Mark Warner: Tech Millionaire Who Became Tech’s Critic in Congress

"Saxby Chambliss, a retired Republican senator from Georgia who regularly meets with Mr. Warner and the Intelligence Committee chairman, Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina ... to discuss the Russia investigation." Just curious: Why are the Senators regularly discussing the Russia investigation with a private citizen (and DLA Piper lawyer)?

We need to lose the attitude that corporations' responsibility above all should be to maximize shareholder value. Yes, corporations should be responsible to their shareholders, but that should be balanced against responsibility to their employees and to their country. it should not be acceptable for them to do everything and anything legal for the sake of a dollar.

If he is a senator, then he should be in a good position to understand and do something about the destruction of the American IT sector by H-1B, L-1, J-1, OPT/F-1, TN-1, and other jobs visas. These visas replace US IT workers with foreign scabs, who are less capable, but are much cheaper. In addition, there are huge issues of national security. Debbie Wasserman Schulz and other House Dems employed a family of Pakistanis to run their IT system. These are foreign nationals, who had intimate access to national secrets. The information on the house system was downloaded to external computers. In other places, US workers who run nuclear-linked power companies (SC Edison) are now run by foreign nationals. Why do foreign nationals have access to nuclear power stations? This is all wrong, as American workers should be the ones employed in the US, not Indians/Pakistanis/Chinese.

Funny to see Delrahim "invoking" a voice from 80 years ago. Lots of twittering going on back then, no doubt. Guy rides the fence but when it's hunger time he knows who's buttering the bread.

Democrats need someone like Mark Warner to run for President.

Who am I more afraid of: Google or the NSA? NSA by a long shot! Google just wants to profit from my information. The NSA wants to invade my privacy and curtail my freedom. Once again, Congress is looking the wrong direction when it comes to maintaining personal freedom and our rights as Americans!

It's ALL out there, each and every keystroke, including your comments here on the NYT. I am particularly leery of not only social media sites but giving my DNA sample to an ancestral research company. As well as the very personal info given to dating web sites. Too much personal information is handed to these companies. And you are the one paying for 'them' to get it? The private dossiers on our children and grandchildren must be outrageous. If given to the wrong people this could be sinister. Imagine if the Stasi or Nazis had access to these amounts of info.

These tech giants are supposed to have the smartest people on the planet working for them. Detecting Twitter-bots should be easy peasy compared with all the other sophistication they've got going on. But this would mean selling fewer ads! Less clickbait! Jeez that's a no-brainer… "let's just wring our hands and say we're already doing everything we can. Nobody will ever notice that we're not even doing the bare minimum." Aside from damaging their corporate reputations, it's hurt them in another way, too. I don't think most tech execs really wanted to see Trump win this election. And now it's partly their fault that he did! They should own their role in this morass, and "lean in" like Cheryl Sandberg keeps saying: in this case, leaning in means address the fake news problem squarely, this monster that they helped to create.

I'm glad that there are smart politicians looking at this. What troubles me is the selected outrage of the press. $100,000 in Facebook ads and a large disinformation campaign is important. Yet we hear no outrage from the press about foreign countries spending millions on lobbyists and to finance favorable think tank studies and papers. The U.S. press is all too willing to print articles that appear through the pay-the-PR-firm-to-get-it-printed game. Saudi Arabia did the largest arms deal in the history of the world. It enlisted U.S. arms manufacturers to enlist their PR firms and lobbying firms, buy advertising, buy favorable press, and make campaign contributions. On another issue the prime minister of Israel flew to the U.S. to speak to Congress directly in an attempt to undermine treaty negotiations done by the U.S. President. Saudi Arabia admitted to spending $690 million to influence the Malaysian election. How much would they spend to influence the American election? The Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia said in the Jordanian press that they we‘re financing 20% of Hillary Clinton‘s campaign. The major U.S. press did not carry the story. The investigation into Russian influence is important. I hope this opens a wider investigation into foreign influence and leads to much more restrictive laws about foreign spending to influence US policy. We need to get big money out of American politics, and in particularly big foreign money.

These companies run afoul of the 4th Amendment every day. I guess the Constitution doesn't matter anymore as long as we create more billionaires.

I agree with Senator Warner that FB, Twitter, and Google are of major concern considering their enormous role in swaying the 2016 presidential election toward one candidate, and their feet-dragging despite the fact they were unwitting accomplices to attacks on our democracy by an enemy foreign power. Next time around there will be more accountability on their part because they have been warned by Congress. Criminal charges may be made against them. Reports are that these same attacks are still continuing and this is a red flag about what could happen again in upcoming elections, and 2018 is almost here. We have all been warned that Putin will be interfering again in our democracy. The entire House is up for re-election in 2018, plus 25-30% of our Senate. The Putin infiltration and infestation remains embedded and this since 2015. Right now FB, Twitter and Google are operating under the ideology of profits over patriotism, and profits over people, and that is unacceptable. This is already the ideology of Trump, his Cabinet, and far too many of the GOP. We don't need more of the same from our social media outlets whose entire purpose has been corrupted. If they are going to post political ads they need to be regulated by the FEC, and if they are going to be sources of news they need to be regulated by the FCC. If they decide they don't want these regulations imposed on a trillion dollar industry then they should get out of the political ads and news business.

