Tools and Weapons Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

The responsibility for the safe use of technology should not rest fully on tech companies or governmental bodies. Both are responsible.

About the Author

Brad Smith is Microsoft’s president. He has done work there to help the company work through critical issues including the intersection of technology and society, including cybersecurity, privacy, AI, human rights, immigration, and environmental sustainability. He has been named as one of the technology industry’s most respected figures. The New York Times called him "a de facto ambassador for the technology industry at large".

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Tools and Weapons Book Summary Preview

Technological advancement is a powerful thing. It can also be a scary one. Like when NSA employee Edward Snowden downloaded 1.5 million classified NSA documents, he left his job in Hawaii, and headed to Hong Kong. Later, he revealed the classified documents to journalists and the public discovered the NSA and the British Government had been copying user information from Yahoo and many other sources. One such program PRISM was an agreement between NASA and various companies where they shared private user data. The release of this information lead to citizens questioning how their data was being used by major tech companies, and more importantly if major tech companies could be trusted. In Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Brown, significant events in tech are analyzed, and lessons are shared: revealing that the relationship between user data and who can see it is actually a bit more complex than it may seem... especially when the government gets involved.

Customer approval seems ideal for determining whether or not to share their data, but there is a gray area.

Theoretically, customer data should not be shared without the legal process. If a person doesn’t agree to share their data, no one should have access to it, right?

Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to get legal consent from someone if you can’t find them, especially when someone’s life is on the line. For instance, when Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by a group of terrorists in Pakistan, the only way to save him was to find him. The terrorists communicated with the US government through wifi hotspots throughout Pakistan. Pearl was killed before they were caught, but the terrorists were caught. They were found using web-based tracking. Was using data to track them ok, even though they didn’t receive explicit consent?

In this instance, yes, because it meant life could be saved. The point? All data tracking and sharing aren’t wrong. Even Microsoft thinks so: this chase led them to scale their ideas on customer privacy. They determined that when faced with an issue that could violate a user’s privacy, they would follow these principles: Privacy, security, transparency, and compliance.

The government shouldn’t use their powers to gain access to citizen’s personal data, and tech companies need to be protected.

The government began pursuing information from tech companies while trying to track terrorists, a noble deed, but it devolved into forcing tech companies to give them private information about American Citizens, and invoking “gagging orders”. These “gagging orders” were laws preventing the companies from disclosing that they were being hacked by the government. Eventually, Microsoft sued the government over this heinous breach of privacy. This lead to the Department of Justice ruling in favor of tech companies. Microsoft met with the Department of Justice, during which limits were set on gagging orders. This was one of the first steps taken to monitor the use of people’s data.