Midway through the Lincoln Network’s Reboot 2018 conference in San Francisco on Friday, one speaker asked approximately 200 attendees a simple question: How many watched the U.S. Senate hearings on Facebook in April? Virtually everyone in the room raised a hand. The next question: How many felt legislators understood how the technology industry worked? No hands rose.

That the communications gap between the tech community and government officials has widened was hardly in dispute at the Silicon Valley gathering. But what to do about it remains a key point of debate as issues such as data privacy and social media manipulation continue to boil.

“It’s really obvious that there’s a lack of understanding about how technology works,” Jennifer Pahlka, executive director of Code for America and a former White House official, said during an appearance at the Lincoln event. “But it has the seeds of getting better.”

Program for IT in government

One reason for Pahlka’s optimism was the U.S. Digital Service, a government program she architected while serving as deputy chief technology officer for the White House in 2014. Digital Service survived the change in administrations and continues to provide consultation support to federal agencies for information technology.

“It survived because it gets outcomes,” Pahlka said. “Government technology projects tend to cost a lot more than they should and often tend not to work very well. Digital Service projects work and they’re cheaper.”

Programs such as Digital Service may help the U.S. government manage technology projects more effectively, but the communication gap between the tech industry and Congress is hard to ignore. One for the reasons for gulf in understanding is a simple lack of resources, according to several speakers at the Lincoln event.

Funding cuts empower lobbyists

In 1972, Congress established the Office of Technology Assessment and it served as a key resource on tech issues. But it was abolished in 1995 and Congress has also reduced its own staff over the past 30 years, to the point where there is precious little expertise on tech issues on Capitol Hill.

This has created a scenario where lobbyists have become the go-to resource for congressional staff members seeking help on a wide range of technological issues.

“They tell me ‘you’re like a member of our team,’” Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress and a former congressional staff member himself, recalled at Friday’s event. “That’s bad. If I’m being viewed as a member of their team, that’s a sign of real problems in our democracy.”

Focus on economy and national security

What is the current administration’s tech focus? In a brief appearance at the Lincoln event, Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president for technology policy, outlined the White House’s concentration on the country’s economic health and safety as the foundation for technology support.

“The north star really is economic growth and national security,” said Kratsios, who called out drone flying, autonomous vehicles and the opening of federal land for broadband sighting as priorities. “We are relentlessly pursing a pro-tech agenda at the White House.”

Yet the administration has also complained that conservative voices are being muted on social media platforms, which has placed tech companies under scrutiny. The Justice Department recently launched an inquiry into the issue.

It’s yet another example for some in the tech industry of how the government fails to understand industry dynamics. “We’re going straight to deputizing the platforms and making them legally responsible for who can or cannot speak,” Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, said during a panel discussion on Friday. “That’s a terrible way to begin these conversations.”

Barrage of tweets

The technology industry itself may not be completely blameless either. On the same panel with Szoka, Renee DiResta, director of research at New Knowledge and a Mozilla fellow, pointed out that algorithmically orchestrated advertising tools offered by Twitter can effectively pump out information en masse through a barrage of tweets.

DiResta cited a recent incident where an unidentified group backing a Senate candidate in Texas was able to generate thousands of identical tweets in the wee hours of a weekday morning. “One of the things we can do as technologists is think about the design of our systems,” DiResta said. “For $5,000 I can buy a whole lot of speech and I’m going to make sure you’re not going to know where that speech came from.”

Another issue confronting the tech community is data privacy. With the May implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, which governs how businesses must handle data it collects from private citizens, there is speculation that similar rules could be enacted in the U.S. Earlier this month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that it would launch a collaborative effort to develop a privacy framework.

To date, the enforcement approach to data privacy has been focused at the state level, which has not pleased one of the country’s major technology trade associations. “There are 47 states with 47 different data breach notification laws,” said Jamie Boone, senior director of government affairs for the Consumer Technology Association. “That’s confusing for consumers. It’s not a great model.”

Seeking permission later

The communications gap between Congress and tech, coupled with an erratic regulatory approach to major issues such as free speech on social media and privacy, has given rise to a trend characterized as “permissionless innovation.” Innovations such as ride sharing and autonomous cars are an outgrowth of this approach.

There are other small, yet significant examples of the permissionless trend. One can be found in a grassroots, open-source organization company called e-NABLE, a group of volunteers is using 3-D printers to make prosthetic hands for children, without Food and Drug Administration approval.

Another group, Nightscout, is a community of volunteer parents who have developed low-cost insulin monitoring and delivery devices via a smartphone app for children with Type 1 diabetes. The initiative grew out of frustration over the slow approval process for such devices by the federal government.

“Innovators are pushing at the margins out there in cyberspace,” said Adam Thierer, senior research fellow at George Mason University. “You’re going to face a different calculus when you try to hack politics.”

Government policy conflicts for the tech community may ultimately be resolved more through cultural change than a legislative one. In 2013, when the website driving HealthCare.gov failed to work properly, a Google engineer named Mikey Dickerson was called in to help fix it. Scenes of Dickerson ambling through the White House wearing a rumpled, tieless shirt in typical Silicon Valley fashion, caused a media stir in the nation’s capital.

“It’s not that there’s a problem with anybody wearing suits,” Dickerson, speaking about how a more relaxed dress code could create a collaborative D.C. culture, said during an interview at the time. “It’s just that I don’t care.”

Whether there will be a place for more Google engineers in Washington D.C. remains to be seen, but the influence of Silicon Valley could make a difference in the legislative landscape.

“It’s not just about technology being agile, but policy being agile,” said Pahlka, who expressed a desire to see the government adopt a more bottom-up mentality. “Just replace the user with the American public. That’s whom we’re here to serve.”

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE