The tug of war between information technology and government oppression is only getting started.

Excerpted from Google’s Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, June 4, 2013.

ERIC SCHMIDT, Exec. Chairman, Google; Co-author, The New Digital Age

JARED COHEN, Director, Google Ideas; Co-author, The New Digital Age

In conversation with GREG DALTON, Host, Director, Climate One

GREG DALTON: The focus of this book is that new information technology and history have often challenged the establishment, the state, the government, the elite. So how is that happening now with new mobile phone technologies?

ERIC SCHMIDT: Let me start by thanking you for hosting this event. When I was a graduate student at Berkeley driving to Xerox Park where a lot of the computer technology we use today was invented, I listened to a radio show every time I went back and forth; it was this show. And I dreamed one day of being in the audience. I understood the reach of what The Commonwealth Club meant. So now, 30-plus years later, we’re all here, and it’s still that important as a dissemination vehicle, which is why we chose this for our San Francisco book tour. [Applause.]

Jared and I started talking about [mobile technology] a couple of years ago. We couldn’t quite figure out where we were going to come out. But we made some observations, and one of them is that the Internet is going to wire up the entire world. There are roughly 3.4 billion phones in use today; there are more than a billion smartphones, of which [the majority] are Android phones, thank you very much. And as those numbers increase and as the next five billion join the Internet, they are going to do it with mobile devices.

So for us in the developed world, the future is fantastic. All of a sudden, new services will emerge. Think of them as a perfectly intelligent digital assistant who can assist you in planning your life and help you out in every conceivable way. And you’re going to love the products that Google and many other companies here in California are going to produce, as well as globally. But the change to people who have no information, no political freedom, no health care, no access to entertainment – when that mobile phone comes up, it’s going to be extraordinary. It’s going to be such a greater change.

Then we began to explore the question, Greg, that you mentioned, which is: What will people do, and how will societies change? Now, the Internet comes with some questions. It comes with some issues – whether privacy or the impact on terrorism, or in particular, how governments will behave with this new shift of power to individuals.

JARED COHEN: One of the reasons we decided to write this book is we were sick and tired of this debate that dominated the present around “Is technology good or is technology bad?” While this debate is intellectually interesting, it completely ignores the inevitability of it; Eric spoke of that.

When you think about five billion new people coming online, you also have to think about where they’re coming online. These are parts of the world where there’s conflict, instability; where the governments are repressive. Fifty-seven percent of the world’s population lives under some kind of autocracy. So we travel to 30-plus countries around the world, largely places that are unstable and autocratic, to try to meet some of these future users who are coming online and understand how their challenges are different from the two billion who are already connected.

So we went to North Korea, we went to Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and a number of other places. We found a number of similarities in how they use the tools and similarities in some of the challenges that they face. But we also found a whole different set of issues that the vast majority of our future users are going to encounter. It’sstartling to think that these are the environments where the majority of people using technology are going to live. So we started asking questions: What does this mean for the future of dictatorships and autocracy? How will these transform the terrorist threat that so many of us are worried about and keeps us up at night?

DALTON: You write about Egypt, for example. During the Arab Spring, there was an uprising. Social media had been a factor, and Egypt tried to cut if off. How did that work out for them?

COHEN: I was in Egypt the day the revolution happened. By the way, one sort of side of note: I went to go see the pyramids before the revolution – sort of the day the revolution began – and everybody knew it was going to start at 1 o’clock. Literally, people, when I got back from the pyramids, were slowly making their way out of bed to get ready for the revolution. What was interesting is going into the street and talking to young people; the assumption is they’re all there because they hate Mubarak and have some sort of long-standing grievance against him. In fact, some of the people you talk to have that belief. But then a lot of the younger people that you talk to would say, “I didn’t like Mubarak. Life wasn’t great here. It was hard for me to be political. But I wouldn’t have gone to the streets and risk having stones thrown at me or risk getting shot. But then he shut down the Internet and he shut down mobile devices, and he really pissed me off.”

SCHMIDT: The Internet was the great time-waster, and they took it off.

DALTON: So what was the lesson for other dictators out there watching this? [Laughter.]

COHEN: You’re talking about a dilemma.

SCHMIDT: We like to give dictators dilemmas. First of all, it’s clear that if you’re an evil dictator, you don’t shut down the Internet; you censor it. You filter it. You try to make sure that information that would get the people riled up is not available to them. It’s remarkable how happy people can be when they’re ignorant of things that they really should be caring about. When we were in North Korea, I figured that the people [would] be fighting in the streets [with] knives and so forth, but in fact people got up and went around their business. The lack of information is the ultimate tool of dictators.

DALTON: These technologies can also be used by dictators to monitor and suppress. Talk about the shadow side of these technologies.

