The digital world offers students an abundance of resources and unlimited learning potential. Our largely one-size-fits-all approach to education and technology in the U.S., however, doesn’t seem to be working for today’s digital youth. Moreover, resources are not applied equitably across schools and classrooms. To help address these challenges, The Aspen Institute established a Task Force on Learning and the Internet, to understand the ways in which young people learn today, and to identify methods to expand educational opportunities online and off, inside and outside the classroom.

After a year of collaboration, the group released its findings via a comprehensive report entitled “Learner at the Center of a Networked World.” The Task Force’s conclusions suggest a radical rethinking of the very approach to education is needed—starting with the core belief that students must be at the center of their learning. This means providing young people with affordable access to networks; arming them with digital-literacy skills, so they can tap into the benefits those networks offer, and ensuring they have a trusted online environment that promotes learning and protects their privacy and safety.

At Microsoft, we recognize that while the Internet has a multitude of benefits, it may also expose students to certain risks, such as inappropriate content or invite unwanted contact. Such risks bring into focus the tension caused by varying beliefs and attitudes that exist among consumers specific to privacy and online safety. My colleague, Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch, reflected on his participation in the Task Force, underscoring the importance of recognizing the impact that changing technology has on these areas, and calling for the creation of frameworks that establish trusted environments for learning. To assist teachers and, in particular parents, as they navigate an online culture in which rules and social norms are imprecise and constantly evolving, Microsoft will continue to provide digital literacy tools and resources. These include Bing in the Classroom and our Safety and Security Center so educators and parents can assist young people in making responsible, ethical decisions in our digitally dominant world.

We call this sense of ownership and online personal responsibility “Digital Citizenship.” And, teaching skills like digital literacy, digital ethics and digital etiquette is critical to help prepare students for life in a technology-driven society. We support the integration of digital citizenship concepts into the classrooms and curricula to help put students at the center, and in control of, their learning environments. In fact, the Aspen Task Force identified this as an imperative to help foster continued scholarship both in real life and online.

Cultivating the next generation of digital citizens through digital literacy and educational programs offers students tremendous opportunities to learn, share and communicate. I am bolstered by the Task Force’s findings, and encouraged that we are on a solid path toward comprehensive reform for teaching our 21^stcentury learners.

For more information, tools and resources on Microsoft’s approach to digital literacy and online safety, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/safety.

Editor’s Note: Once a month on Microsoft on the Issues, Jacqueline Beauchere shares her point of view on topics related to the global consumer online safety landscape. Follow the conversation on Twitter using #MSFTCOSO.

A new poll we’re releasing today shows it’s not just the Supreme Court that wants the right balance between public safety and the privacy concerns of technology users. The American public wants this as well.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in the Riley case last month, I’ve been blogging about the historic importance of its unanimous view that police need a warrant to search someone’s cell phone. The decision shifted the scales of justice in a profound way, in part because the Court noted that phones today are often a gateway to the email and pictures we now store in the cloud, and these deserve the same Constitutional protection we’ve traditionally had for things kept in our homes.

The Riley case addresses the heart of tech products and the rights of our customers, so we wanted to better understand how the public feels about these issues. Interestingly, the results of a survey we commissioned were unequivocal in support of the Court’s decision. A full 83 percent of American voters believe police should get a warrant before searching personal information on someone’s cell phone.

The poll also found that:

· 75 percent agree with Chief Justice Roberts’ statement that “privacy comes at a cost” and there needs to be a balance between fighting crime and our Constitutional right to privacy; and

· 86 percent believe police should have to follow the same legal requirements for obtaining personal information stored in the cloud as they do for personal information stored on paper.

The Supreme Court’s decision, while a historic step, addresses just one of the many questions that the growth of technology is posing for our privacy laws. We’ve raised another unresolved question in a case in federal court in New York in which we’re challenging a search warrant seeking customer communications stored in our data center in Ireland.

We think it’s a problem for governments to use a warrant to reach across international borders and search a person’s email without respecting local privacy laws. And we are not alone. The same survey asked what Americans think about the questions raised in our case and found:

· 79 percent agree the federal government should have to respect local privacy laws when searching through people’s personal information like their email accounts;

· 56 percent are worried that if the U.S. government decides it can demand information in other countries without going through their governments, then other countries will follow suit and force companies to turn over Americans’ private information; and

· Only 13 percent believe that police in another country should be able to obtain the emails of a U.S. citizen stored in the U.S. without informing that citizen or the U.S. government.

As all of this suggests, the American public understands what’s at stake for technology and the future of privacy.

Now we need to hope that government officials will pay attention to this digital common sense.

They’re not doing that yet. Last week, the government in the United Kingdom proposed new legislation that would go in the opposite direction, extending extraterritorial jurisdiction for warrants to other countries and reaching unilaterally the email of people who are not British citizens or residents. And in our case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York filed a brief arguing for a broad mandate for law enforcement to reach email in Ireland without informing the Irish government or following the treaty put in place between our two governments.

The American people understand that these issues matter. We hope that the White House and Congress will listen.

If you’re interested in more information on the survey, which was conducted by the public opinion research firm of Anzalone, Liszt Grove, you can find it here. The poll was conducted July 7 and July 8.

Editor’s Note: This post also appears at www.digitalconstitution.com, a resource for information about Microsoft’s legal challenge to a U.S. warrant for customer communications stored in our data center in Ireland.

Amid the current public debates about government surveillance, this is a good day to step back and remember the Third of July.

Of course, the first question you might ask is, what happened on the Third of July?

Many Americans will recall, of course, that it was in Philadelphia at Independence Hall on July 2, 1776, that the colonies voted for their independence. And then it was two days later on July 4 that our Founders signed the Declaration of Independence.

But on the day in between, on July 3, 1776, something interesting happened as well.

‘The commencement of the controversy’

It was on that morning that John Adams got up in Philadelphia and, before walking over to Independence Hall, wrote a letter to his wife Abigail, who was at home in Massachusetts. He used that letter to reflect in part on what he thought had started it all, “the commencement of the controversy” that had led to the American Revolution.

Adams traced the Revolution to a specific dispute that was argued in court in Boston in 1761 by James Otis. The case was all about one issue. It concerned the ability of the British Government to use what was called a general warrant or writ of assistance to go from house to house to look for customs violations without any probable cause that there existed within any evidence of a crime.

Otis argued that this was a fundamental violation of civil liberties, calling it “the worst instance of arbitrary power.”

Adams, as it had turned out, was in the courtroom the day that Otis made his argument. At that time, he was 25 years old, not yet working as a lawyer. Nearer the end of his life, Adams would still remember Otis’ argument and write that it had “breathed into this nation the breath of life.” He would say to the day he died that it was that day, that case, that courtroom, and this issue that set this country on a course for independence.

It would take 13 long years after the Declaration of Independence was signed to realize the principle for which Otis had argued so passionately. As the first Congress met in New York in 1789, James Madison introduced his proposal for a Bill of Rights. As we know, it included what became the Fourth Amendment, guaranteeing that the people would be secure in their “persons, houses, papers, and effects” from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” including the use of general warrants.

When some in Congress challenged the need for a Bill of Rights, Madison defended the concept in part by taking them back to Otis’ argument in Boston. Madison explained that a government that had the authority to protect public safety and to collect revenue, and that had the authority under the Constitution to do everything that was “necessary and proper” to fulfill those responsibilities, also needed to have limits. And one of the needed limits to which Madison referred was for people to be protected from unreasonable government searches.

