who's too conservative to talk about that.
Kids are coming online and connecting at a pace that's faster than their physical maturation process. Would you ever imagine that you'd have to talk to your kid about phishing before you're talking to him about the birds and the bees?
The importance of human judgment does not evaporate in the future, and as connected individuals, we will have to exercise sound judgment about what we choose to share or not share about ourselves.
By definition, transnational crime crosses borders, but efforts to combat it mostly do not.
At a certain point, a critical mass of people either have used the Internet or have expectations. Anything less than the free flow of information will be seen as having something taken away. We've seen time and again - in Egypt and Iran, for example - that creates a backlash.