COHEN: Let me [ask] all of you a question: How many of you have multiple email accounts? How many of you have multiple social networking profiles –

SCHMIDT: That was essentially everybody.

DALTON: Everybody in the house.

COHEN: Multiple chatting passes – etc. You guys get the idea. Basically, in the physical world you’re one person, but online you’ve got a whole virtual entourage of yourselves. Maybe, you know, one member of that entourage misbehaves and does shady things and other one is sort of useful for professional reasons. In autocratic environments, it’s the same thing. Iran is going to have a presidential election in just a few weeks. The country is 72 million physical members of the population. In the future when every one of them is online and they would all raise their hands just like you all did, online that population is going to look more like 500 million people. So the dictator’s dilemma in the future is distinguishing between what’s noise and what’s actually real. How do you know that when there’s a disturbance online that it’s not just 10 people acting like thousands? Where they overreach and overreact, they run the risk of taking something that is digitally robust and pushing it into the streets.

SCHMIDT: The old issue in the Internet is how do you know it’s a dog versus a person. But how do you know that these are real revolutionaries that are threatening your dictatorship versus people who are just having a good time yelling about you? One of the things we talk about in the book is one strategy for the dictator would be to allow for expression in the virtual space, but shut off any expression in the physical space. So you have choices as a dictator on how you do this.

What we ultimately concluded is that it’s better not to be dictator, because these tools are so empowering for individuals, and it’s easy for people to go around these kinds of surveillance systems using heuristic means including cryptography. If you really want to be a dictator, you really don’t want to have the Internet around: it’s too empowering for the citizens that you’re not serving well.

DALTON: This week, there’s a presidential summit between the president of China and the president of the United States; cyber espionage – cyberwarfare – is on the agenda. What do you think is going to happen?

SCHMIDT: We spend a fair amount of time talking about the possibility of cyberwar, and the conclusion you’d come to is that there’s going to be low-grade fighting between countries for a very long time in cyberspace. China is a classic example. By all accounts, America has a good relationship with China. Among other things, they buy our debt, we buy their products. There’s a tremendous amount of trade back and forth; it’s mutually beneficial in most people’s eyes.

On the Internet, it’s a completely different story. Not only are they filtering and censoring the Internet, but they, among other things, attack Google. [An] un-scientific survey of the level of attacks indicates that the majority of the sources, 80-ish percent, are originating in China for whatever reason.

So you can imagine the following scenario: Think about Dr. Strangelove. A Chinese military guy decides to have a little fun, so he releases a virus into America. That virus, by the way, mutates in some way that it actually causes some physical damage. Some bad stuff. This could happen. Now we have the summit. The Chinese premier says, “Mr. President, Barack, sorry; we didn’t authorize this – and this time I’m telling you the truth.” What’s the president going to do?

I mentioned it to President Obama and he sort of looked at me, “Oh my God.” You actually have to think about these things? You want to think about them before they happen. Now imagine the same scenario, but because of the lack of attribution on the Internet, it’s really from another country and they’ve set it up to blame China. These poor Chinese people really are not guilty of this. The Internet has some properties. It’s hard to attribute where the things come from. It’s possible to do a lot of damage, at least digitally, and our systems are not fully protected from it. There’s a lot of reasons. For example, how many of you know that the Chinese and others are not inside your corporate or university networks? Raise your hand if you’re sure.

COHEN: One of the things we’re very concerned about is [how] we often talk about cyber-terrorism and cyberwar in one silo and physical-world terrorism and physical war in another silo. So people talk about and speculate about what a cyber-Pearl Harbor might look like or what a future 9/11 might look like, but we have to sort of resist the urge to silo these things, because at the end of the day, what we should really fear is coordinated attacks across both domains, or a situation when a cyber-attack is so severe it warrants a physical world response.

After Hurricane Sandy sort of turned downtown Manhattan into “little North Korea,” to quote Jon Stewart, I called Eric and said, “This is really terrifying, not because of what national disasters and hurricanes can do – but this is sort of forecasting of what a really terrifying terrorist attack could accomplish.” So you could imagine the situation where a cyberterrorist attack takes out the electricity of a major city, paving the way for a couple of terrorists to physically go in there and do something terrible undetected. It is a very real scenario.

SCHMIDT: We obviously think this is a terrible thing; we’re not endorsing it in any way.

So you sit there and you go, “How could this happen?” After all, these terrorists are operating out of caves. You could imagine sort of a bad alliance between the criminal hacking games that exist, you get to see these periodically online; they have technical skills and they’re after money and they’re sort of evil terrorist groups. They could actually form sort of a supergroup. It could actually be quite serious.

