Just commit for six months, Carter tells Silicon Valley Elizabeth Weise
As a young physicist, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter learned a culture of service from his World War II-era colleagues.
“They always told me that because of the knowledge you possess, you have a responsibility” to participate, he told a packed audience at the RSA computer security conference here Wednesday.
Now he’s making that same case to Silicon Valley.
“Whether you’re looking at our problems and offering us a solution, whether you’re offering your own commitment, whether it’s a year or six months, we have lots of avenues for you to connect with us, in ways you probably haven’t thought of,” he said.
His own service began with choosing sites for nuclear missiles where the Soviet Union wouldn’t be able to destroy them with a first strike.
“Somebody said ‘Come to Washington for just one year and give it a try. It’s a really important technical problem,’ ” he said.
For him, that was the start of a 20-plus year career in the Department of Defense. But he was quick to reassure the audience that his trajectory wasn’t necessarily theirs.
He said he got that cyber experts aren’t like typical military recruits. For example, he’s not sure the U.S. Cyber Command is going to be a uniformed force and probably won’t be like “traditional” military, he said. (The U.S. Cyber Command conducts U.S. military cyberspace operations and directs the operation and defense of Department of Defense information networks.)
Carter was in town both to speak at RSA and to meet with technology executives. One of them was Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who has agreed to head a new Pentagon advisory board to get more Silicon Valley-style innovation into the U.S. military.
The Department of Defense needs to “make it not impossible for people to work with the government, to find some tunnels that go between east and west,” Carter said.
In that, he meant not China and the U.S., but Silicon Valley and Washington D.C.
Carter has been much more engaged in Silicon Valley than previous Secretaries of Defense. This is his third trip to the San Francisco Bay area since taking the job in February 2015.
Asked about encryption and the Apple/FBI issue, Carter said data security is absolutely necessary for the Pentagon. Apple has appealed a court order that it write new software to override an encryption feature on an iPhone 5c used by one of the assailants in the San Bernardino shootings in December. The FBI says it needs Apple’s help to get more information on the killers.
“There’s no point for me buying all these ships and planes if I can’t connect them. So we’re four square behind encryption,” he said.
He’s also not a fan of building weaknesses into systems so government officials can access them.
“I’m not a believer in backdoors or a single technical approach to what is a complex question. I don’t think that’s realistic, I don’t think that’s technically accurate,” he said.
But he declined to comment on the Apple case directly, except to say, “there isn’t going to be one answer. I don’t think we ought to let one case drive general conclusions or solution.”
“There’s no point for me buying all these ships and planes if I can’t connect them. So we’re four square behind encryption.” Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter