This article originally appeared in the Stanford Report.

The future of clean energy, quantum technology, and innovation were among the topics of discussion between Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol at an event held at Stanford University.

The historic meeting, which took place on Nov. 17 during the last day of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, was hosted by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and the Hoover Institution. It was one of seven convenings between the two leaders this year to strengthen bilateral relations between their countries. Such a meeting would have been unthinkable just over a year ago because of decades of tense relations. Since Yoon and Kishida took office, they have taken steps towards rapprochement and building trust that their predecessors could not achieve.

“We at Stanford are deeply honored to be hosting these two leaders on the same stage for another historic chapter in relations between their two countries,” said Michael McFaul, the director of FSI, in his opening remarks.

Condoleezza Rice, the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution, moderated the discussion, which centered around innovation and the future of science and technology.

“Democratic allies need very much to discuss both the challenges and the opportunities that technologies bring,” said Rice, who served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States.

The event was one of several visits that saw dignitaries from Asia visiting the Stanford campus while they were in the Bay Area for the APEC summit in San Francisco.

Calls for collaboration

Balancing the risks and opportunities of technology was a recurring theme during the discussion between the leaders of Japan and South Korea, with each of them calling for increased collaboration and cooperation among countries with shared values.

“In the field of science and technology, no one country alone can drive innovation that will change the world,” said Kishida in his opening remarks.

For example, Kishida said, various countries now contribute key elements to innovations such as semiconductors, quantum computing, and generative AI.

“If there is one element missing, there will be no innovation,” Kishida said. “New ideas emerge through a multi-layered exchange between diverse people.”

Convening at Stanford

In Yoon’s opening remarks, he reflected on how Stanford is entwined with Korea’s own efforts to expand educational opportunities in the field of science and technology.

Yoon shared how in the 1960s, then-President Park Chung Hee reached out to the U.S. for help in cultivating South Korea’s engineering talent.

Frederick Terman – who served as dean of the School of Engineering from 1944 to 1958 and provost from 1955 to 1965 and is known as “the father of Silicon Valley” – visited Korea and compiled his observations in The Terman Report. This report, which included contributions from four other experts, led to the creation of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science in 1971, which later was renamed Korea Institute of Science and Technology, or “KIST.”

“At that time, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world, but policies for establishing a scientific and technological state with KIST at the core has resulted in Korea achieving the current status of freedom and prosperity,” Yoon said. “Just like the motto of Stanford, the winds of freedom blew all the way across to Korea.”

Now, Yoon said he and Kishida are expanding the scope of Korea-Japan relations to include cultivating collaboration in science and technology in their diplomacy.

Technology can propel economic growth, creating new jobs and opportunities, Yoon said. But he also warned that technology can leave some people behind.

Yoon emphasized that the three countries must work together to reduce the digital divide and ensure that the world has fair access to new technologies – “and thereby contribute to the sustainable peace and prosperity of the international community through such trilateral cooperation,” he said.

Yoon also urged for trilateral cooperation in accelerating the pace of advancement towards carbon neutrality goals with carbon-free energy technologies such as nuclear power and hydrogen. Yoon also said he “is looking forward to proposing the establishment of a hydrogen ammonia global value chain in which Japan and Korea will be the main participants.”

Addressing the climate challenge

The leaders referenced equity, carbon neutrality, and clean energy again when Rice asked them about their plan to address the current climate challenge.

Yoon shared his concerns about the uneven effects of carbon emissions, pointing out how advanced economies have emitted more carbon dioxide compared to developing or low-developed countries, yet it has been the developing nations that are most negatively impacted.

“We have to cooperate internationally to help bridge the climate divide,” Yoon said.

Kishida cited the Doerr School of Sustainability – which was made possible through a generous gift by the engineer and venture capitalist John Doerr – as an example of entrepreneurs making investments in innovative, sustainable solutions to the climate crisis.

The potential in quantum technology

Rice also asked the leaders about quantum technology, which the Biden administration has invested over $1 trillion in advancing.