DALTON: [An] aspect of the news business is leaks. The trial of Bradley Manning started this week; WikiLeaks has been a big thing. So how does that fit into your construct, this idea that secret government information can now be disclosed en masse?

SCHMIDT: There are a couple comments to make about the Internet in general. The Internet lacks a delete button. Information that was secret that is released such as WikiLeaks and others, once it’s out there, it’s not going to get redacted. You can’t do it. In that case, for example, the harder you try to prevent the release of that information, the more you stamp out copies, the more likely that somebody or some other country is going to make a copy of it. We saw this recently with a gentleman who thought he was being brilliant by releasing 3D printing prints for a plastic gun that can evade x-ray machines. The U.S. government ordered that information taken down, but by then the information has been stored all over the world. So the secret is out.

We went to visit Julian Assange when he was in his earlier form of confinement, and he made an argument which I found pretty convincing, that if you’re going to do systemic evil, the best way to prevent that is to leak it. Because systematic evil by governments, you have to write it down.

We ultimately went to Rwanda, where 750,000 people were killed by machetes, and we – Jared’s in fact an expert on that; he wrote a very important book on the Rwanda conflict. You think about it for a while, and you think if they’ve known about it, they must have planned it at that level. If those plans have been leaked or people have mobile phones, perhaps they would have prevented much of the genocide.

The problem that we had with that argument is: Who gets to make this decision? Does the leaker make the decision? Does the government make the decision? It’s not obvious to me how you make that decision, but information, once released, is very hard to put back. So if you have something that’s that important, you have to really think about who’s going to have access to it and what their motivations will be.

And finally, you have think about if you’re going to have systematic evil, how will you use leaking to police it and who is the appropriate person to police that?

DALTON: Any thoughts on Bradley Manning?

SCHMIDT: Don’t know enough. He’s on trial now. It’s probably better to let the process fall.

DALTON: Jared Cohen?

COHEN: If I can just jump in though on this question of data permanence. We frequently talk about data permanence in the context of once things are leaked, there is privacy and security, but it’s interesting to think about data permanence in the context of criminality and terrorism – two things that really plague our world today. One of the arguments we make in the book is whether you’re a criminal or a terrorist, in the future it’s going to be very difficult to imagine any of them operating in a cave in Tora Bora. So if we assume that every terrorist and criminal will have to opt in to technology to be relevant, ultimately, that’s good for fighting crime and combatting violence, because by opting in, they’re susceptible to leaving a digital trail.

SCHMIDT: Look at an example. In Boston, we got the two guys who killed the three people in a terrorist attack, car-jack a Mercedes with a Chinese guy in it, who doesn’t [speak] very good English; they terrorized him for 90 minutes, driving around. He eventually escapes from the car. He leaves his cellphone in the car. So as a result of his cellphone being in the car, they were able to track the car, and they ultimately stopped the car – one of the assailants was killed and another one was injured, leading him to the boat, and everybody knows the history there. So in the sort of evil terrorist manual, step number 27 is: Make sure there’s no cellphone in the car after you’ve car-jacked the car.

The problem is that the people who are doing these things are young, male and in a hurry – they’re going to make mistakes. The police are going to be able to get them. It’s just not possible to avoid those kinds of mistakes, especially in a high-stress situation.

COHEN: Our favorite example of the last couple of weeks: I’m sure some of you read about a $45 million ATM heist where literally in a matter of hours, criminals essentially took $45 million out of thousands of ATMs in dozens of countries around the world.

So if you’re going to have a partnership between hackers who are very good at being invisible and transnational organized criminals who are pretty good at staying off the grid, ultimately they still needed somebody to physically go to the ATM machines to get the money out. So who did they contract? They contracted street criminals in various places and of various cultures. And what happened in this case? Well, some of the street criminals, who maybe weren’t necessarily the smartest people in the world, took the money out of the ATM and celebrated by posting pictures of themselves with their faces and their cash on Instagram. So thank you anybody who works for Instagram –

SCHMIDT: But we can do even better. We have John McAfee, right? Our fellow [Silicon Valley] resident who managed to move himself to Belize under questioning and suspicion for the death of a neighbor, manages to go on the lam and publicizes that he’s on the lam and he’s on vacation, he’s moving to Latin America. He goes to a hotel in Guatemala. Someone takes his picture and he posts this showing [McAfee] in his bathing suit and having a nice time. He was obviously not aware that when you post a photo, it includes your GPS coordinates. Within about one second, someone had taken the metadata of the photo, had figured out where they were, the Guatemalan police showed up and arrested him, right – the good or bad version of the story, depending on your point of view. I think the good part of the story is there was no reason to hold him, but he was not supposed to be in the country at all.

So again, if you’re on the lam, remember this: Turn off the geo-location feature in the metadata as you post pictures of you sunning yourself at the beach.

