(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Okay, hello everyone. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here with Meet the Analysts segment Sunday morning. We've got everyone around the world here to discuss a bit of the news around the EU killing the privacy deal, striking it down, among other topics around, you know, data privacy and global commerce. We got great guests here, Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. Bill Mew, founder and CEO of Cyber Crisis Management from the Firm Crisis Team. And JD, CEO of Spearhead Management. JD, I can let you say your name because I really can't pronounce it. How do I (laughs) pronounce it, doctor? >> I wouldn't even try it unless you are Dutch, otherwise it will seriously hurt your throat. (Ray laughing) So, JD works perfect for me. >> Doctor Drooghaag. >> And Sarbjeet Johal, who's obviously an influencer, a cloud awesome native expert. Great, guys. Great to have you on, appreciate it, thanks for comin' on. And Bill, thank you for initiating this, I appreciate all your tweets. >> Happy Sunday. (Bill laughing) >> You guys have been really tweeting up a storm, I want to get everyone together, kind of as an analyst, Meet the Analyst segment. Let's go through with it. The news is the EU and U.S. Privacy Shield for data struck down by the court, that's the BBC headline. Variety of news, different perspectives, you've got an American perspective and you've got an international perspective. Bill, we'll start with you. What does this news mean? I mean, basically half the people in the world probably don't know what the Privacy Shield means, so why is this ruling so important, and why should it be discussed? >> Well, thanks to sharing between Europe and America, it's based on a two-way promise that when data goes from Europe to America, the Americans promise to respect our privacy, and when data goes form America to Europe, the Europeans promise to respect the American privacy. Unfortunately, there are big cultural differences between the two blocks. The Europeans have a massive orientation around privacy as a human right. And in the U.S., there's somewhat more of a prioritization on national security, and therefore for some time there's been a mismatch here, and it could be argued that the Americans haven't been living up to their promise because they've had various different laws, and look how much talk about FISA and the Cloud Act that actually contravene European privacy and are incompatible with the promise Americans have given. That promise, first of all, was in the form of a treaty called Safe Harbor. This went to court and was struck down. It was replaced by Privacy Shield, which was pretty much the same thing really, and that has recently been to the court as well, and that has been struck down. There now is no other means of legally sharing data between Europe and America other than what are being called standard contractual clauses. This isn't a broad treaty between two nations, these are drawn by each individual country. But also in the ruling, they said that standard contractual clauses could not be used by any companies that were subject to mass surveillance. And actually in the U.S., the FISA courts enforce a level of mass surveillance through all of the major IT firms, of all major U.S. telcos, cloud firms, or indeed, social media firms. So, this means that for all of the companies out there and their clients, business should be carrying on as usual apart from if you're one of those major U.S. IT firms, or one of their clients. >> So, why did this come about? Was there like a major incident? Why now, was it in the court, stuck in the courts? Were people bitchin' and moanin' about it? Why did this go down, what's the real issue? >> For those of us who have been following this attentively, things have been getting more and more precarious for a number of years now. We've had a situation where there are different measures being taken in the U.S., that have continued to erode the different protections that there were for Europeans. FISA is an example that I've given, and that is the sort of secret courts and secret warrants that are issued to seize data without anyone's knowledge. There's the Cloud Act, which is a sort of extrajudicial law that means that warrants can be served in America to U.S. organizations, and they have to hand over data wherever that data resides, anywhere in the world. So, data could exist on a European server, if it was under the control of an American company, they'd have to hand that over. So, whilst FISA is in direct conflict with the promises that the Americans made, things like the Cloud Act are not only in controversion with the promise they've made, there's conflicting law here, because if you're a U.S. subsidiary of a big U.S. firm, and you're based in Europe, who do you obey, the European law that says you can't hand it over because of GDPR, or the American laws that says they've got extrajudicial control, and that you've got to hand it over. So, it's made things a complete mess. And to say has this stuff, hasn't really happened? No, there's been a gradual erosion, and this has been going through the courts for a number of years. And many of us have seen it coming, and now it just hit us. >> So, if I get you right in what you're saying, it's basically all this mishmash of different laws, and there's no coherency, and consistency, is that the core issue? >> On the European side you could argue there's quite a lot of consistency, because we uphold people's privacy, in theory. But there have been incidents which we could talk about with that, but in theory, we hold your rights dear, and also the rights of Europeans, so everyone's data should be safe here from the sort of mass surveillance we're seeing. In the U.S., there's more of a direct conflict between everything, including there's been a, in his first week in the White House, Donald Trump signed an executive order saying that the Privacy Act in the U.S., which had been the main protection for people in the U.S., no longer applied to non-U.S. citizens. Which was, if you wanted try and cause a storm, and if you wanted to try and undermine the treaty, there's no better way of doing it than that. >> A lot of ways, Ray, I mean simplify this for me, because I'm a startup, I'm hustlin', or I'm a big company, I don't even know who runs the servers anymore, and I've got data stored in multiple clouds, I got in regions, and Oracle just announced more regions, you got Amazon, a gazillion regions, I could be on-premise. I mean bottom line, what is this about? I mean, and -- >> Bill's right, I mean when Max Schrems, the Austrian. Bill's right, when Max Schrems the Austrian activist actually filed his case against Facebook for where data was being stored, data residency wasn't as popular. And you know, what it means for companies that are in the cloud is that you have to make sure your data's being stored in the region, and following those specific region rules, you can't skirt those rules anymore. And I think the cloud companies know that this has been coming for some time, and that's why there's been announced in a lot of regions, a lot of areas that are actually happening, so I think that's the important part. But going back to Bill's earlier point, which is important, is America is basically the Canary Islands of privacy, right? Privacy is there, but it isn't there in a very, very explicit sense, and I think we've been skirting the rules for quite some time, because a lot of our economy depends on that data, and the marketing of the data. And so we often confuse privacy with consent, and also with value exchange, and I think that's part of the problem of what's going on here. Companies that have been building their business models on free data, free private data, free personally identifiable data information are the ones that are at risk! And I think that's what's going on here. >> It's the classic Facebook issue, you're the product, and the data is your product. Well, I want to get into what this means, 'cause my personal take away, not knowing the specifics, and just following say, cyber security for instance, one of the tenets there is that data sharing is an invaluable, important ethos in the community. Now, everyone has their own privacy, or security data, they don't want to let everyone know about their exploits but, but it's well known in the security world that sharing data with each other, different companies and countries is actually a good thing. So, the question that comes in my mind, is this really about data sharing or data privacy, or both? >> I think it's about both. And actually what the ruling is saying here is, all we're asking from the European side is please stop spying on us and please give us a level of equal protection that you give to your own citizens. Because data comes from America to Europe, whatever that data belongs to, a U.S. citizen or a European citizen, it's given equal protection. It is only if data goes in the other direction, where you have secret courts, secret warrants, seizure of data on this massive scale, and also a level of lack of equivalence that has been imposed. And we're just asking that once you've sorted out a few of those things, we'd say everything's back on the table, away we go again! >> Why don't we merge the EU with the United States? Wouldn't that solve the problem? (Bill laughing) >> We just left Europe! (laughs heartily) >> Actually I always -- >> A hostile takeover of the UK maybe, the 52nd state. (Bill laughing loudly) >> I always pick on Bill, like Bill, you got all screaming loud and clear about all these concerns, but UKs trying to get out of that economic union. It is a union at the end of the day, and I think the problem is the institutional mismatch between the EU and U.S., U.S. is old democracy, bigger country, population wise, bigger economy. Whereas Europe is several countries trying to put together, band together as one entity, and the institutions are new, like you know, they're 15 years old, right? They're maturing. I think that's where the big mismatch is and -- >> Well, Ray, I want to get your thoughts on this, Ray wrote a book, I forget what year it was, this digital disruption, basically it was digital transformation before it was actually a trend. I mean to me it's like, do you do the process first and then figure out where the value extraction is, and this may be a Silicon Valley or an American thing, but go create value, then figure out how to create process or understand regulations. So, if data and entrepreneurship is going to be a new modern era of value, why wouldn't we want to create a rule based system that's open and enabling, and not restrictive? >> So, that's a great point, right? And the innovation culture means you go do it first, and you figure out the rules later, and that's been a very American way of getting things done, and very Silicon Valley in our perspective, not everyone, but I think in general that's kind of the trend. I think the challenge here is that we are trading privacy for security, privacy for convenience, privacy for personalization, right? And on the security level, it's a very different conversation than what it is on the consumer end, you know, personalization side. On the security side I think most Americans are okay with a little bit of "spying," at least on your own side, you know, to keep the country safe. We're not okay with a China level type of spying, which we're not sure exactly what that means or what's enforceable in the courts. We look like China to the Europeans in the way we treat privacy, and I think that's the perspective we need to understand because Europeans are very explicit about how privacy is being protected. And so this really comes back to a point where we actually have to get to a consent model on privacy, as to knowing what data is being shared, you have the right to say no, and when you have the right to say no. And then if you have a value exchange on that data, then it's really like sometimes it's monetary, sometimes it's non-monetary, sometimes there's other areas around consensus where you can actually put that into place. And I think that's what's missing at this point, saying, you know, "Do we pay for your data? Do we explicitly get your consent first before we use it?" And we haven't had that in place, and I think that's where we're headed towards. And you know sometimes we actually say privacy should be a human right, it is in the UN Charter, but we haven't figured out how to enforce it or talk about it in the digital age. And so I think that's the challenge. >> Okay, people, until they lose it, they don't really understand what it means. I mean, look at Americans. I have to say that we're idiots on this front, (Bill chuckling) but you know, the thing is most people don't even understand how much value's getting sucked out of their digital exhaust. Like, our kids, TikTok and whatnot. So I mean, I get that, I think there's some, there's going to be blow back for America for sure. I just worry it's going to increase the cost of doing business, and take away from the innovation for citizen value, the people, because at the end of the day, it's for the people right? I mean, at the end of the day it's like, what's my privacy mean if I lose value? >> Even before we start talking about the value of the data and the innovation that we can do through data use, you have to understand the European perspective here. For the European there's a level of double standards and an erosion of trust. There's double standards in the fact that in California you have new privacy regulations that are slightly different to GDPR, but they're very much GDPR like. And if the boot was on the other foot, to say if we were spying on Californians and looking at their personal data, and contravening CCPA, the Californians would be up in arms! Likewise if we having promised to have a level of equality, had enacted a local rule in Europe that said that when data from America's over here, actually the privacy of Americans counts for nothing, we're only going to prioritize the privacy of Europeans. Again, the Americans would be up in arms! And therefore you can see that there are real double standards here that are a massive issue, and until those addressed, we're not going to trust the Americans. And likewise, the very fact that on a number of occasions Americans have signed up to treaties and promised to protect our data as they did with Safe Harbor, as they did with Privacy Shield, and then have blatantly, blatantly failed to do so means that actually to get back to even a level playing field, where we were, you have a great deal of trust to overcome! And the thing from the perspective of the big IT firms, they've seen this coming for a long time, as Ray was saying, and they sought to try and have a presence in Europe and other things. But the way this ruling has gone is that, I'm sorry, that isn't going to be sufficient! These big IT firms based in the U.S. that have been happy to hand over data, well some of them maybe more happy than others, but they all need to hand over data to the NSA or the CIA. They've been doing this for some time now without actually respecting this data privacy agreement that has existed between the two trading blocks. And now they've been called out, and the position now is that the U.S. is no longer trusted, and neither are any of these large American technology firms. And until the snooping stops and equality is introduced, they can now no longer, even from their European operations, they can no longer use standard contractual clauses to transfer data, which is going to be a massive restriction on their business. And if they had any sense, they'd be lobbying very, very hard right now to the Senate, to the House, to try and persuade U.S. lawmakers actually to stick to some these treaties! To stop introducing really mad laws that ride roughshod over other people's privacy, and have a certain amount of respect. >> Let's let JD weigh in, 'cause he just got in, sorry on the video, I made him back on a host 'cause he dropped off. Just, Bill, real quick, I mean I think it's like when, you know, I go to Europe there's the line for Americans, there's the line for EU. Or EU and everybody else. I mean we might be there, but ultimately this has to be solved. So, JD, I want to let you weigh in, Germany has been at the beginning forefront of privacy, and they've been hardcore, and how's this all playing out in your perspective? >> Well, the first thing that we have to understand is that in Germany, there is a very strong law for regulation. Germans panic as soon as they know regulation, so they need to understand what am I allowed to do, and what am I not allowed to do. And they expect the same from the others. For the record I'm not German, but I live in Germany for some 20 years, so I got a bit of a feeling for them. And that sense of need for regulation has spread very fast throughout the European Union, because most of the European member states of the European Union consider this, that it makes sense, and then we found that Britain had already a very good framework for privacy, so GDPR itself is very largely based on what the United Kingdom already had in place with their privacy act. Moving forward, we try to find agreement and consensus with other countries, especially the United States because that's where most of the tech providers are, only to find out, and that is where it started to go really, really bad, 2014, when the mass production by Edward Snowden came out, to find out it's not data from citizens, it's surveillance programs which include companies. I joined a purchasing conference a few weeks ago where the purchase of a large European multinational, where the purchasing director explicitly stated that usage of U.S. based tech providers for sensitive data is prohibited as a result of them finding out that they have been under surveillance. So, it's not just the citizens, there's mass -- >> There you have it, guys! We did trust you! We did have agreements there that you could have abided by, but you chose not to, you chose to abuse our trust! And you're now in a position where you are no longer trusted, and unless you can lobby your own elected representatives to actually recreate a level playing field, we're not going to continue trusting you. >> So, I think really I -- >> Well I mean that, you know, innovation has to come from somewhere, and you know, has to come from America if that's the case, you guys have to get on board, right? Is that what it -- >> Innovation without trust? >> Is that the perspective? >> I don't think it's a country thing, I mean like, it's not you or them, I think everybody -- >> I'm just bustin' Bill's chops there. >> No, but I think everybody, everybody is looking for what the privacy rules are, and that's important. And you can have that innovation with consent, and I think that's really where we're going to get to. And this is why I keep pushing that issue. I mean, privacy should be a fundamental right, and how you get paid for that privacy is interesting, or how you get compensated for that privacy if you know what the explicit value exchange is. What you're talking about here is the surveillance that's going on by companies, which shouldn't be happening, right? That shouldn't be happening at the company level. At the government level I can understand that that is happening, and I think those are treaties that the governments have to agree upon as to how much they're going to impinge on our personal privacy for the trade off for security, and I don't think they've had those discussions either. Or they decided and didn't tell any of their citizens, and I think that's probably more likely the case. >> I mean, I think what's happening here, Bill, you guys were pointing out, and Ray, you articulated there on the other side, and my kind of colorful joke aside, is that we're living a first generation modern sociology problem. I mean, this is a policy challenge that extends across multiple industries, cyber security, citizen's rights, geopolitical. I mean when would look, and even when we were doing CUBE events overseas in Europe, in North American companies we'd call it abroad, we'd just recycle the American program, and we found there's so much localization value. So, Ray, this is the digital disruption, it's the virtualization of physical for digital worlds, and it's a lot of network theory, which is computer science, a lot of sociology. This is a modern challenge, and I don't think it so much has a silver bullet, it's just that we need smart people working on this. That's my take away! >> I think we can describe the ideal endpoint being somewhere we have meaningful protection alongside the maximization of economic and social value through innovation. So, that should be what we would all agree would be the ideal endpoint. But we need both, we need meaningful protection, and we need the maximization of economic and social value through innovation! >> Can I add another axis? Another axis, security as well. >> Well, I could -- >> I put meaningful protection as becoming both security and privacy. >> Well, I'll speak for the American perspective here, and I won't speak, 'cause I'm not the President of the United States, but I will say as someone who's been from Silicon Valley and the east coast as a technical person, not a political person, our lawmakers are idiots when it comes to tech, just generally. (Ray laughing) They're not really -- (Bill laughing loudly) >> They really don't understand. They really don't understand the tech at all! >> So, the problem is -- >> I'm not claiming ours are a great deal better. (laughs) >> Well, this is why I think this is a modern problem. Like, the young people I talk to are like, "Why do we have this rules?" They're all lawyers that got into these positions of Congress on the American side, and so with the American JEDI Contract you guys have been following very closely is, it's been like the old school Oracle, IBM, and then Amazon is leading with an innovative solution, and Microsoft has come in and re-pivoted. And so what you have is a fight for the digital future of citizenship! And I think what's happening is that we're in a massive societal transition, where the people in charge don't know what the hell they're talkin' about, technically. And they don't know who to tap to solve the problems, or even shape or frame the problems. Now, there's pockets of people that are workin' on it, but to me as someone who looks at this saying, it's a pretty simple solution, no one's ever seen this before. So, there's a metaphor you can draw, but it's a completely different problem space because it's, this is all digital, data's involved. >> We've got a lobbyists out there, and we've got some tech firms spending an enormous amount of lobbying. If those lobbyists aren't trying to steer their representatives in the right direction to come up with law that aren't going to massively undermine trade and data sharing between Europe and America, then they're making a big mistake, because we got here through some really dumb lawmaking in the U.S., I mean, there are none of the laws in Europe that are a problem here. 'Cause GDPR isn't a great difference, a great deal different from some of the laws that we have already in California and elsewhere. >> Bill, Bill. >> The laws that are at issue here -- >> Bill, Bill! You have to like, back up a little bit from that rhetoric that EU is perfect and U.S. is not, that's not true actually. >> I'm not saying we're perfect! >> No, no, you say that all the time. >> But I'm saying there's a massive lack of innovation. Yeah, yeah. >> I don't, I've never said it! >> Arm wrestle! >> Yes, yes. >> When I'm being critical of some of the dumb laws in the U.S, (Sarbjeet laughing) I'm not saying Europe is perfect. What we're trying to say is that in this particular instance, I said there was an equal balance here between meaningful protection and the maximization of economic and social value. On the meaningful protection side, America's got it very wrong in terms of the meaningful protection it provides to civil European data. On the maximization of economic and social value, I think Europe's got it wrong. I think there are a lot of things we could do in Europe to actually have far more innovation. >> Yeah. >> It's a cultural issue. The Germans want rules, that's what they crave for. America's the other way, we don't want rules, I mean, pretty much is a rebel society. And that's kind of the ethos of most tech companies. But I think you know, to me the media, there's two things that go on with this tech business. The company's themselves have to be checked by say, government, and I believe in not a lot of regulation, but enough to check the power of bad actors. Media so called "checking power", both of these major roles, they don't really know what they're talking about, and this is back to the education piece. The people who are in the media so called "checking power" and the government checking power assume that the companies are bad. Right, so yeah, because eight out of ten companies like Amazon, actually try to do good things. If you don't know what good is, you don't really, (laughs) you know, you're in the wrong game. So, I think media and government have a huge education opportunity to look at this because they don't even know what they're measuring. >> I support the level of innovation -- >> I think we're unreeling from the globalization. Like, we are undoing the globalization, and that these are the side effects, these conflicts are a side effect of that. >> Yeah, so all I'm saying is I support the focus on innovation in America, and that has driven an enormous amount of wealth and value. What I'm questioning here is do you really need to spy on us, your allies, in order to help that innovation? And I'm starting to, I mean, do you need mass surveillance of your allies? I mean, I can see you may want to have some surveillance of people who are a threat to you, but wait, guys, we're meant to be on your side, and you haven't been treating our privacy with a great deal of respect! >> You know, Saudi Arabia was our ally. You know, 9/11 happened because of them, their people, right? There is