An issue that remains relevant today

Microsoft Executive Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith speaks at The Brookings Institution, June 24, 2014

I’ve recounted this story in a few recent speeches in New York and Washington, including last Tuesday at the Brookings Institution. A day later last week, I was delighted to read the Supreme Court’s opinion in Riley v. California, which concluded that the authorities must obtain a warrant based upon specific probable cause before searching an arrestee’s cell phone. And it was notable to read one of the concluding paragraphs in the Court’s opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts. He wrote:

“Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding generation’s response to the revised 'general warrants’ and ‘writs of assistance’ of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the driving forces behind the Revolution itself. In 1761, the patriot James Otis delivered a speech in Boston denouncing the use of writs of assistance. A young John Adams was there, and he would later write that ‘[e]very man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.’ According to Adams, Otis’s speech was ‘the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born.’”

Chief Roberts then connected the issues of the Revolution to the innovations of our own day. He referred to the power of a modern cell phone and wrote that “the fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”

Well said. A principle worth fighting to attain is worth standing up to defend.

So before we finish our plans for tomorrow to watch fireworks and celebrate what happened on July 4, we should reflect on what happened on the Third of July as well. It speaks to the issues of our day.

In December, we announced our commitment to further increase the security of our customers’ data. We also announced our plans to reinforce legal protections for our customers’ data, and continue to increase transparency in how we engage with governments around the world. We are making positive progress on all of these fronts. 

We are in the midst of a comprehensive engineering effort to strengthen encryption across our networks and services. Our goal is to provide even greater protection for data across all the great Microsoft services you use and depend on every day. This effort also helps us reinforce that governments use appropriate legal processes, not technical brute force, if they want access to that data. 

As part of that, today we’re announcing three important milestones that honor our commitments to security and increased transparency. 

First, Outlook.com is now further protected by Transport Layer Security, or TLS, encryption for both outbound and inbound email. This means that when you send an email to someone, your email is encrypted and thus better protected as it travels between Microsoft and other email providers. Of course, this requires their email service provider to also have TLS support. 

Over the past six months, we have been working across the industry to further protect and help ensure your mail remains protected. This includes working closely with several international providers throughout our implementation, including, Deutsche Telekom, Yandex and Mail.Ru to test and help ensure that mail stays encrypted in transit to and from each email service. I'd like to thank each of these companies and the community for the hard work they've put in, and for making this additional engineering investment a priority. 

This encryption work builds on the existing protections already in many of our products and services, like Microsoft Azure, Skype and Office 365, and some improvements we have made over the last six months. A few examples include enhanced message encryption in Office 365 as well as Azure’s addition of ExpressRoute, a service that enables businesses to create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure on their premises or in a colocation environment. This is a significant engineering effort given the large number of services Microsoft offers and the hundreds of millions of customers we serve around the world. 

In addition to the availability of TLS, Outlook.com has also enabled Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption support for sending and receiving mail between email providers. Forward secrecy uses a different encryption key for every connection, making it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections. 

Second, OneDrive has now enabled PFS encryption support as well. OneDrive customers now automatically get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive through onedrive.live.com, our mobile OneDrive application and our sync clients. As with Outlook.com’s email transfer, this makes it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections between their systems and OneDrive. 

Third, I’m pleased to announce that today we opened the first Microsoft Transparency Center, on our Redmond, Wash. campus. Our Transparency Centers provide participating governments with the ability to review source code for our key products, assure themselves of their software integrity, and confirm there are no “back doors.” The Redmond location is the first in a number of regional transparency centers that we plan to open. We continue to make progress on the Transparency Center in Brussels that I announced in January, with other locations soon to be announced. 

As with most things relating to security, the landscape is ever changing. Our work is ongoing and we are continuing to advance on engineering and policy commitments with the goal of increasing protection for your data and increasing transparency in our processes. 

Over time, privacy protection has advanced in key moments. These have involved judges and advocates who appreciated new technologies and found ways to ensure privacy prevailed in a changing world. This week’s unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Riley v. California ranks with other key historical moments. More than in any other recent decision, the Supreme Court this week advanced privacy in a digital era characterized by ubiquitous computing.

As a result, the scales of justice shifted in a profound way toward a new ideal of privacy in a digital world. There is an important history for privacy that points in this direction and is worth appreciating.  But it’s important to start simply by saying this: it was not just a historic week, but a very good week for privacy. A scale implies balance. The Supreme Court’s decision strikes the right balance between public safety and the privacy concerns of users of mobile technology.

The context for this week’s case is important. For decades, the authorities have validly searched those they arrested without a warrant under an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. These searches extended to the possessions and immediate area near an arrestee, such as a wallet, purse or the inside of a car. The Supreme Court ruled this week, however, that warrantless searches cannot extend to a cell phone; instead the authorities must secure a warrant from a court to search such a device.

We live in a time when the importance of effective law enforcement remains vital. Yet as the Court rightly observed, “the sum of an individual’s private life can be reconstructed” by accessing the information stored on a cell phone.   

In making this observation, the Court built on a long-standing and important tradition of adapting privacy to new technology, albeit one that has moved markedly on only rare occasions. Perhaps the only way to fully appreciate the importance of the past week’s decision is to take the broad view and put it in the context of other pivotal steps.

In important respects, technology started to challenge privacy protection as long ago as the 1800’s, as Americans embraced the camera, telegraph and telephone. In 1890, Louis Brandeis took one of the privacy field’s seminal steps, publishing in the Harvard Law Review an article advocating “the right to be let alone.” Writing a quarter century before he joined the Supreme Court, Brandeis helped define this field by articulating a clear rationale for protecting privacy under existing state common laws. Notably, Brandeis argued that the impetus for this strengthened privacy protection was the adoption of new technologies, including “instantaneous photographs.” Using words that resonate still, he argued that “mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’”

Brandeis’ piece captured the tension that sometimes arises between the advance of new technologies and the protection of enduring values. This tension sometimes pits technologists against lawyers. The more fruitful challenge, however, is to focus on how we can maximize the benefits of technology while simultaneously preserving values we hold timeless. This is not always easy, in part because the issues are often complex and because it takes time for the societal impact of new technologies to become clear. That’s why it’s so important to pause and reflect on the critical moments when key people and writings, like that of Brandeis and his article, have helped show a path forward.

As I mentioned when speaking at the Brookings Institution this past Tuesday, I’ve believed that one such moment came in early 2012, when Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a short concurring opinion in the case of U.S. v. Jones. The case involved the placement by the San Diego police of a GPS locator on a suspect’s car, exceeding the scope of a court warrant. In a 5-4 decision, a majority of the Supreme Court held that this violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. But the Court’s principal opinion did so using a traditional argument that Brandeis would have found familiar, relying on the physical intrusion involved in placing the GPS locator on the car and its implications under common law trespass principles.

Justice Sotomayor wrote a short concurring opinion in the case that went further. It stated that without any physical intrusion at all, the authorities could rely on “GPS-enabled smartphones” to track people. And the privacy implications of this could be profound. Justice Sotomayor pointed out that “GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” And as the opinion added, the “Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future.” Ultimately, as her opinion concluded, unless this type of surveillance was safeguarded under the Fourth Amendment regardless of whether there was a physical intrusion, it could “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.”

Equally important, Justice Sotomayor’s 2012 opinion looked forward and addressed directly the changing attitudes of a new generation that increasingly was comfortable sharing its personal information. She reasoned that people could share information with their friends and still have “a reasonable expectation of privacy,” which is the prerequisite for Constitutional protection under the Fourth Amendment. As she pointed out, for generations the law had basically equated privacy with secrecy. In other words, when lawyers (and many other people) used the word “privacy,” they often used it as if it were synonymous with the word “secrecy.” But as technology trends increasingly have shown, a new generation of people increasingly has redefined the word “privacy.” To them it means the ability to share information but determine who they share the information with and how the information will be used. If anything, one of the defining features of the early growth of services such as Facebook and Snapchat has been the ability for consumers to do precisely that. In other words, people now share information in a limited way and look to privacy protection to sustain these limits.

Since Justice Sotomayor’s opinion in 2012, one of the most important questions in privacy law was whether and when the rest of the Supreme Court would embrace a similar view. Today we know the answer to that question, at least to a considerable degree. It was this past Wednesday.

The Court’s decision this week will be remembered as another seminal moment in advancing privacy protection. Significantly, it came from a unanimous rather than divided court, with an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts for eight of the Justices. But perhaps most important was the Court’s reasoning and its positive implications both for smart devices and the storage of personal information in the cloud. 

The Court put a stake firmly in the ground and effectively declared that privacy protection must account for new technologies. As Chief Justice Roberts noted, “before cell phones, a search of a person was limited by physical realities and tended as a general matter to constitute only a narrow intrusion on privacy.” As he pointed out, “most people cannot lug around every piece of mail they have received for the past several months, every picture they have taken, or every book or article they have read – nor would they have any reason to attempt to do so.” Yet smartphones have changed this dynamic. As his opinion stated, “many of these devices are in fact minicomputers that also happen to have the capacity to be used as a telephone. They could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.” 

Putting these features together, Chief Justice Roberts recognized the impact of smartphones today in a way that is similar to Brandeis’ focus on the impact of the camera 125 years ago. As his opinion recognized, “modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life’.” 

Comparing the new technology to the Fourth Amendment’s traditional protection of information in peoples’ homes, the Supreme Court could not have been more clear-cut. As it observed, the search of a cell phone “would typically expose to the government far more than the most exhaustive search of a house: A phone not only contains in digital form many sensitive records previously found in the home; it also contains a broad array of private information never found in a home in any form.” 

While all this is of huge importance, the significance of the Supreme Court’s decision does not stop there. Just as Justice Sotomayor pointed in 2012 toward a next set of important questions, so did Chief Justice Roberts this past week. This is because his opinion included the Court’s first explicit discussion of privacy in the context of cloud computing. 

As the opinion noted, “the data a user views on many modern cell phones may not in fact be stored on the device itself.” While the Court was not presented with the search warrant requirements applicable to accessing a data center from a remote location, it nonetheless observed that “the same type of data may be stored locally on the device for one user and in the cloud for another.” This provided the Court with an additional reason to uphold rather than minimize privacy protection. Chief Justice Roberts pointed to “the possibility that a search might extend well beyond papers and effects in the physical proximity of an arrestee” and concluded that this was “yet another reason that the privacy interests here dwarf those” that the Court had considered in an earlier case in 1973. For those of us at Microsoft and other tech companies who are seeking to ensure that the Fourth Amendment protects information stored in the cloud, these are encouraging words.

The Supreme Court’s decision is all the more interesting given the past month’s developments in the House of Representatives. By a lopsided bi-partisan vote of 293-to-123, the House approved an amendment to a defense spending bill to prohibit government agencies from using funds to require Internet service providers to give the government direct access to their servers or to access private electronic communications without a warrant. Similarly, a majority of House members have now signed as co-sponsors on legislation to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to ensure that the authorities obtain a lawful warrant before accessing stored email content, regardless of how old the email may be or where it is stored. 

At a time when many Americans think of Washington, D.C. as the capital of gridlock, both the judicial and legislative branches have taken new steps to protect privacy. It’s not unreasonable to hope that now more than ever, there is an important opportunity to bring people together to address next-generation privacy issues. The ultimate answer will lie not in pitting public safety, technology, and privacy against each other. Rather, as I had the opportunity to discuss at the Brookings Institution the day before the Supreme Court’s decision, the challenge is to find new ways to recognize and balance all three of these needs.

This is not to suggest that the issues are easy. As Chief Justice Roberts recognized, “privacy comes at a cost.” But as the Court’s decision makes clear, privacy is also an important and enduring value. As we look back on the privacy week that was, there’s an opportunity for all of us to take inspiration from a unanimous Court and pursue new paths that will enable privacy, safety and technology to move forward together.