Kishida said how the full transformation of quantum technology has yet to be imagined – “quantum technology is a complete game changer,” he said.

For example, Yoon said, quantum technology has the potential to disable encryption systems or wiretapping. He also pointed out how it can also lead to improvements in the detection of submarines – prompting new implications for national security.

Yoon and Kishida both saw opportunities for Japan, Korea, and the U.S. to work together, emphasizing how each country has strengths and weaknesses that can complement one another.

“Quantum technology, I believe, is the area where global cooperation is the most crucial because there is no one country in the world that has a complete understanding of it,” Yoon said.

New mindset to advancing carbon neutrality

During the Q&A portion of the event, the leaders were asked how their countries are ensuring the world is united in solving the global climate crisis.

“Climate change is the biggest global challenge we face today and I think all countries share a common sense of crisis,” Kishida responded. Kishida emphasized Yoon’s earlier point about how each country experiences climate change differently – therefore, there must be “diverse pathways” to innovation that “transcend national borders.”

Yoon said that transitioning to carbon-free energy should not be viewed as a cost but rather as an investment in a new market and industry.

“It should be understood as an asset or an industry that would translate into this becoming a market,” said Yoon, who reiterated the need for cooperation to be fair and just. “We need to change our mindset.”

The event closed with remarks from Gi-Wook Shin, the director of APARC and a professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

“This momentous occasion has built on deepening ties between Japan and the Republic of Korea,” said Shin. “We are so honored to be part of this journey.”

In the Media

The historic meeting of the Japanese and South Korean leaders on the Stanford campus received wide coverage in the media. Selected coverage includes:

• KTVU
• ABC News
• Bloomberg News
• Reuters
• Nikkei Asia
• Mainichi Shimbun
• Japan Times
• Dong-a Ilbo
• Korea Herald
• Korea Times
• Korea JoongAng Daily
• Yonhap

See also the report by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.

Huang concluded his talk with some lessons from history. He proclaimed that economic and technological successes require both scale and scope. Scale being uniformity, such as government support, and scope being diversity and heterogeneity, such as competition and ideological freedom. China in history and today is most successful when both conditions are present. 
 

Watch the Recorded Lecture

If you are interested in  learning more from Professor Yasheng Huang and his study on technological achievements in China, read his book The Rise and Fall of the East and stay tuned for his forthcoming book focusing more specifically on technology in China. 

Gandhi reminisced about the ‘Unite India March,’ a democratic-inspired walk he led across the country that started with 125 people in September 2022 and ended with millions of people joining the 2,540-mile journey. And, although the ruling government had all the “force,” the instruments of control in society, the marchers were never stopped, he noted.

“This was a question that just kept rotating in my mind,” Gandhi said. “They have the force, but they don’t have power, and I realized that force and power are two completely different things. Most politicians confuse force and power, and they think they're the same thing. They’re completely different things. Power is an act of imagination, always in the present, and it is not linear. And power comes when you go close to the truth. That’s why we could not be stopped by force.”

He compared this to other moments of “power” in history, such as when President Kennedy said, ‘let’s go to the moon,’ or when Mahatma Gandhi stood up to the British Empire colonial powers in India, and when the American colonists created the Declaration of Independence to start separating from Britain.

Gandhi said acts of “force” did not drive these historical turning points; rather, they revealed the magnitude of the power of imagination that potentially exists among people to create a better, more just, and visionary world.

Such visioning needs to also inspire and transform the U.S.-India relationship, he believes.

“We already have a bridge between us, and it’s important that this bridge is not simply a bridge based on force, but that it is a bridge based on understanding of the realities of both our people,” said Gandhi, noting the software and technical skills of the Indian people in general match up extremely well with the leading-edge technology systems and markets in the U.S.

