Seventy-four years after the fictionalized film featuring the actor Jimmy Stewart, Mr. Smith really did go to Washington.

In 2013, Microsoft Corp. president Brad Smith (pictured) found himself sitting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House conversing with President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, members of the Cabinet and a number of technology leaders.

The topic was the government’s penchant for secretly collecting the data of private citizens –an issue brought to light by Edward Snowden, who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency earlier that year.

Many of the tech leaders were pressuring President Obama to place more checks and balances on the NSA, according to Smith. However, after listening to the discussion for a while, the Obama offered an observation that Smith remembered vividly afterward.

“He said ‘I have a suspicion that the guns will turn,’” recalled Smith, during an appearance Monday evening at a meeting of the executive speaking forum Churchill Club in Redwood Shores, California. “Obama said, ‘There will come a day when the same demands will be placed on you.’”

The White House meeting represented one of two key inflection points for the tech industry, according to Smith, who has recently published a book – “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age” – written with Carol Ann Browne and accompanied by a forward from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The other inflection point would occur in 2018 when it was revealed that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested raw data from 87 million Facebook files to assist a political campaign, triggering international outrage.

“Cambridge Analytica was the moment when President Obama’s prediction came true,” Smith said.

Privacy and antitrust

The two inflection points bracket an interesting period for the technology industry which has been subjected to scrutiny and policy conflict not previously seen in the decades since Smith joined Microsoft in 1993. The company’s president addressed a number of the contentious issues roiling the industry in a wide-ranging hourlong discussion.

In January of 2020, a consumer data privacy law passed by California will go into effect. It is designed to provide the state’s consumers with protections in how “personal information” is collected and handled, including biometric data, geolocation information and the purchase of a home.

“Consumers are not changing their behavior, but we do want to see our privacy protected,” Smith said. “Why all the pressure from governments? It is government representing the public.”

In addition to privacy protection at the state level, the federal government has recently trained its sights on the tech industry from an antitrust perspective. Last week, Congress requested a trove of information from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google LLC dealing with the companies’ perceived dominance in areas such as advertising, e-commerce and search.

It is an area not unfamiliar to Microsoft which endured its own antitrust investigation beginning in 1990.

“There’s a lot that people can learn from our mistakes, our travails,” said Smith on Monday night, who noted that the government’s pursuit of Microsoft lasted 29 years and may distract the other companies much as it did his firm. “Once an antitrust investigation takes off, it tends to last a long time. If you have to spend a lot of time dealing with an antitrust issue, it will mean there’s a lot of time you’re not spending on other things.”

Facial recognition and online content

Facial recognition technology and its growing use by a number of nations, including China, is an area where Microsoft has actually welcomed support from the government to regulate use. Smith himself published a lengthy blog post last year which outlined the risks and opportunities for facial recognition, along with suggestions for how government legislation can address concerns.

“There are real risks for fundamental democratic principles,” said Smith during the Churchill Club event, and he noted that recent demonstrations in Hong Kong offered a prime example. “People are wearing masks not just because they are thinking about tear gas. One of the first things the protesters tore down were the cameras.”

Earlier this year, Smith and a team from Microsoft found themselves in the middle of a national tragedy. They had arrived in New Zealand at the same time that a deadly terrorist attack occurred in the city of Christchurch, resulting in 51 deaths.

The gunman livestreamed the mass-shooting carnage on Facebook, which ultimately triggered a change in the social media giant’s policies for its livestreaming service.

“It was the world’s first internet-staged mass shooting,” Smith said. “The ability to use the internet as a stage might have created an incentive for the attack in the first place.”

Two months to the day after the terrorist attack, it was announced that over 20 countries, the European Commission, and at least eight tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook would adopt the Christchurch Call to Action which committed to new limits for violent online extremism. Smith hinted that additional countries may sign on during the annual General Assembly meeting of the United Nations in New York next week.

Asked why the United States had so far declined to adopt the Christchurch accord with other countries, Smith echoed the optimism of actor Jimmy Stewart, who went to Washington as a fictitious senator with the goal of changing hearts and minds.

“Never worry about the people who haven’t signed on,” Smith said. “They just haven’t signed on yet.”

Photo: Churchill Club