no ally here, and there is no enemy, in a way. We don't know where the rogue actors are sitting, like they don't know, they can be within the walls -- >> It's well understood I think, I agree, sorry. it's well understood that nation states are enabling terrorist groups to take out cyber attacks. That's well known, the source enables it. So, I think there's the privacy versus -- >> I'm not sure it's true in your case that it's Europeans that's doing this though. >> No, no, well you know, they share -- >> I'm a former officer in the Royal Navy, I've stood shoulder to shoulder with my U.S. counterparts. I put my life on the line on NATO exercises in real war zones, and I'm now a disabled ex-serviceman as a result of that. I mean, if I put my line on the line shoulder to shoulder with Americans, why is my privacy not respected? >> Hold on -- >> I feel it's, I was going to say actually that it's not that, like even the U.S., right? Part of the spying internally is we have internal actors that are behaving poorly. >> Yeah. >> Right, we have Marxist organizations posing as, you know, whatever it is, I'll leave it at that. But my point being is we've got a lot of that, every country has that, every country has actors and citizens and people in the system that are destined to try to overthrow the system. And I think that's what that surveillance is about. The question is, we don't have treaties, or we didn't have your explicit agreements. And that's why I'm pushing really hard here, like, they're separating privacy versus security, which is the national security, and privacy versus us as citizens in terms of our data being basically taken over for free, being used for free. >> John: I agree with that. >> That I think we have some agreement on. I just think that our governments haven't really had that conversation about what surveillance means. Maybe someone agreed and said, "Okay, that's fine. You guys can go do that, we won't tell anybody." And that's what it feels like. And I don't think we deliberately are saying, "Hey, we wanted to spy on your citizens." I think someone said, "Hey, there's a benefit here too." Otherwise I don't think the EU would have let this happen for that long unless Max had made that case and started this ball rolling, so, and Edward Snowden and other folks. >> Yeah, and I totally support the need for security. >> I want to enter the -- >> I mean we need to, where there are domestic terrorists, we need to stop them, and we need to have local action in UK to stop it happening here, and in America to stop it happening there. But if we're doing that, there is absolutely no need for the Americans to be spying on us. And there's absolutely no need for the Americans to say that privacy applies to U.S. citizens only, and not to Europeans, these are daft, it's just daft! >> That's a fair point. I'm sure GCHQ and everyone else has this covered, I mean I'm sure they do. (laughs) >> Oh, Bill, I know, I've been involved, I've been involved, and I know for a fact the U.S. and the UK are discussing I know a company called IronNet, which is run by General Keith Alexander, funded by C5 Capital. There's a lot of collaboration, because again, they're tryin' to get their arms around how to frame it. And they all agree that sharing data for the security side is super important, right? And I think IronNet has this thing called Iron Dome, which is essentially like they're saying, hey, we'll just consistency around the rules of shared data, and we can both, everyone can have their own little data. So, I think there's recognition at the highest levels of some smart people on both countries. (laughs) "Hey, let's work together!" The issue I have is just policy, and I think there's a lot of clustering going on. Clustered here around just getting out of their own way. That's my take on that. >> Are we a PG show? Wait, are we a PG show? I just got to remember that. (laughs) (Bill laughing) >> It's the internet, there's no regulation, there's no rules! >> There's no regulation! >> The European rules or is it the American rules? (Ray laughing) >> I would like to jump back quickly to the purpose of the surveillance, and especially when mass surveillance is done under the cover of national security and terror prevention. I worked with five clients in the past decade who all have been targeted under mass surveillance, which was revealed by Edward Snowden, and when they did their own investigation, and partially was confirmed by Edward Snowden in person, they found out that their purchasing department, their engineering department, big parts of their pricing data was targeted in mass surveillance. There's no way that anyone can explain me that that has anything to do with preventing terror attacks, or finding the bad guys. That is economical espionage, you cannot call it in any other way. And that was authorized by the same legislation that authorizes the surveillance for the right purposes. I'm all for fighting terror, and anything that can help us prevent terror from happening, I would be the first person to welcome it. But I do not welcome when that regulation is abused for a lot of other things under the cover of national interest. I understand -- >> Back to the lawmakers again. And again, America's been victim to the Chinese some of the individual properties, well documented, well known in tech circles. >> Yeah, but just 'cause the Chinese have targeted you doesn't give you free right to target us. >> I'm not saying that, but its abuse of power -- >> If the U.S. can sort out a little bit of reform, in the Senate and the House, I think that would go a long way to solving the issues that Europeans have right now, and a long way to sort of reaching a far better place from which we can all innovate and cooperate. >> Here's the challenge that I see. If you want to be instrumenting everything, you need a closed society, because if you have a free country like America and the UK, a democracy, you're open. If you're open, you can't stop everything, right? So, there has to be a trust, to your point, Bill. As to me that I'm just, I just can't get my arms around that idea of complete lockdown and data surveillance because I don't think it's gettable in the United States, like it's a free world, it's like, open. It should be open. But here we've got the grids, and we've got the critical infrastructure that should be protected. So, that's one hand. I just can't get around that, 'cause once you start getting to locking down stuff and measuring everything, that's just a series of walled gardens. >> So, to JD's point on the procurement data and pricing data, I have been involved in some of those kind of operations, and I think it's financial espionage that they're looking at, financial security, trying to figure out a way to track down capital flows and what was purchased. I hope that was it in your client's case, but I think it's trying to figure out where the money flow is going, more so than trying to understand the pricing data from competitive purposes. If it is the latter, where they're stealing the competitive information on pricing, and data's getting back to a competitor, that is definitely a no-no! But if it's really to figure out where the money trail went, which is what I think most of those financial analysts are doing, especially in the CIA, or in the FBI, that's really what that probably would have been. >> Yeah, I don't think that the CIA is selling the data to your competitors, as a company, to Microsoft or to Google, they're not selling it to each other, right? They're not giving it to each other, right? So, I think the one big problem I studied with FISA is that they get the data, but how long they can keep the data and how long they can mine the data. So, they should use that data as exhaust. Means like, they use it and just throw it away. But they don't, they keep mining that data at a later date, and FISA is only good for five years. Like, I learned that every five years we revisit that, and that's what happened this time, that we renewed it for six years this time, not five, for some reason one extra year. So, I think we revisit all these laws -- >> Could be an election cycle. >> Huh? >> Could be an election cycle maybe. (laughs) >> Yes, exactly! So, we revisit all these laws with Congress and Senate here periodically just to make sure that they are up to date, and that they're not infringing on human rights, or citizen's rights, or stuff like that. >> When you say you update to check they're not conflicting with anything, did you not support that it was conflicting with Privacy Shield and some of the promises you made to Europeans? At what point did that fail to become obvious? >> It does, because there's heightened urgency. Every big incident happens, 9/11 caused a lot of new sort of like regulations and laws coming into the picture. And then the last time, that the Russian interference in our election, that created some sort of heightened urgency. Like, "We need to do something guys here, like if some country can topple our elections, right, that's not acceptable." So, yeah -- >> And what was it that your allies did that caused you to spy on us and to downgrade our privacy? >> I'm not expert on the political systems here. I think our allies are, okay, loose on their, okay, I call it village politics. Like, world is like a village. Like it's so only few countries, it's not millions of countries, right? That's how I see it, a city versus a village, and that's how I see the countries, like village politics. Like there are two camps, like there's Russia and China camp, and then there's U.S. camp on the other side. Like, we used to have Russia and U.S., two forces, big guys, and they managed the whole world balance somehow, right? Like some people with one camp, the other with the other, right? That's how they used to work. Now that Russia has gone, hold on, let me finish, let me finish. >> Yeah. >> Russia's gone, there's this void, right? And China's trying to fill the void. Chinese are not like, acting diplomatic enough to fill that void, and there's, it's all like we're on this imbalance, I believe. And then Russia becomes a rogue actor kind of in a way, that's how I see it, and then they are funding all these bad people. You see that all along, like what happened in the Middle East and all that stuff. >> You said there are different camps. We thought we were in your camp! We didn't expect to be spied on by you, or to have our rights downgraded by you. >> No, I understand but -- >> We thought we were on your side! >> But, but you have to guys to trust us also, like in a village. Let me tell you, I come from a village, that's why I use the villager as a hashtag in my twitter also. Like in village, there are usually one or two families which keep the village intact, that's our roles. >> Right. >> Like, I don't know if you have lived in a village or not -- >> Well, Bill, you're making some great statements. Where's the evidence on the surveillance, where can people find more information on this? Can you share? >> I think there's plenty of evidence, and I can send some stuff on, and I'm a little bit shocked given the awareness of the FISA Act, the Cloud Act, the fact that these things are in existence and they're not exactly unknown. And many people have been complaining about them for years. I mean, we've had Safe Harbor overturned, we've had Privacy Shield overturned, and these weren't just on a whim! >> Yeah, what does JD have in his hand? I want to know. >> The Edward Snowden book! (laughs) >> By Edward Snowden, which gives you plenty. But it wasn't enough, and it's something that we have to keep in mind, because we can always claim that whatever Edward Snowden wrote, that he made it up. Every publication by Edward Snowden is an avalanche of technical confirmation. One of the things that he described about the Cisco switches, which Bill prefers to quote every time, which is a proven case, there were bundles of researchers saying, "I told you guys!" Nobody paid attention to those researchers, and Edward Snowden was smart enough to get the mass media representation in there. But there's one thing, a question I have for Sabjeet, because in the two parties strategy, it is interesting that you always take out the European Union as part. And the European Union is a big player, and it will continue to grow. It has a growing amount of trade agreements with a growing amount of countries, and I still hope, and I think think Bill -- >> Well, I think the number of countries is reducing, you've just lost one! >> Only one. (Bill laughing loudly) Actually though, those are four countries under one kingdom, but that's another point. (Bill chortling heartily) >> Guys, final topic, 5G impact, 'cause you mentioned Cisco, couldn't help think about -- >> Let me finish please my question, John. >> Okay, go ahead. How would you the United States respond if the European Union would now legalize to spy on everybody and every company, and every governmental institution within the United States and say, "No, no, it's our privilege, we need that." How would the United States respond? >> You can try that and see