Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter praised two Stanford luminaries during his Pentagon policy speech on cybersecurity. He gave the annual Drell Lecture for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. The lecture is named for theoretical physicist and arms control expert Sidney Drell, the center’s co-founder, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Drell and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – a FSI senior fellow and consulting professor at CISAC – were both mentors to Carter. Drell could not attend due to illness and Perry was in the audience. Here are the comments Carter made about the two men who had such a significant impact on his life:

Thank you, Dr. Hennessy, for that introduction. And thanks to all my many friends and colleagues here at Stanford for the opportunity to be with you today. It’s a special privilege for me to give the Sidney Drell Lecture, and I need to tell you why.

I began my career in elementary particle physics, and the classic textbook in relativistic quantum field theory was Bjorken and Drell, entitled Relativistic Quantum Fields, which described the first of what are known as gauge field theories, namely quantum electrodynamics. Here is my copy of Bjorken and Drell, with my hand marking in the margins.

For my doctorate in theoretical physics, I worked on quantum chromodynamics, a gauge field theory of the force by which quarks are held together to make sub-nuclear particles. And at Oxford University’s department of theoretical physics, the external thesis examiner for my doctorate was none other than Sidney Drell.

When I visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in subsequent years as a post-doc, I remember sitting on the porch of the rambling ranch house right here on the Stanford campus that Sid and Harriet Drell lived in. As post-docs tend to do, I would hang around their house at dinnertime hoping that Harriet would invite me in to dinner, which she usually did. Sometimes their daughter Persis would be there, who is now, of course, the dean of engineering here at Stanford University.

A few years later, Sid was assisting the assembly of a team of scientists for the U.S. Congress on a topic that preoccupied Cold War Washington at the time: how to base the ten-warhead MX intercontinental ballistic missile so that it could not be destroyed in a first strike by 3,000 equivalent megatons of Soviet throw-weight atop their SS-18 missile. He recommended that I join this team. Sid Drell as an inspiration to all those who worked in those years to control the danger of nuclear weapons. This was the beginning of my involvement in national security affairs.

About that time, I got to meet then-Under Secretary of Defense in charge of technology and procurement for the Department of Defense. He impressed me with how lucid and logical he was, and how well he applied technical thinking to national security problems. That Under Secretary was of course William Perry, who is also present here today, and who later because Deputy Secretary of Defense and finally Secretary of Defense in a progression that I have followed some 20 years later. Bill has been a major figure in my life, including standing in for my father at my wedding.

So I thank both Sid Drell and Bill Perry, and many, many other colleagues and friends here at CISAC, at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the hoover Institution, and in the engineering faculty. I especially thank everyone for their warm welcome for me as a visitor earlier this academic year. Not quite two months into it, on a fateful Monday morning in November, though, duty called. And I found myself nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Defense. 

Image

Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter unveiled the Pentagon’s new cybersecurity strategy before a Stanford audience Thursday, saying the United States would defend the nation using cyber warfare and calling for a renewed partnership with Silicon Valley.

Carter, the first sitting secretary of defense to speak on the Stanford campus in two decades, warned cyber criminals that Washington considers a cyber attack against the homeland or American businesses and citizens like any other threat to national security.

“Adversaries should know that our preference for deterrence and our defensive posture don’t diminish our willingness to use cyber options if necessary,” he told the audience at CEMEX Auditorium. “And when we do take action – defensive or otherwise, conventionally or in cyberspace – we operate under rules of engagement that comply with domestic and international law.”

Carter, who has a doctorate in theoretical physics, has strong ties to technology. He knows that as he takes the helm at the Pentagon, digital innovators and cyber criminals are trying to outpace one another at breakneck speeds. A strong partnership between military strategist and technologists would establish an unbeatable pact, he said.

The secretary was a senior partner at Global Technology Partners, where he advised major investment firms on technology and defense. He acknowledges the boundless transformation of technology and the opportunities and prosperity that it has brought to all sectors of American society.

