Facing new threats, Defense Secretary Ash Carter courts Seattle’s tech leaders

During Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s pilgrimage to West Coast tech hubs this week, the Pentagon launched a contest with a name that sounded like an invitation to get arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay.

Called “Hack the Pentagon,” the program asks private-sector cyber security professionals to take a crack at the Defense Department’s protection of its public web pages. The idea is to see what kind of weaknesses outsiders can find.

“I think we’ll learn something,” Carter told a San Francisco forum Wednesday.

His willingness to let “white hat” hackers root around in the Defense Department’s information infrastructure is a reflection of his work over the past year to lure tech leaders into new partnerships with the Pentagon. For that, he wants to send a signal that he’s open to changing the way the Defense Department does business.

On Thursday, his campaign came to Seattle, where Carter met with officials from Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing to open doors between the Pentagon and some of the Northwest largest companies. His goal is to nurture collaborations that might lead to a game-changing technology and to recruit talented engineers who might be interested in working on national security projects.

“We need partners like Microsoft and others in this room,” Carter said. “We don’t build anything in the Pentagon. That’s not the way it works. The Soviet Union tried that. It didn’t work very well.”

Carter has put a spotlight on connecting with tech leaders since he took office in February 2015. He’s made three trips to Silicon Valley since then, more than any of his predecessors.

He’s also put money and staff behind his appeals to private industry. This week, he announced the creation of a Defense Innovation Advisory Board that is to be led by Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.

It follows the launch last year of a Pentagon office in Silicon Valley called Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, where military and tech leaders can work through different challenges. Eleven lawmakers from Washington’s congressional delegation in October wrote a letter asking Carter to open a similar branch in the Seattle area.

“We believe Washington state’s science and technology sector is uniquely positioned to accelerate the Defense Innovation Initiative,” the lawmakers wrote, citing the region’s concentration of military bases, universities and industry.

That pitch didn’t come up at the Microsoft breakfast, but Carter highlighted the region’s connections between the Armed Forces and the private sector when he welcomed an audience full of Northwest military leaders and industry representatives.

“We need to innovate. We need to do it together for the future,” he said.

In some cases, Carter has been working to repair relationships that were damaged when former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed the scope of the government’s worldwide surveillance programs. He acknowledged as much when he described the “Snowden overhang” as one of the barriers between the Pentagon and the tech world.

“That was seen as a betrayal by many people in Silicon Valley” who realized the Pentagon had been hacking private companies, said Herbert Lin, a cyber policy professor at Stanford University. Back then, Lin said he noticed people in private industry unfavorably comparing the Defense Department to authoritarian regimes known for spying on their own citizens.

“To some extent, that sense of mistrust is starting to be repaired, but slowly,” he said.

Today, divides between the tech industry and the government continue to dominate headlines. Most large tech companies, for instance, back Apple’s refusal to comply with a judge’s order that would compel the company to write a program to help the FBI crack an iPhone that belonged to San Bernadino shooter Syed Farook.

Microsoft and Amazaon were among the companies that filed a court brief Thursday supporting Apple’s position that it should not be forced to write software that would undermine its own products.

“We agree wholeheartedly with Apple,” Microsoft President Brad Smith told a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week.

This week, Carter has faced questions on the Apple case at almost every stop. He has insisted he can’t comment on the specifics of the case because it’s in court.

Instead, he encourages private industry and the Defense Department to work toward a solution that would appease both cultures.

“There isn’t going to be one answer,” he said in San Francisco. “I don’t think we ought to let one case drive a general conclusion or solution. And the only way we’re going to get to a good solution is by working together.”

In Seattle, Carter used a good portion of his time to talk about his challenges getting young people with tech backgrounds interested in military service. He said they want “to try out” something before they commit, which tends to be a reversal of how someone joins the military.

“We have to try harder to connect our military to our society than previous generations have. I know there’s magic to that union, but we have to make that introduction,” he said.

In California, some people in the tech world have said Carter has started to make a difference. They want him to succeed, hoping the changes he started can accelerate improvements to the Defense Department’s often cumbersome and expensive research and development programs.

“The government struggles with taking good disruptive ideas and implementing them on the operational side. That’s what Silicon Valley does 24-7,” said Peter Newell, a former Army brigade commander who now leads BMNT, a Palo Alto consulting firm. Last year, he organized a series of “hackathons” that challenged Stanford students to help solve military problems. He’s working to expand the “hacking for defense” model to other colleges.

Stanford’s Lin said it’s unclear whether Carter will make a lasting shift in the relationship between the military and tech hubs on the West Coast. Carter has faced that question at a couple stops, with tech leaders noting that he’ll likely be replaced by the next president in 2017.

“Carter is the most tech-savvy secretary of defense in a long time. He understands the Defense Department needs the innovation and power of Silicon Valley. If he can’t do it, I don’t know if anybody can,” Lin said.

This story was originally published March 3, 2016 at 3:11 PM with the headline "Facing new threats, Defense Secretary Ash Carter courts Seattle’s tech leaders."