economically what happens to you, that's how the village politics work, you have to listen to the mightier than you, and we are economically mightier, that's the fact. Actually it's hard to swallow fact for, even for anybody else. >> If you guys built a great app, I would use it, and surveil all you want. >> Yeah, but so this is going to be driven by the economics. (John laughing) But the -- >> That's exactly what John said. >> This is going to be driven by the economics here. The big U.S. cloud firms are got to find this ruling enormously difficult for them, and they are inevitably going to lobby for a level of reform. And I think a level of a reform is needed. Nobody on your side is actually arguing very vociferously that the Cloud Act and the discrimination against Europeans is actually a particularly good idea. The problem is that once you've done the reform, are we going to believe you when you say, "Oh, it's all good now, we've stopped it!" Because with Crypto AG scandal in Switzerland you weren't exactly honest about what you were doing. With the FISA courts, so I mean FISA secret courts, the secret warrants, how do we know and what proof can we have that you've stopped doing all these bad things? And I think one of the challenges, A, going to be the reform, and then B, got to be able to show that you actually got your act together and you're now clean. And until you can solve those two, many of your big tech companies are going to be at a competitive disadvantage, and they're going to be screaming for this reform. >> Well, I think that, you know, General Mattis said in his book about Trump and the United states, is that you need alliances, and I think your point about trust and executing together, without alliances, it really doesn't work. So, unless there's some sort of real alliance, (laughs) like understanding that there's going to be some teamwork here, (Bill laughing) I don't think it's going to go anywhere. So, otherwise it'll continue to be siloed and network based, right? So to the village point, if TikTok can become a massively successful app, and they're surveilling, so and then we have to decide that we're going to put up with that, I mean, that's not my decision, but that's what's goin' on here. It's like, what is TikTok, is it good or bad? Amazon sent out an email, and they've retracted it, that's because it went public. I guarantee you that they're talkin' about that at Amazon, like, "Why would we want infiltration by the Chinese?" And I'm speculating, I have no data, I'm just saying, you know. They email those out, then they pull it back, "Oh, we didn't mean to send that." Really, hmm? (laughs) You know, so this kind of -- >> But the TRA Balin's good, you always want to get TRA Balin out there. >> Yeah, exactly. There's some spying going on! So, this is the reality. >> So, John, you were talking about 5G, and I think you know, the role of 5G, you know, the battle between Cisco and Huawei, you just have to look at it this way, would you rather have the U.S. spy on you, or would you rather have China? And that's really your binary choice at this moment. And you know both is happening, and so the question is which one is better. Like, the one that you're in alliance with? The one that you're not in alliance with, the one that wants to bury you, and decimate your country, and steal all your secrets and then commercialize 'em? Or the one kind of does it, but doesn't really do it explicitly? So, you've got to choose. (laughs) >> It's supposed to be -- >> Or you can say no, we're going to create our own standard for 5G and kick both out, that's an option. >> It's probably not as straightforward a question as, or an answer to that question as you say, because if we were to fast-forward 50 years, I would argue that China is going to be the largest trading nation in the world. I believe that China is going to have the upper hand on many of these technologies, and therefore why would we not want to use some of their innovation, some of their technology, why would we not actually be more orientated around trading with them than we might be with the U.S.? I think the U.S. is throwing its weight around at this moment in time, but if we were to fast-forward I think looking in the longterm, if I had to put my money on Huawei or some of its competitors, I think given its level of investments in research and whatever, I think the better longterm bet is Huawei. >> No, no, actually you guys need to pick a camp. It's a village again. You have to pick a camp, you can't be with both guys. >> Global village. >> Oh, right, so we have to go with the guys that have been spying on us? >> How do you know the Chinese haven't been spying on you? (Ray and John laughing loudly) >> I think I'm very happy, you find a backdoor in the Huawei equipment and you show it to us, we'll take them to task on it. But don't start bullying us into making decisions based on what-ifs. >> I don't think I'm, I'm not qualified to represent the U.S., but what we would want to say is that if you look at the dynamics of what's going on, China, we've been studying that as well in terms of the geopolitical aspects of what happens in technology, they have to do what they're doing right now. Because in 20 years our population dynamics go like this, right? You've got the one child policy, and they won't have the ability to go out and fight for those same resources where they are, so what they're doing makes sense from a country perspective and country policy. But I think they're going to look like Japan in 20 years, right? Because the xenophobia, the lack of immigration, the lack of inside stuff coming in, an aging population. I mean, those are all factors that slow down your economy in the long run. And the lack of bringing new people in for ideas, I mean that's part of it, they're a closed system. And so I think the longterm dynamics of every closed system is that they tend to fail versus open systems. So, I'm not sure, they may have better technology along the way. But I think a lot of us are probably in the camp now thinking that we're not going to aid and abet them, in that sense to get there. >> You're competing a country with a company, I didn't say that China had necessarily everything rosy in its future, it'll be a bigger economy, and it'll be a bigger trading partner, but it's got its problems, the one child policy and the repercussions of that. But that is not one of the things, Huawei, I think Huawei's a massively unlimited company that has got a massive lead, certainly in 5G technology, and may continue to maintain a lead into 6G and beyond. >> Oh yeah, yeah, Huawei's done a great job on the 5G side, and I don't disagree with that. And they're ahead in many aspects compared to the U.S., and they're already working on the 6G technologies as well, and the roll outs have been further ahead. So, that's definitely -- >> And they've got a great backer too, the financer, the country China. Okay guys, (Ray laughing) let's wrap up the segment. Thanks for everyone's time. Final thoughts, just each of you on this core issue of the news that we discussed and the impact that was the conversation. What's the core issue? What should people think about? What's your solution? What's your opinion of how this plays out? Just final statements. We'll start with Bill, Ray, Sarbjeet and JD. >> All I'm going to ask you is stop spying on us, treat us equally, treat us like the allies that we are, and then I think we've got to a bright future together! >> John: Ray? >> I would say that Bill's right in that aspect in terms of how security agreements work, I think that we've needed to be more explicit about those. I can't represent the U.S. government, but I think the larger issue is really how do we view privacy, and how we do trade offs between security and convenience, and you know, what's required for personalization, and companies that are built on data. So, the sooner we get to those kind of rules, an understanding of what's possible, what's a consensus between different countries and companies, I think the better off we will all be a society. >> Yeah, I believe the most important kind of independence is the economic independence. Like, economically sound parties dictate the terms, that's what U.S. is doing. And the smaller countries have to live with it or pick the other bigger player, number two in this case is China. John said earlier, I think, also what JD said is the fine balance between national security and the privacy. You can't have, you have to strike that balance, because the rogue actors are sitting in your country, and across the boundaries of the countries, right? So, it's not that FISA is being fought by Europeans only. Our internal people are fighting that too, like how when you are mining our data, like what are you using it for? Like, I get concerned too, when you can use that data against me, that you have some data against me, right? So, I think it's the fine balance between security and privacy, we have to strike that. Awesome. JD? I'll include a little fake check, fact check, at the moment China is the largest economy, the European Union is the second largest economy, followed directly by the USA, it's a very small difference, and I recommend that these two big parties behind the largest economy start to collaborate and start to do that eye to eye, because if you want to balance the economical and manufacturing power of China, you cannot do that as being number two and number three. You have to join up forces, and that starts with sticking with the treaties that you signed, and that has not happened in the past, almost four years. So, let's go back to the table, let's work on rules where from both sides the rights and the privileges are properly reflected, and then do the most important thing, stick to them! >> Yep, I think that's awesome. I think I would say that these young kids in high school and college, they need to come up and solve the problems, this is going to be a new generational shift where the geopolitical landscape will change radically, you mentioned the top three there. And new alliances, new kinds of re-imagination has to be there, and from America's standpoint I'll just say that I'd like to see lawmakers have, instead of a LinkedIn handle, a GitHub handle. You know, when they all go out on campaign talk about what code they've written. So, I think having a technical background or some sort of knowledge of computer science and how the internet works with sociology and societal impact will be critical for our citizenships to advance. So, you know rather a lawyer, right so? (laughs) Maybe get some law involved in that, I mean the critical lawyers, but today most people are lawyers in American politics, but show me a GitHub handle of that congressman, that senator, I'd be impressed. So, that's what we need. >> Thanks, good night! >> Ray, you want to say something? >> I wanted to say something, because I thought the U.S. economy was 21 trillion, the EU is sittin' at about 16, and China was sitting about 14, but okay, I don't know. >> You need to do math man. >> Hey, we went over our 30 minutes time, we can do an hour with you guys, so you're still good. (laughs) >> Can't take anymore. >> No go on, get in there, go at it when you've got something to say. >> I don't think it's immaterial the exact size of the economy, I think that we're better off collaborating on even and fair terms, we are -- >> We're all better off collaborating. >> Yeah. >> Gentlemen -- >> But the collaboration has to be on equal and fair terms, you know. (laughs) >> How do you define fair, good point. Fair and balanced, you know, we've got the new -- >> We did define fair, we struck a treaty! We absolutely defined it, absolutely! >> Yeah. >> And then one side didn't stick to it. >> We will leave it right there, and we'll follow up (Bill laughing) in a later conversation. Gentlemen, you guys are good. Thank you. (relaxing electronic music)

>> Narrator: New York City, it's the Cube covering CyberConnect 2017 brought to you by Centrify and the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> Welcome back, everyone. This is the Cube's live coverage in New York City's Grand Hyatt Ballroom for CyberConnect 2017 presented by Centrify. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the Cube with my co-host this week is Dave Vellante, my partner and co-founder and co-CEO with me in SiliconAngle Media in the Cube. Our next guest is James Scott who is the co-founder and senior fellow at ICIT. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> You guys are putting on this event, really putting the content together. Centrify, just so everyone knows, is underwriting the event but this is not a Centrify event. You guys are the key content partner, developing the content agenda. It's been phenomenal. It's an inaugural event so it's the first of its kind bringing in industry, government, and practitioners all together, kind of up leveling from the normal and good events like Black Hat and other events like RSA which go into deep dives. Here it's a little bit different. Explain. >> Yeah, it is. We're growing. We're a newer think tank. We're less than five years old. The objective is to stay smaller. We have organizations, like Centrify, that came out of nowhere in D.C. so we deal, most of what we've done up until now has been purely federal and on the Hill so what I do, I work in the intelligence community. I specialize in social engineering and then I advise in the Senate for the most part, some in the House. We're able to take these organizations into the Pentagon or wherever and when we get a good read on them and when senators are like, "hey, can you bring them back in to brief us?" That's when we know we have a winner so we started really creating a relationship with Tom Kemp, who's the CEO and founder over there, and Greg Cranley, who heads the federal division. They're aggressively trying to be different as opposed to trying to be like everyone else, which makes it easy. If someone wants to do something, they have to be a fellow for us to do it, but if they want to do it, just like if they want to commission a paper, we just basically say, "okay, you can pay for it but we run it." Centrify has just been excellent. >> They get the community model. They get the relationship that you have with your constituents in the community. Trust matters, so you guys are happy to do this but more importantly, the content. You're held to a standard in your community. This is new, not to go in a different direction for a second but this is what the community marketing model is. Stay true to your audience and trust. You're relied upon so that's some balance that you guys have to do. >> The thing is we deal with cylance and others. Cylance, for example, was the first to introduce machine learning artificial intelligence to get passed that mutating hash for endpoint security. They fit in really well in the intelligence community. The great thing about working with Centrify is they let us take the lead and they're very flexible and we just make sure they come out on top each time. The content, it's very content driven. In D.C., we have at our cocktail receptions, they're CIA, NSA, DARPA, NASA. >> You guys are the poster child of be big, think small. >> Exactly. Intimate. >> You say Centrify is doing things differently. They're not falling in line like a lemming. What do you mean by that? What is everybody doing that these guys are doing differently? >> I think in the federal space, I think commercial too, but you have to be willing to take a big risk to be different so you have to be willing to pay a premium. If people work with us, they know they're going to pay a premium but we make sure they come out on top. What they do is, they'll tell us, Centrify will be like, "look, we're going to put x amount of dollars into a lunch. "Here are the types of pedigree individuals "that we need there." Maybe they're not executives. Maybe they're the actual practitioners at DHS or whatever. The one thing that they do different is they're aggressively trying to deviate from the prototype. That's what I mean. >> Like a vendor trying to sell stuff. >> Yeah and the thing is, that's why when someone goes to a Centrify event, I don't work for Centrify (mumbles). That's how they're able to attract. If you see, we have General Alexander. We've got major players here because of the content, because it's been different and then the other players want to be on the stage with other players, you know what I mean. It almost becomes a competition for "hey, I was asked to come to an ICIT thing" you know, that sort of thing. That's what I mean. >> It's reputation. You guys have a reputation and you stay true to that. That's what I was saying. To me, I think this is the future of how things get done. When you have a community model, you're held to a standard with your community. If you cross the line on that standard, you head fake your community, that's the algorithm that brings you a balance so you bring good stuff to the table and you vet everyone else on the other side so it's just more of a collaboration, if you will. >> The themes here, what you'll see is within critical infrastructure, we try to gear this a little more towards the financial sector. We brought, from Aetna, he set up the FS ISAC. Now he's with the health sector ISAC. For this particular geography in New York, we're trying to have it focus more around health sector and financial critical infrastructure. You'll see that. >> Alright, James, I've got to ask you. You're a senior fellow. You're on the front lines with a great Rolodex, great relationships in D.C., and you're adivising and leaned upon by people making policy, looking at the world and the general layout in which, the reality is shit's happening differently now so the world's got to change. Take us through a day in the life of some of the things you guys are seeing and what's the outlook? I mean, it's like a perfect storm of chaos, yet opportunity. >> It really depends. Each federal agency, we look at it from a Hill perspective, it comes down to really educating them. When I'm in advising in the House, I know I'm going to be working with a different policy pedigree than a Senate committee policy expert, you know what I mean. You have to gauge the conversation depending on how new the office is, House, Senate, are they minority side, and then what we try to do is bring the issues that the private sector is having while simultaneously hitting the issues that the federal agency space is. Usually, we'll have a needs list from the CSWEP at the different federal agencies for a particular topic like the Chinese APTs or the Russian APT. What we'll do is, we'll break down what the issue is. With Russia, for example, it's a combination of two types of exploits that are happening. You have the technical exploit, the malicious payload and vulnerability in a critical infrastructure network and then profiling those actors. We also have another problem, the influence operations, which is why we started the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies. We've been asked repeatedly since the elections last year by the intelligence community to tell us, explain this new propaganda. The interesting thing is the synergies between the two sides are exploiting and weaponizing the same vectors. While on the technical side, you're exploiting a vulnerability in a network with a technical exploit, with a payload, a compiled payload with a bunch of tools. On the influence operations side, they're weaponizing the same social media platforms that you would use to distribute a payload here but only the... >> Contest payload. Either way you have critical infrastructure. The payload being content, fake content or whatever content, has an underpinning that gamification call it virality, network effect and user psychology around they don't really open up the Facebook post, they just read the headline and picture. There's a dissonance campaign, or whatever they're running, that might not be critical to national security at that time but it's also a post. >> It shifts the conversation in a way where they can use, for example, right now all the rage with nation states is to use metadata, put it into big data analytics, come up with a psychographic algorithm, and go after critical infrastructure executives with elevated privileges. You can do anything with those guys. You can spearfish them. The Russian modus operandi is to call and act like a recruiter, have that first touch of contact be the phone call, which they're not expecting. "Hey, I got this job. "Keep it on the down low. Don't tell anybody. "I'm going to send you the job description. "Here's the PDF." Take it from there. >> How should we think about the different nation state actors? You mentioned Russia, China, there's Iran, North Korea. Lay it out for us. >> Each geography has a different vibe to their hacking. With Russia you have this stealth and sophistication and their hacking is just like their espionage. It's like playing chess. They're really good at making pawns feel like they're kings on the chessboard so they're really good at recruiting insider threats. Bill Evanina is the head of counterintel. He's a bulldog. I know him personally. He's exactly what we need in that position. The Chinese hacking style is more smash and grab, very unsophisticated. They'll use a payload over and over again so forensically, it's easy to... >> Dave: Signatures. >> Yeah, it is. >> More shearing on the tooling or whatever. >> They'll use code to the point of redundancy so it's like alright, the only reason they got in... Chinese get into a network, not because of sophistication, but because the network is not protected. Then you have the mercenary element which is where China really thrives. Chinese PLA will hack for the nation state during the day, but they'll moonlight at night to North Korea so North Korea, they have people who may consider themselves hackers but they're not code writers. They outsource. >> They're brokers, like general contractors. >> They're not sophisticated enough to carry out a real nation state attack. What they'll do is outsource to Chinese PLA members. Chinese PLA members will be like, "okay well, here's what I need for this job." Typically, what the Chinese will do, their loyalties are different than in the west, during the day they'll discover a vulnerability or an O day. They won't tell their boss right away. They'll capitalize off of it for a week. You do that, you go to jail over here. Russia, they'll kill you. China, somehow this is an accepted thing. They don't like it but it just happens. Then you have the eastern European nations and Russia still uses mercenary elements out of Moscow and St. Petersburg so what they'll do is they will freelance, as well. That's when you get the sophisticated, carbonic style hack where they'll go into the financial sector. They'll monitor the situation. Learn the ins and outs of everything having to do with that particular swift or bank or whatever. They go in and those are the guys that are making millions of dollars on a breach. Hacking in general is a grind. It's a lot of vulnerabilities work, but few work for long. Everybody is always thinking there's this omega code that they have. >> It's just brute force. You just pound it all day long. >> That's it and it's a grind. You might have something that you worked on for six months. You're ready to monetize. >> What about South America? What's the vibe down there? Anything happening in there? >> Not really. There is nothing of substance that really affects us here. Again, if an organization is completely unprotected. >> John: Russia? China? >> Russia and China. >> What about our allies? >> GCHQ. >> Israel? What's the collaboration, coordination, snooping? What's the dynamic like there? >> We deal, mostly, with NATO and Five Eyes. I actually had dinner with NATO last night. Five Eyes is important because we share signals intelligence and most of the communications will go through Five Eyes which is California, United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Those are our five most important allies and then NATO after that, as far as I'm concerned, for cyber. You have the whole weaponization of space going on with SATCOM interception. We're dealing with that with NASA, DARPA. Not a lot is happening down in South America. The next big thing that we have to look at is the cyber caliphate. You have the Muslim brotherhood that funds it. Their influence operations domestically are extremely strong. They have a lot of contacts on the Hill which is a problem. You have ANTIFA. So there's two sides to this. You have the technical exploit but then the information warfare exploit. >> What about the bitcoin underbelly that started with the silk roads and you've seen a lot of bitcoin. Money laundering is a big deal, know your customer. Now regulation is part of big ICOs going on. Are you seeing any activity from those? Are they pulling from previous mercenary groups or are they arbitraging just more free? >> For updating bitcoin? >> The whole bitcoin networks. There's been an effort to commercialize (mumbles) so there's been a legitimate track to bring that on but yet there's still a lot of actors. >> I think bitcoin is important to keep and if you look at the more black ops type hacking or payment stuff, bitcoin is an important element just as tor is an important element, just as encryption is an important element. >> John: It's fundamental, actually. >> It's a necessity so when I hear people on the Hill, I have my researcher, I'm like, "any time you hear somebody trying to have "weakened encryption, back door encryption" the first thing, we add them to the briefing schedule and I'm like, "look, here's what you're proposing. "You're proposing that you outlaw math. "So what? Two plus two doesn't equal four. "What is it? Three and a half? "Where's the logic?" When you break it down for them like that, on the Hill in particular, they begin to get it. They're like, "well how do we get the intelligence community "or the FBI, for example, to get into this iphone?" Civil liberties, you've got to take that into consideration. >> I got to ask you a question. I interviewed a guy, I won't say his name. He