Big is bad for the younger (less then 60) people who want to be head of a corporation. The few companies the fewer executives. So break up the big companies to allow for opportunities for younger generations. The rest of the arguments are more emotional. America should be the land of opportunity.

I'm glad that there at least one smart politician who will carefully evaluate the situation. What troubles me is the selective outrage of the press. We have learned that Russia spent $0.1 million with Facebook to influence the election. Yet we hear barely a peep from the press about other foreign countries spending millions. Foreign governments legally cannot make campaign contributions. But they can pay lobbyists and finance think tank studies and articles. The U.S. press is too willing to print articles that appear through the pay-the-PR-firm-to-get-it-printed game. Saudi Arabia wanted to do the largest arms deal in the history of the world, so it enlisted U.S. arms manufacturers to make campaign contributions, lobbying firms to influence government officials, buy advertising, and to pay PR firms to buy favorable press. Saudi Arabia said it spent $690 million to influence the Malaysian election. How much would it spend to influence an American election? The Deputy Crown Prince said in the Jordanian press that they were financing 20% of the Clinton campaign. If true, this is a major breach of federal law. The major U.S. press did not carry the story. The Russian influence investigation is important and should be carried to its conclusion. I hope this opens a wider investigation. We need to get big money out of American politics, and in particular we need to get big foreign money out of American politics.

Very often the "free market" mantra is, in practice, a justification for letting the rich and powerful have their way (usually to manipulate the political system so as to undermine competition and to maximize their positions). Now that it is becoming more evident that a foreign power has used social media to undermine the American political system to its advantage, it is time for the free market ideologues to change their tune, at least in this area. If they can't bring themselves to do so, it will be also become more evident that they value an abstract principle (and corporate profits) over the welfare of their own nation. It is high time for reasonable regulations to be enacted and enforced.

I’ve spent the last 25 years working in tech, most of it in Silicon Valley, and about half of that time for companies that specialize in acquiring, processing and selling “big data” about the average American. If the average American knew how much in-depth personal information that these companies have about them today, and what is done with that data, they would completely freak out. Tech companies like this aren’t doing this because they’re evil, they’re doing it for profit, plain and simple. They typically don’t care about the implications of their business model on the privacy of average Americans or the American electoral process not because they’re evil, but because they’re focused on making money, and they’re not required by laws about what they can and can’t do with that data. Let me tell you folks, if an authoritarian American government with a sycophantic Congress ever forced these tech companies to give said government all that data, well, let’s just say that 1984 wouldn’t look all that fictional for very long. You should be afraid of the tech industry’s power in this matter, you probably just don’t realize it yet. For those who don’t believe me, then y’all have fun with repairing your own mess that Equifax causes for you. Sadly, that’s probably just the beginning of this unfortunate privacy meltdown nightmare, which Congressional Republicans will do nothing about because they just love “free markets” and money more than they do democracy.

If the posts on Facebook and Twitter by whomever made them swung the election then we have the elected officials we deserve.

A Senator with a background in a particular business using his expertise to lay out how best to regulate that business to ensure it contributes to American society - instead of to help boost its profits to the furthest extent regardless of its costs to American society - is an unfortunate rarity these days. Kudos to Senator Warner.

It's not really technology that is at issue here; technology is valueless until humans use it. The core issue is the use of technology for profit, and how the profit motive continually threatens to override a variety of other human interests -- not only in the digital realm, but in pharmaceuticals, food, natural resources, energy policy, and the many social norms that capitalism seeks to appropriate and bend to its convenience.

Per usual, the legal and regulatory communities are way behind the curve with technology in general, and social media in particular. Tech companies focus on creating services and/or innovations that exploit the capabilities of advanced technology, and how to fund their companies long enough to survive through to market acceptance and sustainable growth. Their risk assessments pertain to the business environment in which they find themselves, not to any risks their very existence may create to American democracy and politics. FaceBook in particular was oblivious to the rise of terrorist arms dealing in their private user groups until a customer alerted them to their existence. Facebook immediately shut them down once aware of the problem, but they do not proactively spend time performing strategic or political risk assessments that are related to issues commonly dealt with by Homeland Security and the Dept. of Defense. America has paid a high price for this lack of collaborative vigilance, which we all hope does not result in the collapse of our democracy. We need a focused public/private partnership that involves the relevant participants and that fosters an intelligent approach to the relevant issues to meet the security needs of the American public. Round #2 of the continuing Cold War went to Putin. Let's ensure that we move forward to prevail in the forthcoming elections.

Tech should serve humanity, first, and if they get rich in the process, so be it. Tech is NOT serving humanity, at this moment. Humanity may benefit, purely as a side effect. They are pretty much out of control, and will move to the dark side in a blink, if we don't regulate.