But, he added: “The same Internet that enables Wikipedia also allows terrorists to learn how to build a bomb. And the same technologies we use to target cruise missiles and jam enemy air defenses can be used against our own forces – and they’re now available to the highest bidder.”

This is why, he said, the Pentagon must rebuild the bridge between Washington and Silicon Valley. “Renewing our partnership is the only way we can do this right.” Carter was building on President Barack Obama’s cybersecurity policies outlined by the president at the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford earlier this year. 

Carter was the Payne distinguished visitor at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution until he was sworn in as the 25th secretary of defense in February.

Carter’s speech was delivered as the annual Drell Lecture for Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

The lecture is named for theoretical physicist and arms control expert Sidney Drell, the center’s co-founder, a senior fellow at Hoover and former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Drell and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry – a FSI senior fellow and consulting professor at CISAC – were both mentors to Carter and he thanked them at length before his formal policy speech. (Read here.)

"Secretary Carter is the first sitting secretary of defense to speak in Silicon Valley in 20 years," said CISAC Co-Director and Hoover senior fellow Amy Zegart, who led a Q&A session with Carter at the end of his talk. "This was an historic day, with the unveiling of DoD's new cyber strategy, and we are honored that Stanford could play a part. Cybersecurity is one of the toughest international security challenges of our time, and we are dedicated to playing a leading role in bringing together policymakers, scholars, and industry leaders to develop the new technologies, talent, and ideas that our nation requires."

Image

As Carter was speaking, the Department of Defense released online its new cyber strategy based on three primary missions: To defend the Pentagon’s networks; to defend the United States and its interests against cyber attacks of “significant consequences”; and to provide integrated cyber capabilities to support military operations and contingency plans.

“The cyber threat against U.S. interests is increasing in severity and sophistication,” Carter said. “While the North Korean cyber attack on Sony was the most destructive on a U.S. entity so far, this threat affects us all. Just as Russia and China have advanced cyber capabilities and strategies ranging from stealthy network penetration to intellectual property theft, criminal and terrorist networks are also increasing their cyber operations. Low-cost and global proliferation of malware have lowered barriers to entry and made it easier for smaller malicious actors to strike in cyberspace.”

The cyber strategy calls for a 6,200-strong Cyber Mission Force of military, civilian and defense contractors, with 133 cyber protection and combat teams in action by 2018.

“These are the talented individuals who hunt down intruders, red-team our networks and perform the forensics that help keep our systems secure,” Carter said.

And the Pentagon is creating a new “point of partnership” in the Silicon Valley called the Defense Innovation Unit X.

“The first-of-its-kind unit will be staffed by an elite team of active-duty and civilian personnel, plus key people from the Reserves, where some of our best technical talent resides,” he said, adding the unit would scout for breakthrough and emerging technologies and potentially help startups find new ways to work with the military.

The Pentagon will establish a branch of the U.S. Digital Service, the outgrowth of the technical team that helped rescue the beleaguered healthcare.gov site, which collapsed when the Affordable Care Act was implemented.

Herb Lin, a senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at CISAC and a research fellow at Hoover, said the concept was particularly noteworthy. “He’s asking technologists to take a tour of duty helping the DoD by working on some important technical problems. I heartily endorse this vision.”

Lin said the new DoD cyber strategy that was released online is also notable for its openness about the role of the Pentagon’s offensive cyber capabilities.

“It’s been an open secret for a long time that DoD has these capabilities, but by discussing them more forthrightly than any defense secretary has done before, Dr. Carter has done a real public service,” Lin said. “And the announcement of the new strategy will spark much needed conversations among policymakers and researchers about what should be done with these capabilities.”

Lin – chief scientist for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies before coming to Stanford earlier this year – was also impressed by how open Carter was about wanting to repair relations with Silicon Valley. Those have been frosty at best since the Edward Snowden revelations.

“That will be a hard task, but you have to start somewhere, and Carter is quite tech-savvy, so if anyone can make headway, he can,” Lin said.