actually commented off the record, but he said to me, "you won't believe how dumb some of these state actors are "when it comes to cyber. "There's some super smart ones. "Specifically Iran and the Middle East, "they're really not that bright." He used an example, I don't know if it's true or not, that stuxnet, I forget which one it was, there was a test and it got out of control and they couldn't pull it back and it revealed their hand but it could've been something worse. His point was they actually screwed up their entire operation because they're doing some QA on their thing. >> I can't talk about stuxnet but it's easy to get... >> In terms of how you test them, how do you QA your work? >> James: How do you review malware? (mumbles) >> You can't comment on the accuracy of Zero Days, the documentary? >> Next question. Here's what you find. Some of these nation state actors, they saw what happened with our elections so they're like, "we have a really crappy offensive cyber program "but maybe we can thrive in influence operations "in propaganda and whatever." We're getting hit by everybody and 2020 is going to be, I don't even want to imagine. >> John: You think it's going to be out of control? >> It's going to be. >> I've got to ask this question, this came up. You're bringing up a really good point I think a lot of people aren't talking about but we've brought up a few times. I want to keep on getting it out there. In the old days, state on state actors used to do things, espionage, and everyone knew who they were and it was very important not to bring their queen out, if you will, too early, or reveal their moves. Now with Wikileaks and public domain, a lot of these tools are being democratized so that they can covertly put stuff out in the open for enemies of our country to just attack us at will. Is that happening? I hear about it, meaning that I might be Russia or I might be someone else. I don't want to reveal my hand but hey, you ISIS guys out there, all you guys in the Middle East might want to use this great hack and put it out in the open. >> I think yeah. The new world order, I guess. The order of things, the power positions are completely flipped, B side, counter, whatever. It's completely not what the establishment was thinking it would be. What's happening is Facebook is no more relevant, I mean Facebook is more relevant than the UN. Wikileaks has more information pulsating out of it than a CIA analyst, whatever. >> John: There's a democratization of the information? >> The thing is we're no longer a world that's divided by geographic lines in the sand that were drawn by these two guys that fought and lost a war 50 years ago. We're now in a tribal chieftain digital society and we're separated by ideological variation and so you have tribe members here in the US who have fellow tribe members in Israel, Russia, whatever. Look at Anonymous. Anonymous, I think everyone understands that's the biggest law enforcement honeypot there is, but you look at the ideological variation and it's hashtags and it's keywords and it's forums. That's the Senate. That's congress. >> John: This is a new reality. >> This is reality. >> How do you explain that to senators? I was watching that on TV where they're trying to grasp what Facebook is and Twitter. (mumbles) Certainly Facebook knew what was going on. They're trying to play policy and they're new. They're newbies when it comes to policy. They don't have any experience on the Hill, now it's ramping up and they've had some help but tech has never been an actor on the stage of policy formulation. >> We have a real problem. We're looking at outside threats as our national security threats, which is incorrect. You have dragnet surveillance capitalists. Here's the biggest threats we have. The weaponization of Facebook, twitter, youtube, google, and search engines like comcast. They all have a censorship algorithm, which is how they monetize your traffic. It's censorship. You're signing your rights away and your free will when you use google. You're not getting the right answer, you're getting the answer that coincides with an algorithm that they're meant to monetize and capitalize on. It's complete censorship. What's happening is, we had something that just passed SJ res 34 which no resistance whatsoever, blew my mind. What that allows is for a new actor, the ISPs to curate metadata on their users and charge them their monthly fee as well. It's completely corrupt. These dragnet surveillance capitalists have become dragnet surveillance censorists. Is that a word? Censorists? I'll make it one. Now they've become dragnet surveillance propagandists. That's why 2020 is up for grabs. >> (mumbles) We come from the same school here on this one, but here's the question. The younger generation, I asked a gentleman in the hallway on his way out, I said, "where's the cyber west point? "We're the Navy SEALS in this new digital culture." He said, "oh yeah, some things." We're talking about the younger generation, the kids playing Call of Duty Destiny. These are the guys out there, young kids coming up that will probably end up having multiple disciplinary skills. Where are they going to come from? So the question is, are we going to have a counterculture? We're almost feeling like what the 60s were to the 50s. Vietnam. I kind of feel like maybe the security stuff doesn't get taken care of, a revolt is coming. You talk about dragnet censorship. You're talking about the lack of control and privacy. I don't mind giving Facebook my data to connect with my friends and see my thanksgiving photos or whatever but now I don't want fake news jammed down my throat. Anti-Trump and Anti-Hillary spew. I didn't buy into that. I don't want that anymore. >> I think millennials, I have a 19 year old son, my researchers, they're right out of grad school. >> John: What's the profile like? >> They have no trust whatsoever in the government and they laugh at legislation. They don't care any more about having their face on their Facebook page and all their most intimate details of last night's date and tomorrow's date with two different, whatever. They just don't... They loathe the traditional way of things. You got to talk to General Alexander today. We have a really good relationship with him, Hayden, Mike Rogers. There is a counterculture in the works but it's not going to happen overnight because we have a tech deficit here where we need foreign tech people just to make up for the deficit. >> Bill Mann and I were talking, I heard the general basically, this is my interpretation, "if we don't get our shit together, "this is going to be an f'd up situation." That's what I heard him basically say. You guys don't come together so what Bill talked about was two scenarios. If industry and government don't share and come together, they're going to have stuff mandated on them by the government. Do you agree? >> I do. >> What's going to happen? >> The argument for regulation on the Hill is they don't want to stifle innovation, which makes sense but then ISPs don't innovate at all. They're using 1980s technology, so why did you pass SJ res 34? >> John: For access? >> I don't know because nation states just look at that as, "oh wow another treasure trove of metadata "that we can weaponize. "Let's start psychographically charging alt-left "and alt-right, you know what I mean?" >> Hacks are inevitable. That seems to be the trend. >> You talked before, James, about threats. You mentioned weaponization of social. >> James: Social media. >> You mentioned another in terms of ISPs I think. >> James: Dragnet. >> What are the big threats? Weaponization of social. ISP metadata, obviously. >> Metadata, it really depends and that's the thing. That's what makes the advisory so difficult because you have to go between influence operations and the exploit because the vectors are used for different things in different variations. >> John: Integrated model. >> It really is and so with a question like that I'm like okay so my biggest concern is the propaganda, political warfare, the information warfare. >> People are underestimating the value of how big that is, aren't they? They're oversimplifying the impact of info campaigns. >> Yeah because your reality is based off of... It's like this, influence operations. Traditional media, everybody is all about the narrative and controlling the narrative. What Russia understands is to control the narrative, the most embryo state of the narrative is the meme. Control the meme, control the idea. If you control the idea, you control the belief system. Control the belief system, you control the narrative. Control the narrative, you control the population. No guns were fired, see what I'm saying? >> I was explaining to a friend on Facebook, I was getting into a rant on this. I used a very simple example. In the advertising world, they run millions of dollars of ad campaigns on car companies for post car purchase cognitive dissonance campaigns. Just to make you feel good about your purchase. In a way, that's what's going on and explains what's going on on Facebook. This constant reinforcement of these beliefs whether its for Trump or Hillary, all this stuff was happening. I saw it firsthand. That's just one small nuance but it's across a spectrum of memes. >> You have all these people, you have nation states, you have mercenaries, but the most potent force in this space, the most hyperevolving in influence operations, is the special interest group. The well-funded special interests. That's going to be a problem. 2020, I keep hitting that because I was doing an interview earlier. 2020 is going to be a tug of war for the psychological core of the population and it's free game. Dragnet surveillance capitalists will absolutely be dragnet surveillance propagandists. They will have the candidates that they're going to push. Now that can also work against them because mainstream media, twitter, Facebook were completely against trump, for example, and that worked in his advantage. >> We've seen this before. I'm a little bit older, but we are the same generation. Remember when they were going to open up sealex? Remember the last mile for connectivity? That battle was won before it was even fought. What you're saying, if I get this right, the war and tug of war going on now is a big game. If it's not played in one now, this jerry rigging, gerrymandering of stuff could happen so when people wake up and realize what's happened the game has already been won. >> Yeah, your universe as you know it, your belief systems, what you hold to be true and self evident. Again, the embryo. If you look back to the embryo introduction of that concept, whatever concept it is, to your mind it came from somewhere else. There are very few things that you believe that you came up with yourself. The digital space expedites that process and that's dangerous because now it's being weaponized. >> Back to the, who fixes this. Who's the watchdog on this? These ideas you're talking about, some of them, you're like, "man that guy has lost it, he's crazy." Actually, I don't think you're crazy at all. I think it's right on. Is there a media outlet watching it? Who's reporting on it? What even can grasp what you're saying? What's going on in D.C.? Can you share that perspective? >> Yeah, the people that get this are the intelligence community, okay? The problem is the way we advise is I will go in with one of the silos in the NSA and explain what's happening and how to do it. They'll turn around their computer and say, "show me how to do it. "How do you do a multi vector campaign "with this meme and make it viral in 30 minutes." You have to be able to show them how to do it. >> John: We can do that. Actually we can't. >> That sort of thing, you have to be able to show them because there's not enough practitioners, we call them operators. When you're going in here, you're teaching them. >> The thing is if they have the metadata to your treasure trove, this is how they do it. I'll explain here. If they have the metadata, they know where the touch points are. It's a network effect mole, just distributive mole. They can put content in certain subnetworks that they know have a reaction to the metadata so they have the knowledge going in. It's not like they're scanning the whole world. They're monitoring pockets like a drone, right? Once they get over the territory, then they do the acquired deeper targets and then go viral. That's basically how fake news works. >> See the problem is, you look at something like alt-right and ANTIFA. ANTIFA, just like Black Lives Matter, the initiatives may have started out with righteous intentions just like take a knee. These initiatives, first stage is if it causes chaos, chaos is the op for a nation state in the US. That's the op. Chaos. That's the beginning and the end of an op. What happens is they will say, "oh okay look, this is ticking off all these other people "so let's fan the flame of this take a knee thing "hurt the NFL." Who cares? I don't watch football anyway but you know, take a knee. It's causing all this chaos. >> John: It's called trolling. >> What will happen is