U.S. Relationship, Manufacturing, China

After his remarks, Gandhi engaged in an audience Q&A and conversation with Dinsha Mistree, an affiliated scholar with CDDRL. Gandhi elaborated that the political disconnect in India is attributable to a concentration of wealth, inequality throughout society, the current political system, and technology that’s outpacing the ability of social systems and people to digest and manage all the connectivity.

“With social media and technology, there’s a bit of a lag between the political system and technological progress, and I think democracies are struggling with that. I think evolution in the systems is going to take some time, but it’ll happen,” he said.

On economics, Gandhi said that while China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project that aims to stretch around the globe and seems to promote prosperity, it’s ultimately a non-democratic and authoritarian vision of the world. More visioning needs to be done by leading democratic countries on what prosperity entails for societies that may not be as wealthy as others.

“What’s the counter vision? So that’s where I see the gap. Of course, there is military cooperation (with the U.S.). That’s important. But it can’t just be military cooperation,” he said.

As for China, their top-down manufacturing policies are a challenge for democratic countries like India. Gandhi recommends that India follows a more decentralized manufacturing process.

“You cannot simply ignore the manufacturing might of China. You have to compete with. I don’t think it’s an option. So, what does that competition look like? I’m not talking about conflict, I’m talking about competition. How do we create an alternative vision?” he said, adding that it was a “fatal mistake” for the U.S. to parcel out its manufacturing in recent decades to China.

In response to an audience question on India’s position of formal neutrality in the Ukraine-Russia war, Gandhi said, “We have a relationship with Russia, and we have certain dependencies on Russia. So, I would have a very similar stance as the government of India. I mean, it might not be popular, but it is what it is. At the end of the day, we have to also look out for our interests.”

Democracy and Political Opposition

Mistree shared in an email prior to the event that Gandhi believes that India and the U.S. could work together in better ways on trade and economics.

For example, Gandhi’s view is that India could become a manufacturing powerhouse, which is a departure from the current ruling party’s position, while the U.S. continues to innovate and turns to India for more of its manufacturing needs, Mistree said.

“There’s a lot of space for these two countries to work much more closely together,” he said, adding that the Indian diaspora in America represents the second largest immigrant group in the country right now, and both countries share common security challenges in Asia.

Larry Diamond, Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at FSI, noted that Gandhi is the leader of the most important opposition party in India.

“You can’t have a democracy unless you have a political opposition that is free to criticize the ruling party, and contest for power. He has also been questioning directly the concentration and abuse of power by the current government,” Diamond wrote in an email prior to Gandhi’s talk.

Diamond added that U.S. and India have important, economic and strategic interests that should move forward in partnership based on their own logic.

“We need to hear and take seriously the concerns of political opposition and civil society in India, and we need to make clear to the Indian government that violations of basic democratic standards present obstacles to the deepening of U.S.-Indian ties,” Diamond said.

Gandhi was on a six-day visit to the United States to interact with the Indian diaspora and express his party’s commitment to democratic values in India and across the world.

He said, “There are difficult times, but there are also times of opportunity. I think there are times when acts of imagination and acts of true power will resonate and can transform the way we think of ourselves.”

In 2009, world events collided with Schaake’s position as a newly-seated MEP. While the democratic elections in the EU were unfolding without incident, 3,000 miles away in Iran, a very different story was unfolding. Following the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a second term as Iran’s president, allegations of fraud and vote tampering were immediately voiced by supporters of former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leading candidate opposing Ahmadinejad. The protests that followed quickly morphed into the Green Movement, one of the largest sustained protest movements in Iran’s history after the Iranian Revolution of 1978 and until the protests against the death of Mahsa Amini began in September 2022.
 
With the protests came an increased wave of state violence against the demonstrators. While repression and intimidation are nothing new to autocratic regimes, in 2009 the proliferation of cell phones in the hands of an increasingly digitally connected population allowed citizens to document human rights abuses firsthand and beam the evidence directly from the streets of Tehran to the rest of the world in real-time.
 
As more and more footage poured in from the situation on the ground, Schaake, with a pre-politics background in human rights and a specific interest in civil rights, took up the case of the Green Movement as one of her first major issues in the European Parliament. She was appointed spokesperson on Iran for her political group. 