The secretary was slated to visit Facebook after his speech and meet with tech leaders on Friday. Not only does he hope to make amends, but to enlist their support in countering the threat of cyber attacks and ensuring the military has the technology it needs.

Carter revealed that earlier this year, sensors that guard the Pentagon’s unclassified networks detected what they believed were Russian hackers. After investigating, they discovered an old vulnerability in one of the DoD’s legacy networks that hadn’t been patched. But they caught it and kicked off the hackers within 24 hours.

He said the incident had not been made public until now.

“Shining a bright light on such intrusions can eventually benefit us all, government and business alike,” he said. “As secretary of defense, I believe that we at the Pentagon must be open, and think, as I like to say, outside our five-sided box.”

After his speech, the secretary took questions from the Stanford and Twitter audiences in a session moderated by Zegart.

One of those questions from Twitter asked why young Stanford computer scientists or technologists from the valley would want to join the cyber teams at the Pentagon.

“Because we have the most exciting problems you can have in technology,” he said. “And they’re consequential – they matter.”

Image

All Photos by Rod Searcey.

A sustainable future is within reach, but it won’t prevent the world from experiencing the potentially catastrophic environmental and political consequences of climate change and environmental degradation, former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told a Stanford audience.

Chu, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics and served as the energy secretary under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, held a seminar at CISAC on Tuesday on climate change, sustainability and security.

The consequences of the damage wrought by unsustainable resource depletion and air pollution will manifest in a hotter, more dangerous world, said the Stanford physics professor.

Average global temperatures have skyrocketed past normal levels since the Industrial Revolution and have plateaued in the last few months at the highest points in history. Chu said the plateau is likely due to it taking a long time for the lower depths of the oceans to warm up.

“There is a built-in time delay between committing damage, which we’ve already done, and feeling the true consequences. All we can say is that temperatures are likely to climb again, we just don’t know when – could be 50 to 100 years – and by how much,” said Chu.

Even if the world were to stop using coal, oil, and natural gas today, he said, it would not stop the oncoming consequences. “It’s like a long-time chain-smoker who stops smoking. Stopping does not necessarily prevent the occurrence of lung cancer.”

Chu said the battle between scientists and the tobacco industry in the 20th century is analogous to today’s conflict between scientists and the energy industries.

“A lot of what you hear from the incumbent energy industries and their representatives are the same kinds of arguments that the tobacco industry made when the science showing the harm cigarettes caused came out,” said Chu.

Ironically, the same science showing the damage cigarettes cause to health can be used to demonstrate the hazards of air pollution today.

Chu noted that a recent study found that for every 10 micrograms of pollution per cubic meter, the chances of contracting lung cancer increases 36 percent. This lends alarming perspective to pollution in places such as China and India.

Image

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing tracks air pollution levels daily.

“The average level of air pollution was 194 micrograms per cubic meter. So it’s possible that breathing the average air in Beijing is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day,” he said. “Even if it’s a third of that, it’s still really bad. But again, there is going to be a lag time between now and a possible rash of deaths by lung cancer.

In addition to causing large-scale health crises, global warming and environmental degradation may exacerbate, or even cause, potential conflicts between countries.

“I think water insecurity concerns me more than even rising sea levels,” said Chu, noting that today’s conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa are exacerbated by water insecurity.

“India is already nervous that China will direct water runoff from the Himalayas to water-starved Northern China and away from India or Bangladesh, which are also water-starved,” he said. “India is also concerned that millions of Bangladeshis could become environmental refugees and start streaming into India.”

Chu recalled that when he was energy secretary, one of his biggest climate-change allies was the Department of Defense

“They will be the ones called on to help with those stresses and they see serious geopolitical risks due to climate change,” he said.

Despite the dangers ahead, Chu is optimistic about great strides in sustainable technology.

Chu and some of his colleagues studied a phenomenon that may bode well for creating a more environmentally friendly economy: putting efficiency standards on electronic appliances, which eventually could lead to a decline in the cost of appliances.

In addition to economical energy standards, new and cheaper green energy technology is within sight. Chu is working with Stanford Professor Yi Cui on creating a lithium-sulfur battery that may be significantly lighter than the current electric batteries used by cars such as Tesla and charge 200 miles in 10 minutes.

Additionally, wind energy is set to become cheaper than natural gas. Chu said that in the Midwest, where the wind is best and cheapest, contracts are selling anywhere between 2.5 and 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. If you build a new natural gas plant, it would be about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

“To be fair, wind does have the benefit of a production tax credit and if you take that away, wind would be somewhere around 5.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. But I think within the next dozen years wind will, on its own, be cheaper than natural gas,” he said.

Solar is even more surprising, said Chu. In July 2008, contracts were going for 18 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Texas in 2014, two contracts were signed one for 5 cents and the other for 4.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar has the advantage of being scalable and the amount of solar resources available around the world is substantial.

“There’s plenty of solar energy available to power the entire world several times over,” he said.

Nonetheless, public policy nudges are still needed.

“There is still no serious discussion in the U.S. about creating a national grid with long distance transmission lines, which will be necessary for a sustainable future. But before that can happen, the campaign by incumbent industries to discredit and doubt climate science has to be defeated.”

The Program on Human Rights welcomed Pamela Merchant and Kristen Myles to Stanford on March 4 as final speakers in the winter course U.S. Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights. Ms. Merchant has served for the past nine years as executive director of the Center for Justice & Accountability, the leading U.S.-based organization that pursues international human rights abusers through litigation in U.S. courts. Formerly a federal prosecutor, Ms. Merchant has frequently testified on human rights issues before the U.S. Congress; currently serves on the Advisory Council for the ABA Center on Human Rights; and is a director of the Foundation for Sustainable Rule of Law Initiatives. Ms. Myles is a litigation partner in the San Francisco office of Munger, Tolles & Olson and is repeatedly named among California's “top women lawyers” by the Daily Journal. In her practice of complex business litigation, Ms. Myles filed a “friend of the court” brief in the 2014 case of Shell Oil vs. Kiobel which in the U.S. Supreme Court decided that U.S. corporations could not be sued in U.S. courts under the Alien Torts Statute for alleged human rights abuses abroad.

Ms. Merchant’s strongly held view is that some human rights violations are so egregious that they should be litigated in any court system, even if they occurred outside the country in which the case is argued. Ms. Merchant argued that courts create a record of truth about human rights violations, and that shedding the light of truth on these terrible events will make the world a less violent place. The Center for Justice and Accountability has provided legal advice for human rights victims to pursue their claims of human rights abuses in U.S. courts when abuses occurred in countries such at El Salvador, Nigeria, South Africa, and Myanmar, using U.S. federal legislation of the Alien Torts Statute and the Torture Victims Prevention Act. The CJA’s position is that the Nuremberg Trials of the World War II genocide atrocities created an obligation for all nation states to pursue justice in their courts under the international law principle of universal jurisdiction that holds that egregious human rights abuses are the concern of all humanity, wherever they have taken place.

Ms. Myles has represented U.S. corporations against whom human rights victims allege were directly or indirectly the instigators of their violations by virtue of pursuing corporate economic interests abroad in collusion with corrupt officials who resort to violence, such as by pushing people off their land or working in industrial settings in sub-standard conditions. Ms. Myles pointed that U.S. corporate executives do not instruct their overseas operators to be violent; instead, they are working through long chains of delegated authority in their off-shore operations, and these off-shore people act beyond their corporate mandate. Most importantly, the international legal principle of universal jurisdiction is the “law of nations” so it is directed to national governments and not to private corporations.