Russia and China, China has got their 13 five year plan, Russia has their foreign influence operations. They will fan that flame to exhaustion. Now what happens to the ANTIFA guy when he's a self-radicalized wound collector with a mental disorder? Maybe he's bipolar. Now with ANTIFA, he's experienced a heightened more extreme variation of that particular ideology so who steps in next? Cyber caliphate and Muslim brotherhood. That's why we're going to have an epidemic. I can't believe, you know, ANTIFA is a domestic terrorist organization. It's shocking that the FBI is not taking this more serious. What's happening now is Muslim brotherhood funds basically the cyber caliphate. The whole point of cyber caliphate is to create awareness, instill the illusion of rampant xenophobia for recruiting. They have self-radicalized wound collectors with ANTIFA that are already extremists anyway. They're just looking for a reason to take that up a notch. That's when, cyber caliphate, they hook up with them with a hashtag. They respond and they create a relationship. >> John: They get the fly wheel going. >> They take them to a deep web forum, dark web forum, and start showing them how it works. You can do this. You can be part of something. This guy who was never even muslim now is going under the ISIS moniker and he acts. He drives people over in New York. >> They fossilized their belief system. >> The whole point to the cyber caliphate is to find actors that are already in the self-radicalization phase but what does it take psychologically and from a mentoring perspective, to get them to act? That's the cyber caliphate. >> This is the value of data and context in real time using the current events to use that data, refuel their operation. It's data driven terrorism. >> What's the prescription that you're advising? >> I'm not a regulations kind of guy, but any time you're curating metadata like we're just talking about right now. Any time you have organizations like google, like Facebook, that have become so big, they are like their own nation state. That's a dangerous thing. The metadata curation. >> John: The value of the data is very big. That's the point. >> It is because what's happening... >> John: There's always a vulnerability. >> There's always a vulnerability and it will be exploited and all that metadata, it's unscrubbed. I'm not worried about them selling metadata that's scrubbed. I'm worried about the nation state or the sophisticated actor that already has a remote access Trojan on the network and is exfiltrating in real time. That's the guy that I'm worried about because he can just say, "forget it, I'm going to target people that are at this phase." He knows how to write algorithms, comes up with a good psychographic algorithm, puts the data in there, and now he's like, "look I'm only going to promote this concept, "two people at this particular stage of self-radicalization "or sympathetic to the kremlin." We have a big problem on the college campuses with IP theft because of the Chinese Students Scholar Associations which are directly run by the Chinese communist party. >> I heard a rumor that Equifax's franchising strategy had partners on the VPN that were state sponsored. They weren't even hacking, they had full access. >> There's a reason that the Chinese are buying hotels. They bought the Waldorf Astoria. We do stuff with the UN and NATO, you can't even stay there anymore. I think it's still under construction but it's a no-no to stay there anymore. I mean western nations and allies because they'll have bugs in the rooms. The WiFi that you use... >> Has fake certificates. >> Or there's a vulnerability that's left in that network so the information for executives who have IP or PII or electronic health records, you know what I mean? You go to these places to stay overnight, as an executive, and you're compromised. >> Look what happened with Eugene Kaspersky. I don't know the real story. I don't know if you can comment, but someone sees that and says, "this guy used to have high level meetings "at the Pentagon weekly, monthly." Now he's persona non grata. >> He fell out of favor, I guess, right? It happens. >> James, great conversation. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Congratulations on the great work you guys are doing here at the event. I know the content has been well received. Certainly the key notes we saw were awesome. CSOs, view from the government, from industry, congratulations. James Scott who is the co founder and senior fellow of ICIT, Internet Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> James: Institute of Critical Infrastructure Technology. >> T is for tech. >> And the Center for Cyber Influence Operations Studies. >> Good stuff. A lot of stuff going on (mumbles), exploits, infrastructure, it's all mainstream. It's the crisis of our generation. There's a radical shift happening and the answers are all going to come from industry and government coming together. This is the Cube bringing the data, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. More live coverage after this short break. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's partner ecosystem. >> Welcome back, live here on theCUBE along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls. Welcome to AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Again, live from Washington, D.C., your nation's capital, our nation's capital. With us now is our host for the week, puts on one heck of a show, I'm want to tell you, 10,000 strong here, jammed into the Washington Convention Center, Theresa Carlson from World Wide Public Sector. Nice to have you here, Theresa. >> Hi, good afternoon. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Love theCUBE and thank you for being here with us today. >> Absolutely. >> All week in fact. >> It's been great, it really has. Let's just talk about the show first off. Way back, six years ago, we could probably get everybody there jammed into our little area here, just about I think. >> Pretty much. >> Hard to do today. >> That's right. >> How do you feel about when you've seen this kind of growth not only of the show, but in your sector in general? >> I think at AWS we're humbled and excited and, on a personal level because I was sort of given the charge of go create this Public Sector business world-wide, I'm blown away, I pinch myself every time because you did hear my story. The first event, we had about 50 people in the basement of some hotel. And then, we're like, okay. And today, 10,000 people. Last year we had it at the Marriott Wardman Park and we shut down Connecticut Avenue so we knew we needed to make a change. (laughing) But it's great, this is really about our customers and partners. This is really for them. It's for them to make connections, share, and the whole theme of this is superheroes and they are our superheroes. >> One of the heroes you had on the stage today, John Edwards from the CIA, one of your poster-children if you will for great success and that kind of collaboration, said something to the effect of quote, "The best decision we ever made at the CIA "was engaging with AWS in that partnership." When you hear something like that from such a treasured partner, you got to feel pretty good. >> You just have to drop the microphone, boom, and you're sort of done. They are doing amazing work and their innovation levels are really leading, I would say, in the US Public Sector for sure and also, not just in US Public Sector but around the world. Their efforts of what they're doing and the scale and reach at which they're doing it so that's pretty cool. >> John, you've talked about the CIA moment, I'd like to hear the story, share with Theresa. >> Oh, you're going to steal my thunder here? >> No, I'm setting you up. That's what a good partner does. It's all yours. >> Well, John, we've talked multiple times already so I'll say it for the third time. The shot heard around the cloud was my definition of seminal moment, in big mega-trends there's always a moment. It was when Obama tweeted, Twitter grew, plane landing on the Hudson, there's always a seminal moment in major trends that make or break companies. For you guys, it was the CIA. Since then, it's just been a massive growth for you guys. That deal was interesting because it validated Shadow IT, validated the cloud, and it also unseated IBM, the behemoth sales organization that owned the account. In a way, a lot of things lined up. Take us through what's happened then, and since then to now. >> Well, you saw between yesterday at Werner Vogels' keynote and my keynote this morning, just the breadth and depth of the type of customers we have. Everything from the UK government, GCHQ, the Department of Justice with the IT in the UK, to the centers for Medicare for HHS, to amazing educational companies, Cal. Polytech., Australian Tax Office. That's just the breadth and depth of the type of customers we have and all of their stories were impactful, every story is impactful in their own way and across whatever sector they have. That really just tells you that the type of workloads that people are running has evolved because I remember in the early days, when you and I first talked, we talked about what are the kind of workloads and we were talking a little bit about website hosting. That's, of course, really evolved into things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, a massive scale of applications. >> Five or six years ago when we first chatted at re:Invent, it's interesting 'cause now this is the size of re:Invent what it was then so you're on a same trajectory from a show size. Again, validation to the growth in Public Sector. But I was complimenting you on our opening today, saying that you're tenacious because we've talked early days, it was a slog in the early days to get going in the cloud, you were knocking on a lot of doors, convincing people, hey, the future's going to look his way and I don't want to say they slammed the proverbial door in your face but it was more of, woah, they don't believe the cloud is ever going to happen for the government. Share some of those stories because now, looking back, obviously the world has changed. >> It has and, in fact, it's changed in many aspects of it, from policy makers, which I think would be great for you all to have on here sometime to get their perspective on cloud, but policy makers who are now thinking about, we just had a new modernization of IT mandate come out in the US Federal Government where they're going to give millions and millions of dollars toward the modernization of IT for US Government agencies which is going to be huge. That's the first time that's ever happened. To an executive order around cyber-security which is pretty much mandated to look at cloud and how you use it. You're seeing thing like that to even how grants are given where it used to be an old-school model of hardware only to now use cloud. Those ideas and aspects of how individuals are using IT but also just the procurements that are coming out. The buying vehicles that you're seeing come out of government, almost all of them have cloud now. >> John and I were talking about D.C. and the political climate. Obviously, we always talk about it on my show, comment on that. But, interesting, theCUBE, we could do damage here in D.C.. So much target-rich environment for content but more than ever, to me, is the tech scene here is really intrinsically different. For example, this is not a shiny new toy kind of trend, it is a fundamental transformation of the business model. What's interesting to me is, again, since the CIA shot heard around the cloud moment, you've seen a real shift in operating model. So the question I have for you, Theresa, if you can comment on this is: how has that changed? How has the procuring of technology changed? How has he human side of it changed? Because people want to do a good job, they're just on minicomputers and mainframes from the old days with small incremental improvement over the years in IT but now to a fundamental, agile, there's going to be more apps, more action. >> You said something really important just a moment ago, this is a different kind of group than you'll get in Silicon Valley and it is but it's very enterprise. Everybody you see here, every project they work on, we're talking DoD, the enterprise of enterprises. They have really challenging and tough problems to solve every day. How that's changed, in the old days here in government, they know how to write acquisitions for a missile or a tank or something really big in IT. What's changing is their ability to write acquisitions for agile IT, things like cloud utility based models, moving fast, flywheel approach to IT acquisitions. That's what's changing, that kind of acquisition model. Also, you're seeing the system integrator community here change. Where they were, what I call, body shops to do a lot of these projects, they're having to evolve their IT skills, they're getting much more certified in areas of AWS, at the system admin to certified solution architects at the highest level, to really roll these projects out. So