DALTON: So all the collection availability, this information has given some people concerns about sort of big data or privacy considerations. I’d like to ask about the Utah Data Center, which is being built by the National Security Agency in the United States, reportedly collecting 60 billion iPhones worth of data. That’s five zeta bytes? You know what those are; I don’t. It’s a lot of data. It’s going to be online later this year. How should the U.S. approach that? Reportedly, Thomas Drake is an NSA whistleblower who says they will collect information on Americans. Should we be concerned about that much data in the hands of the government, given the power of the tools you’ve been talking about?

SCHMIDT: In the industry, we’ve gone through a series of these proposals, and they’re often somewhat over-hyped, what they can actually do. Let me suggest what can be done; I don’t know if this proposal could be done. Then we can debate whether this is a good idea. As I understand it, the NSA’s job is essentially foreign communications; they’re not allowed to operate in the United States, but I could be wrong there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER VIA YOUTUBE: I live in Germany. Currently, I’m an MA student at Hult International Business School in San Francisco. Over the past years, corporate social responsibility has become increasingly important to companies and communities around the world. I was wondering how Google and other companies in its industry can use their innovations to increase the quality of life for people in emerging markets.

SCHMIDT: I like the question – because it was submitted on YouTube, obviously. Corporate social responsibility is good for your bottom line, because it allows you to get smarter, better employees who feel more empowered and work harder in your company. It’s a good business principle as well as a good social principle.

In this particular case, the best thing that I think we’ve sort of come to is wiring up the world, which is what’s happening now, and accelerating that is probably the best protection for women. It’s the best protection against real conflict. It’s the best way to avoid some of the problems that have bedeviled the world.

Technically this means the wiring, the connectivity, the applications, getting the price points down. It also, by the way, means getting reliable electric power. It means having telecommunications networks that actually work. Many people in this room are working on this stuff; this is good work.

COHEN: And let me get to the illustrative examples of what Eric is talking about. The first is in Libya. In the early days of the NATO bombing, Libyan schoolgirls were using Google Maps to plot out where the bombs were falling so they could find safe passageways to school. So effective were these maps that the NGOs then started using the information [provided] by the Libyan schoolgirls to deliver aid. So you think the Internet matters? It matters a lot for these women in Libya.

Probably the most moving experience that Eric and I had during our research for this book and perhaps in our entire lives – it was a trip to Pakistan about a year ago. We met a group of women who had been attacked by the Taliban with acid. We went to visit them and all of their faces were horribly disfigured. Through no fault of their own, the physical scars that they bear carry a terrible stigma in the physical world that essentially makes it impossible for them to live without being discriminated against or demonized, etc. So when we went to visit these women, they were all living in a house together. They all had smart phones; they were learning technical skills; some of them were starting businesses.

What we realized in talking to them and learning from them is that the Internet had essentially given them a second chance at life, because their scars were invisible online. One of them had even met a man online who she developed a relationship with and actually led to them getting married. So do you think the Internet matters? Try talking to a group of women attacked by the Taliban who were given a second chance at life – it matters a lot.

DALTON: Question from the audience: Could you respond to Julian Assange’s op-ed in The New York Times?

SCHMIDT: He called us the witch doctors of Google. I’ve never been called a witch doctor.

DALTON: But the point underlying was that these technologies actually helped totalitarian regimes.

COHEN: I would start by saying we’re not witch doctors. I would also say that in my personal belief, there are some people for whom, in my view, critique is praise and praise would be critique. That’s sort of at a high level how we look at it.

But the reality is there are cat and mouse games that have existed between citizens and their governments since the beginning of time. So you’re seeing the same citizen and state dynamic play out in the future as these societies come online. Then you ask, “What’s changed?” Go back to what I asked all of you in the audience earlier in this session, which is [how] citizens in the future will be able to punch way above their weight and will have a comparative advantage relative to their regimes.

The other thing that I would add is they’re going to be joined by a whole bunch of transnational meddlers who are altruistic and want to help them. So in addition to the sort of power of what citizens will be able to do online and by virtue of that offline in their respective societies, a whole new generation of revolutionary helpers will join them.

SCHMIDT: I think our simplest response is we just disagree. While it’s true that the government can organize a surveillance state, the odds of any government, including the best-run ones, managing to pull that off with the kind of tools and technologies against them [used by an] informed and empowered populace with mobile phones are highly unlikely to be successful. There’s just too many ways in which citizens can get around that. You could imagine a contest between citizens and government in a surveillance state. I know it’s romantic to think, Oh, it’s 1984, and all sort of terrible things are going to happen. But I don’t think the data supports that. The data supports that the empowerment of the Internet and mobile phones in particular empower the citizens at the expense of the state. States should be more worried about their citizens.