After Ms. Merchant and Ms. Myles summarized their individual positions, they engaged in dialogue with Professor Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights. Discussion covered the pros and cons of using the U.S. court system for transnational issues, given that such cases are lengthy and expensive; whether the high visibility of such cases had a deterrent effect on violators abroad, or may lead to the deportation of a violator who had subsequently settled in the U.S., or would prevent an alleged perpetrator’s application to emigrate to the U.S.; the success of victims being paid money from their perpetrator under a civil damages award ordered by a U.S. court; whether this U.S. litigation poses a diplomatic problem for the U.S. in its international operations; how standards on corporate social responsibility can be raised beyond litigating past practices in lengthy and expensive civil court proceedings; and the ethics of imposing higher standards of U.S. corporate standards in countries with lower standards and very high needs to improve economic conditions for their population.

Helen Stacy, Executive Director, Program on Human Rights

Former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall remembers how members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol Building on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They clasped one another’s hands and spontaneously broke out singing, “God Bless America.”

It was a moving moment of patriotic bipartisanship. “It was our generation’s Pearl Harbor,” he recalled, and politics were momentarily subsumed by love of nation.

Then it was time to investigate and bring those responsible to justice.

“For many of us who were policymakers, it was time to take a crash course in understanding the tools of terrorism, trying to penetrate who al-Qaida was, who was this figure, Osama bin Laden – and then how do we respond?”

But the government went into overdrive, the Colorado Democrat believed, and put civil liberties at risk. He recalled other decisions in American history – such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II – that were made in panic and secrecy.  

“It became clear to me that bin Laden’s motive was to create greater suspicion in the world, to incent us to build higher and higher walls,” he told a sold-out crowd at CEMEX Auditorium on Thursday night. His talk was part of Stanford “Security Conundrum” lecture series co-sponsored by CISAC, the Hoover Institution, the Law School, Stanford in Government and Continuing Studies.

“And in an interesting way, it led me to look at civil liberties and civil rights, which are the biggest, baddest weapons that we have,” he said in conversation with Philip Taubman, a CISAC consulting professor and a former reporter at The New York Times.

Taubman is one of the organizers of the special series has brought together nationally prominent experts this academic year to explore the critical issues raised by the National Security Agency's activities, including their impact on security, privacy and civil liberties.

On April 10, the speaker will be Judge Reggie Barnett Walton, former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will close the series before the end of the academic year.

Udall told the audience that in the powerful wake of fear that swept the nation following the 9/11 attacks, the House was presented with the Patriot Act “to strengthen and broaden our capacity to surveil those who might do us harm.”

Image

Udall was a congressman from 1999 to 2009 and then senator from 2009 until losing his seat in the mid-term elections last year. He had been a one-term congressman when the Bush administration put the Patriot Act to a vote on Oct. 24, 2001.

He was one of only 66 House members to vote against the act. It would then also pass through the Senate the following day.

Udall called his no-vote an unpopular one and a lonely period of his political life. But he believed the Act had been hastily drafted without due process and that some of the law’s provisions could lead to violations of privacy and freedoms.

“I was very conscious of what Ben Franklin famously said. He said that a society that trades essential liberties for short-term security deserves neither,” Udall said. “And I believed that we were strong enough to stand behind the civil liberties included in the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment – including the explicit right to privacy – and that we would outlast these adversaries that were in front of us by hewing to those principles, not abandoning those principles.”

Udall also voted against the Obama administration’s four-year extension of three key provision of the act in 2011, which included roving wiretaps, searches of business records and conducting surveillance of those suspected of terrorist-related activities.

He would then gain notoriety for his vocal opposition to NSA surveillance programs in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures of June 2013. He became one of the staunchest critics of the U.S. spy agency for conducting massive, warrantless data grabs on millions of Americans without their knowledge.

Udall said the NSA gathers more than 700 million data sets from phone calls each day.

“I was told, don’t worry Mark, this is metadata. We just collect it; we don’t do anything with it,” Udall said. “But I realized that it wasn’t just metadata, that it was how that metadata was being used and the fact that it was a secret program and under a secret interpretation of the law.”

Udall said the metadata can be manipulated for form a pattern of an individual’s behavior, of his religious and political beliefs, his medical issues, his likes and dislikes.

“We haven’t done anything with this data and that’s all well and good,” he said. “But history shows us that the government will overreach, particularly when it operates in secret. The Fourth Amendment was put in place for a reason.”

He also worries the metadata program has undercut the trust in the intelligence community.

“I want to be clear: We need to gather intelligence,” he said. “There are forces at play in the world that would do us great harm. But again, we ought to gather that intelligence in ways that fit with what the public understands.”

Udall called on the audience to push for transparency reforms to the FISA court – which oversees requests by the NSA and FBI to issue surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents. From 1999 to 2012, the court has granted nearly 34,000 warrants; only 12 have been denied.

Udall believes that privacy, which is implicit in the Bill of Rights, is essential to all other American freedoms that are protected by law.

“This has long-term and important ramifications about how we look at ourselves as Americans,” he said. “We all need to be in the mix; we all need to be having these discussions to be ever-vigilant and protect these fundamental freedoms.”

U.S. Navy Adm. Cecil D. Haney, the U.S. Strategic Command commander, hosted CISAC Co-Directors David Relman and Amy Zegart as well as CISAC faculty and fellows at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska on March 30-31, 2015, to promote military-to-university cooperation and innovation, and provide a better understanding of USSTRATCOM’s global missions.

The visit follows Haney’s trip to Stanford last year, during which he held seminars and private meetings with faculty, scholars and students to discuss strategic deterrence in the 21st century. Those discussions focused on reducing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile while maintaining an effective deterrent, the integration of space and cyberspace in nuclear platforms and the congested, contested and competitive operating environment in space.

“Developing and maintaining partnerships with security experts from the private sector and academic institutions like CISAC enables USSTRATCOM to view the strategic environment from a different perspective and adjust our decision calculous accordingly,” Haney said. “We are excited about this unique opportunity to exchange ideas and share information with this prestigious organization.” 

Haney opened the discussions by presenting a command mission brief, in which he described USSTRATCOM’s nine Unified Command Plan-assigned missions, his priorities as commander and his ongoing effort to build enduring relationships with partner organizations to exchange ideas and confront the broad range of global strategic challenges.

Zegart, who is also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said getting to see and experience how USSTRATCOM operates first-hand was “an eye opener.”

“It’s one thing to think about deterrence, it’s another to live it,” she said. “When you go to each other’s neighborhoods, you gain a better understanding of where each side is coming from … and that’s enormously important to us in how we think about deterrence and what we can do to help USSTRATCOM and its mission.”

“These kinds of exchanges have cascade effects on young people; how they think about civil-military relations [and] how they understand what our military is doing,” she added.

Image

The delegation also received a tour of USSTRATCOM’s global operations center and held discussions with subject matter experts on strategic deterrence, cyber responsibility and nuclear modernization.

“As a cybersecurity fellow, it was fascinating to visit the global operations center and the battle deck to see the role that cybersecurity and information technology plays in the strategic deterrence mission,” said Andreas Kuehn, a CISAC pre-doctoral cybersecurity fellow from Switzerland. “At CISAC, we often discuss deterrence from a theoretical perspective, so it was very insightful to hear from people who work in [this field] and see how they deal with deterrence in an operational manner.”

The two-day visit concluded with an open discussion, during which CISAC and USSTRATCOM members discussed the most effective means to share information, plan future engagements and continue working to build on the mutually beneficial relationship between the two organizations.

“Sometimes people talk [about strategic issues] in the abstract and it becomes difficult to understand what is happening on the ground and in the real world,” Kuehn said. “I think [USSTRATCOM] took extra steps to keep the conversations open and concrete.”

USSTRATCOM is one of nine Department of Defense unified combatant commands charged with strategic deterrence, space operations, cyberspace operations, joint electronic warfare, global strike, missile defense, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, combating weapons of mass destruction, and analysis and targeting.