The Best of Tech and the Worst of Tech

But the more Schaake learned, the clearer it became that the Iranian were not the only ones using technology to stay informed about the protests. Meeting with ights defenders who had escaped from Iran to Eastern Turkey, Schaake was told anecdote after anecdote about how the Islamic Republic’s authorities were using tech to surveil, track, and censor dissenting opinions.
 
Investigations indicated that they were utilizing a technique referred to then as “deep packet inspection,” a system which allows the controller of a communications network to read and block information from going through, alter communications, and collect data about specific individuals. What was more, journalists revealed that many of the systems such regimes were using to perform this type of surveillance had been bought from, and were serviced by, Western companies.
 
For Schaake, this revelation was a turning point of her focus as a politician and the beginning of her journey into the realm of cyber policy and tech regulation.
 
“On the one hand, we were sharing statements urging to respect the human rights of the demonstrators. And then it turned out that European companies were the ones selling this monitoring equipment to the Iranian regime. It became immediately clear to me that if technology was to play a role in enhancing human rights and democracy, we couldn’t simply trust the market to make it so; we needed to have rules,” Schaake explained.

The Transatlantic Divide

But who writes the rules? When it comes to tech regulation, there is longstanding unease between the private and public sectors, and a different approach between the East and West shores of the Atlantic. In general, EU member countries favor oversight of the technology sector and have supported legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Digital Services Act to protect user privacy and digital human rights. On the other hand, major tech companies — many of them based in North America — favor the doctrine of self-regulation and frequently cite claims to intellectual property or widely-defined protections such as Section 230 as a justification for keeping government oversight at arm’s length. Efforts by governing bodies like the European Union to legislate privacy and transparency requirements are with raised hackles 
 
It’s a feeling Schaake has encountered many times in her work. “When you talk to companies in Silicon Valley, they make it sound as if Europeans are after them and that these regulations are weapons meant to punish them,” she says.
 
But the need to place checks on those with power is rooted in history, not histrionics, says Schaake. Memories of living under the eye of surveillance states such as the Soviet Union and East Germany still are fresh on many European’s minds. The drive to protect privacy is as much about keeping the government in check as it is about reining in the outsized influence and power of private technology companies, Schaake asserts.
 

Big Brother Is Watching

In the last few years, the momentum has begun to shift. 
 
In 2020, a joint reporting effort by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Proceso, and over 80 journalists at a dozen additional news outlets worked in partnership with Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories to publish the Pegasus Project, a detailed report showing that spyware from the private company NSO Group was used to target, track, and retaliate against tens of thousands journalists, activists, civil rights leaders, and even against prominent politicians around the world.
 
This type of surveillance has innovated quickly beyond the network monitoring undertaken by regimes like Iran in the 2000s, and taps into the most personal details of an individual’s device, data, and communications. In the absence of widespread regulation, companies like NSO Group have been able to develop commercial products with capabilities as sophisticated as state intelligence bureaus. In many cases, “no-click” infections are now possible, meaning a device can be targeted and have the spyware installed without the user ever knowing or having any suspicions that they have become a victim of covert surveillance.

“If we were to create a spectrum of harmful technologies, spyware could easily take the top position,” said Schaake, speaking as the moderator of a panel on “Countering the Misuse of Technology and the Rise of Digital Authoritarianism” at the 2023 Summit for Democracy co-hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden alongside the governments of Costa Rica, the Netherlands, Republic of Korea, and Republic of Zambia.
 
Revelations like those of the Pegasus Project have helped spur what Schaake believes is long-overdue action from the United States on regulating this sector of the tech world. On March 27, 2023, President Biden signed an executive order prohibiting the operational use of commercial spyware products by the United States government. It is the first time such an action has been formally taken in Washington.
 