training, education, the type of acquisition, and how they're doing it. >> What happened in terms of paradigm shift, mindset? Something had to happen 'cause you brought a vision to the table but somebody had to buy it. Usually, when we talk about legacy systems, it was a legacy mindset too, resistant, reluctant, cautious, all those things. >> Theresa: Well, everything gets thrown out. >> What happened? Where did it tip the other way? Where did it go? >> I think, over time, it's different parts of the government but culture is the hardest thing to, always, change. Other elements of any changes, you get there, but culture is fundamentally the hardest thing. You're seeing that. You've always heard us say, you can't fight gravity, and cloud is the new normal. That's for the whole culture. People are like, I cannot do my project anymore without the use of cloud computing. >> We also have a saying, you can't fight fashion either, and sometimes being in fashion is what the trends are going on. So I got to ask you, what is the fashion statement in cloud these days with your customers? Is it, you mentioned there, moving much down in the workload, is it multi-cloud? Is it analytics? Where's the fashionable, cool action right now? >> I think, here, right now, the cool thing that people really are talking about are artificial intelligence and machine learning, how they take advantage of that. You heard a lot about recognition yesterday, Poly and Lex, these new tools how they are so differentiating anything that they can possibly develop quickly. It's those kind of tools that really we're hearing and of course, IOT for state and local is a big deal. >> I got to ask you the hard question, I always ask Andy a hard question too, if he's watching, you're going to get this one probably at re:Invent. Amazon is a devops culture, you ship code fast and you make all these updates and it's moving very, very fast. One of the things that you guys have done well, but I still think you need some work to do in terms of critical analysis, is getting the releases out that are on public cloud into the GovCloud. You guys have shortened that down to less than a year on most things. You got the east region now rolled out so full disaster recovery but government has always been lagging behind most commercial. How are you guys shrinking that window? When do you see the day when push button commercial, GovCloud are all lockstep and pushing code to both clouds? >> We could do that today but there's a couple of big differentiators that are important for the GovCloud. That is it requires US citizenship, which as you know, we've talked about the challenges of technology and skills. That's just out there, right? At Amazon Web Services, we're a very diverse company, a group of individuals that do our coding and development, and not all of them are US citizens. So for these two clouds, you have to be a US citizen so that is an inhibitor. >> In terms of developers? In terms of building the product? >> Not building but the management aspect. Because of their design, we have multiple individuals managing multiple clouds, right? Now, with us, it's about getting that scale going, that flywheel for us. >> So now it's going to be managed in the USA versus made in the USA with everything as a service. >> Yeah, it is. For us, it's about making sure, number one, we can roll them out, but secondly, we do not want to roll services into those clouds unless they are critical. We are moving a lot faster, we rolled in a lot more services, and the other cool thing is we're starting to do some unique things for our GovCloud regions which, maybe the next time, we can talk a little bit more about those things. >> Final question for me, and let John jump in, the CIA has got this devops factory thing, I want you to talk about it because I think it points to the trend that's encouraging to me at least 'cause I'm skeptical on government, as you know. But this is a full transformation shift on how they do development. Talk about these 4000 developers that got rid of their development workstations, are now doing cloud, and the question is, who else is doing it? Is this a trend that you see happening across other agencies? >> The reason that's really important, I know you know, in the old-school model, you waited forever to provision anything, even just to do development, and you heard John talk about that. That's what he meant on this sort of workstation, this long period of time it took for them to do any kind of development. Now, what they do is they just use any move they have and they go and they provision the cloud like that. Then, they can also not just do that, they can create armies of cores or Amazon machine images so they have super-repeatable tools. Think about that. When you have these super-repeatable tools sitting in the cloud, that you can just pull down these machine images and begin to create both code and development and build off those building blocks, you move so much faster than you did in the past. So that's sort of a big trend, I would say they're definitely leading it. But other key groups are NASA, HHS, Department of Justice. Those are some of the key, big groups that we're seeing really do a lot changes in their dev. >> I got to ask you about the-- >> Oh, I have to say DHS, also DHS on customs and border patrols, they're doing the same, really innovators. >> One of the things that's happening which I'm intrigued by is the whole digital transformation in our culture, right, society. Certainly, the Federal Government wants to take care of the civil liberties of the citizens. So it's not a privacy question, it's more about where smart cities is going. We're starting to see, I call, the digital parks, if you will, where you're starting to see a digital park go into Yosemite and camping out and using pristine resources and enjoying them. There's a demand for citizens to democratize resources available to them, supercomputing or datasets, what's your philosophy on that? What is Amazon doing to facilitate and accelerate the citizen's value of technology so it can be in the hands of anyone? >> I love that question because I'll tell you, at the heart of our business is what we call citizen service, paving the way for disruptive innovation, making the world a better place. That's through citizen's services and they're access. For us, we have multiple things. Everything from our dataset program, where we fund multiple datasets that we put up on the cloud and let everybody take advantage of them, from the individual student to the researcher, for no fee. >> John F.: You pick up the cost on that? >> We do, we fund, we put those datasets in completely, we allow them to go and explore and use. The only time they would ever pay is if they go off and start creating their own systems. The most highly curated datasets up there right now are pretty much on AWS. You heard me talk about the earth, through AWS Earth that we have that shows the earth. We have weather datasets, cancer datasets, we're working with so many groups, genomic, phenotypes, genomes of rice, the rice genome that we've done. >> So this is something that you see that you're behind, >> Oh, completely. >> you're passionate about and will continue to do? >> Because you never know when that individual student or small community school is out there and they can access tools that they never could've accessed before. The training and education, that creativity of the mind, we need to open that up to everybody and we fundamentally believe that cloud is a huge opportunity for that. You heard me tell the 1000 genomes story in the past of where took that cancer dataset or that genome dataset from NIH, put it into AWS for the first time, the first week we put it up we had 3200 new researchers crowdsource on that dataset. That was the first time, that I know of, that anyone had put up a major dataset for researchers. >> And the scale, certainly, is a great resource. And smart cities is an interesting area. I want to get your thoughts on your relationship with Intel. They have 5G coming out, they have a full network transformation, you're going to have autonomous vehicles out there, you're going to have all kinds of digital. How are you guys planning on powering the cloud and what's the role that Intel will play with you guys in the relationship? >> Of course, serverless computing comes into play significantly in areas like that because you want to create efficiencies, even in the cloud, we're all about that. People have always said, oh, AWS won't do that 'cause that's disrupting themselves. We're okay with disrupting ourselves if it's the right thing. We also don't want to hog resourcing of these tools that aren't necessary. So when it comes to devices like that and IOT, you need very efficient computing and you need tools that allow that efficient computing to both scale but not over-resource things. You'll see us continue to have models like that around IOT, or lambda, or serverless computing and how we access and make sure that those resources are used appropriately. >> We're almost out of time so I'd like to shift over if we can. Really impressed with the NGO work, the non-profit work as well and your work in the education space. Just talk about the nuance, differences between working with those particular constituents in the customer base, what you've learned and the kind of work you're providing in those silos right now. >> They are amazing, they are so frugal with their resources and it makes you hungry to really want to go out and help their mission because what you will find when you go meet with a lot of these not-for-profits, they are doing some of the most amazing work that even many people have really not heard of and they're being so frugal with how they resource and drive IT. There's a program called Feed the World and I met the developer of this and it's like two people. They've fed millions of people around the world with like three developers and creating an app and doing great work. To everything from like the American Heart Association that has a mission, literally, of stopping heart disease which is our number one killer around the world. When you meet them and you see the things they're doing and how they are using cloud computing to change and forward their mission. You heard us talk about human trafficking, it's a horrible, misunderstood environment out there that more of us need to be informed on and help with but computing can be a complete differentiator for them, cloud computing. We give millions of dollars of grants away, not just give away, we help them. We help them with the technical resourcing, how they're efficient, and we work really hard to try to help forward their mission and get the word out. It's humbling and it's really nice to feel that you're not only doing things for big governments but you also can help that individual not-for-profit that has a mission that's really important to not only them but groups in the world. >> It's a different level of citizen service, right? I mean, ocean conservancy this morning, talking about that and tidal change. >> What's the biggest thing that, in your mind, personal question, obviously you've been through from the beginning to now, a lot more growth ahead of you. I'm speculating that AWS Public Sector, although you won't disclose the numbers, I'll find a number out there. It's big, you guys could run the table and take a big share, similar to what you've done with startup and now enterprise market. Do you have a pinch-me moment where you go, where are we? Where are you on that spectrum of self-awareness of what's actually happening to you and this world and your team? In Public Sector, we operate just like all of AWS and all of Amazon. We really have treated this business like a startup and I create new teams just like everybody else does. I make them frugal and small and I say go do this. I will tell you, I don't even think about it because we are just scratching the surface, we are just getting going, and today we have customers in 155 countries and I have employees in about 25 countries now. Seven years ago, that was not the case. When you're moving that fast, you know that you're just getting going and that you have so much more that you can do to help your customers and create a partner ecosystem. It's a mission for us, it really is a mission and my team and myself are really excited, out there every day working to support our customers, to really grow and get them moving faster. We sort of keep pushing them to go faster. We have a long way to go and maybe ask me five years from now, we'll see. >> How about next year? We'll come back, we'll ask you again next year. >> Yeah, maybe I'll know more next year. >> John W.: Theresa, thank you for the time, very generous with your time. I know you have a big schedule over the course of this week so thank you for being here with us once again on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Many time CUBE alum, Theresa Carlson from AWS. Back with more here from the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, Washington, D.C. right after this. (electronic music)