Cameron Evans, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for U.S. Education, has an opinion piece posted on eSchool News. In the piece, he questions the impact technology has had in education, and provides ideas for how teachers can incorporate technology into their curriculum in unique ways that meet academic requirements and provide students with learning experiences and the creative freedom to express what they have mastered through compelling experiences.

Two passages sum up Evans’ case:

“The challenge we face is connecting our students with technology while ensuring they gain the skills and knowledge to create their own opportunities and jobs that don’t currently exist. Our students, when properly educated, will propel us into the future of known and unknown possibilities. I call this the Total Creative Opportunity or TCO.”

And:

“Simply digitizing textbooks and worksheets won’t make the grade anymore, now teachers need to fully embrace digital learning into all aspects of their lessons and fuse different disciplines to provide deeper learning experiences.”

Find more of Evans’ thoughts on education innovation at http://higherinnovation.com/.

On Monday, Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) announced a regulatory framework for unlicensed access to unused radio spectrum in the broadcast TV frequency bands, known as TV white spaces (TVWS).

Radio spectrum is, more than ever, being identified by policy makers as a key asset in developing the digital economy and, more broadly, the overall economy. The remarkable growth in the use of smartphones and other wireless devices in recent years has exponentially increased demands on radio spectrum. Mobile traffic is predicted to increase 11-fold over the next five years globally, with wireless devices contributing the majority. Policymakers in many countries are actively looking to both maximise spectrum resources and increase the efficiencies made in their use.

Virtually all sectors of the economy – including education, healthcare, logistics, retail and wholesale, and a wide range of small and medium businesses – benefit from affordable and efficient wireless broadband services. Increasingly, these services are being accessed through unlicensed spectrum such as Wi-Fi networks and short-range devices. Thus Wi-Fi and TVWS, along with other uses of unlicensed spectrum access, offer a great deal of potential for economic growth and development.

What’s more, everyday citizens here in Singapore will see the benefits of the technology. TVWS technology can be used to improve and expand Wireless@SG, the island-wide free Wi-Fi service provided to all citizens. Singapore Power has used the same technology as backhaul for a smart metering service that would be more convenient for consumers than manual meter readings, and more energy efficient as well – leading to less expensive energy bills and a lighter environmental impact.

Microsoft has long advocated for increasing access to spectrum with more flexible and forward-looking regulation. We commend Singapore’s IDA for their open, consultative and forward-looking approach to this issue, and the release now of the response to their recent industry consultation. With this statement, IDA has positioned Singapore at the forefront globally of a movement that will reform spectrum allocation and revolutionize access and usage for the future.

The IDA’s announcement includes a clear set of “rules of the road” addressing how industry leaders and start-ups can help create and drive TVWS-related opportunities in Singapore before exporting these successes around the region and around the world. These opportunities are not just in tech manufacturing of the components such as chipsets, devices and transponders – though this is itself a crucial opportunity – but also in the software, the consulting and integration tools, and the necessary expertise and training as this technology moves into the market.

One issue coming to the forefront of dynamic spectrum access developments – of which TVWS is one crucial example – is the requirement for the deployment and management of the database required for spectrum access and assignation. In this and other emerging opportunities, Singapore now has the chance to foster leading industry players who will cut their teeth in Singapore and then export their expertise to the world.

Other regulators, including the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, the United Kingdom’s Ofcom, Industry Canada and the European Commission’s Radio Spectrum Policy Group, have recognized the economic and social value that can be derived from increased dynamic access to finite spectrum resources. Through trials and pilots, many other regulators around the world are looking at whether and how to enable opportunistic access to unused frequencies.

Microsoft, as a founding member of the Singapore White Spaces Pilot Group and through our other TVWS pilots across the world, has contributed to this process. We are pleased to have the IDA’s active support of our pilot projects in Singapore, and we’re excited to see IDA at the forefront of this issue on the global stage. At the World Telecommunications Development Conference in Dubai earlier this year, IDA helped drive the adoption of a modified resolution (Resolution 9) to consider new spectrum-sharing approaches, thus promoting this movement formally and globally.

