Name: Megan Smith: The tech problem inside the White House
Uploaded: 2015-07-14
Duration: 2 min 56 s
Description: Megan Smith: The tech problem inside the White House

[ MUSIC ] So given that the CIO is really worrying about cybersecurity, I would love your informed opinion. What does it take to keep our data safe at that level? And do we have everything in place That we need. How close are we to being safe? Yeah. I think this is one of the topics of our times. Right? The cover of Fortune today, right now as we're here, is about this topic with some of the private sector folks. Even when I was in Silicon Valley, we had lots of these challenges. We're having them in the federal government. So how are we approaching these? Tony and the team are doing an extraordinary job. There's. I mean across the country, we have top talent working on this and that's true. We need to upgrade a lot of systems. One of the things that the president is doing in general is, has, we've created the United States Pseudo Service, which is How to be more technical leadership from kind of the [ UNKNOWN ] sector of America into government. And so that's true in cyber we already have extraordinary people and we need to keep adding to that. The companies need to keep pushing that. The President had a summit earlier this year on cybersecurity. Huge area to work on. There's both the immediate, Tony has a cyber [ UNKNOWN ] going on et cetera But there's also the how do we get more of our youth interested in this topic. It's a great service thing to protect people. How do we get more diverse talent across the board? The challenges come from all over the place. Some of them are from national actors, some are from criminal actors. How are we being the most creative that we can and taking as many American youth and anybody in on the game? So this is part of the question which is, it's something I observed coming in. You know we have across the government we have principals in all the sectors like the surgeon general or the CDC lead for medical. Or judges, you know Supreme Court, or any of our leaderships COJ. Lawyers, speech writers, all of. I call like TQ? Like tech- like EQ [ UNKNOWN ] TQ. There's sort of humanities Q, science and med Q, but the TQ, the digital people haven't been at the principal level. So the president with the CTOs office and now the United States Federal Service getting leaders who are fluent And digital technologies into the leadership positions in government, so that we can be looking at having technologists in our policy conversations, as well as economists, and lawyers, and others. Right. At the principal's table, when we're just deciding net neutrality, we're deciding encryption, when we're deciding about patents, but also when we're purchasing You know, most of the federal technology should be made by outside people. It should be either off the shelf or custom or however that is. The government isn't here to build tech. But we should be having really informed technical folks in the architecture side and the purchasing decisions together with fabulous [ INAUDIBLE ] teammates on the purchasing side.