For Schaake, the order is a “fantastic first step,” but she also cautions that there is still much more that needs to be done. The use of spyware made by the government is not limited by Biden's executive order, and neither is the use by individuals who can get their hands on these tools. 

Human Rights vs. National Security

One of Schaake’s main concerns is the potential for governmental overreach in the pursuit of curtailing the influence of private companies.
 
Schaake explains, “What's interesting is that while the motivation in Europe for this kind of regulation is very much anchored in fundamental rights, in the U.S., what typically moves the needle is a call to national security, or concern for China.”
 
It is important to stay vigilant about how national security can become a justification for curtailing civil liberties. Writing for the Financial Times, Schaake elaborated on the potential conflict of interest the government has in regulating tech more rigorously:
 
“The U.S. government is right to regulate technology companies. But the proposed measures, devised through the prism of national security policy, must also pass the democracy test. After 9/11, the obsession with national security led to warrantless wiretapping and mass data collection. I back moves to curb the outsized power of technology firms large and small. But government power must not be abused.”
 
While Schaake hopes well-established democracies will do more to lead by example, she also acknowledges that the political will to actually step up to do so is often lacking. In principle, countries rooted in the rule of law and the principles of human rights decry the use of surveillance technology beyond their own borders. But in practice, these same governments are also sometimes customers of the surveillance industrial complex. 

Schaake has been trying to make that disparity an impossible needle for nations to keep threading. For over a decade, she has called for an end to the surveillance industry and has worked on developing export controls rules for the sale of surveillance technology from Europe to other parts of the world. But while these measures make it harder for non-democratic regimes to purchase these products from the West, the legislation is still limited in its ability to keep European and Western nations from importing spyware systems like Pegasus back into the West. And for as long as that reality remains, it undermines the credibility of the EU and West as a whole, says Schaake. 
 
Speaking at the 2023 Summit for Democracy, Schaake urged policymakers to keep the bigger picture in mind when it comes to the risks of unaccountable, ungoverned spyware industries. “We have to have a line in the sand and a limit to the use of this technology. It’s extremely important, because this is proliferating not only to governments, but also to non-state actors. This is not the world we want to live in.”

Building Momentum for the Future

Drawing those lines in the sands is crucial not just for the immediate safety and protection of individuals who have been targeted with spyware but applies to other harms of technology vis-a-vis the long-term health of democracy.

“The narrative that technology is helping people's democratic rights, or access to information, or free speech has been oversold, whereas the need to actually ensure that democratic principles govern technology companies has been underdeveloped,” Schaake argues.

While no longer an active politician, Schaake has not slowed her pace in raising awareness and contributing her expertise to policymakers trying to find ways of threading the digital needle on tech regulation. Working at the Cyber Policy Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Schaake has been able to combine her experiences in European politics with her academic work in the United States against the backdrop of Silicon Valley, the home-base for many of the world’s leading technology companies and executives.
 
Though now half a globe away from the European Parliament, Schaake’s original motivations to improve society and people’s lives have not dimmed.

“It’s up to us to guarantee the upsides of technology and limit its downsides. That’s how we are going to best serve our democracy in this moment,” she says.
 
Schaake is clear-eyed about the hurdles still ahead on the road to meaningful legislation about tech transparency and human rights in digital spaces. With a highly partisan Congress in the United States and other issues like the war in Ukraine and concerns over China taking center stage, it will take time and effort to build a critical mass of political will to tackle these issues. But Biden’s executive order and the discussion of issues like digital authoritarianism at the Summit for Democracy also give Schaake hope that progress can be made.
 
“The bad news is we're not there yet. The good news is there's a lot of momentum for positive change and improvement, and I feel like people are beginning to understand how much it is needed.”
 
And for anyone ready to jump into the fray and make an impact, Schaake adds a standing invitation: “I’m always happy to grab a coffee and chat. Let’s talk!”

The complete recording of "Countering the Misuse of Technology and the Rise of Digital Authoritarianism," the panel Marietje Schaake moderated at the 2023 Summit for Democracy, is available below.