Singapore now sits at the turning point of a very exciting future. We hope that industry will seize the initiative to move forward with this opportunity, and we look forward to continuing to contribute to the advances being made regionally and globally.

The 2013 Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (EO) set forth the U.S. Government’s two-phase approach to strengthening critical infrastructure cybersecurity. In the first phase, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) led collaborative development of a Cybersecurity Framework; in the second phase, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established a voluntary program and continues work towards incentives for organizations to utilize the Framework, while government agencies examined their cybersecurity authorities and regulations relative to the Framework. 

Nearly 16 months after the EO’s release, we can begin to observe the impact of this two-phase approach. In the first phase, the development of the Cybersecurity Framework demonstrated a commitment to collaboration, within government, between government and industry and across industries. The point of view from our colleagues Scott Charney, corporate vice president for Trustworthy Computing, and Matt Thomlinson, vice president for Microsoft Security, is that NIST’s process and the resulting risk management guidance in the Cybersecurity Framework provide a template for leveraging public private partnerships to advance cybersecurity in the United States and around  the world. 

The second phase of EO implementation is now coming into focus, particularly with regard to cybersecurity regulatory efforts. The White House recently published a blog post regarding several cabinet agencies’ assessments of their cybersecurity authorities and existing regulations relative to the Framework. The White House determined that three agencies – the Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Health and Human Services – were required to perform those assessments. The agencies determined that existing regulations, when coupled with strong voluntary partnerships, are capable of mitigating cyber risks to critical infrastructures. 

Additionally, the White House provided the public with the three cabinet agencies’ analyses of their current cybersecurity authorities and regulations. This is a helpful demonstration of how certain U.S. federal agencies interpret their regulatory authorities. We encourage other agencies with regulatory authority, such as the Departments of Energy, Transportation, and the Treasury to conduct reviews and share their respective analyses publicly. 

While governments sometimes engage in public dialogue with industry and other stakeholders about how to shape standards and policy initiatives, it is uncommon for governments to share their internal analyses about regulatory efforts, particularly in cybersecurity. The White House has taken a  leadership approach in driving forward both the Framework and related voluntary efforts, which sets a standard that we encourage other governments to consider as they work to develop cybersecurity policies and regulations. Governments, industry and civil society groups around the world are having very important discussions on critical infrastructure cybersecurity, and the resulting policies will be more effective if the discussion is open and various groups can work together to improve cybersecurity-related risk management globally. 

It is our opinion that governments must strive to harmonize approaches to cybersecurity to enable economic advancement nationally, and the U.S. government’s publication of more agencies’ perspectives can help further this goal. Microsoft looks forward to continuing our participation in implementation of the Executive Order, as well as other cybersecurity risk management initiatives around the world. To learn more about our work in this area, please visit www.microsoft.com/cybersecurity.

Over the past year, revelations of government surveillance, highly publicized data breaches and other stories of private information being leaked have dominated the media. More revealing than the stories themselves is the public’s impassioned response to them, demonstrating that there is still a basic expectation among Americans of personal privacy.

As public discourse continues, some states, districts, schools and parents have begun to consider the safety of student data. In addition, with the use of technology for learning, companies like Microsoft continue to work to effectively meet both education objectives and privacy and safety expectations.

Given Microsoft’s commitment to these issues, I was proud to serve on The Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning and the Internet, which is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The Task Force was comprised of 20 innovative and respected leaders in technology, public policy, education, business, privacy and safety. We were tasked with answering some very difficult questions: What is the new vision for learning? What role should technology and the Internet play in education? And how do we enhance learning, while protecting safety and privacy?

On June 17, after a year of careful deliberations and public engagement, the Institute released a cross-sector and non-partisan report that calls for rethinking learning systems that are currently too bound by time, place and old ways of doing business. The report recommends advancing policies and practices that would foster learning networks and interoperability, increase access to technology and digital literacy, and improve safety, privacy and trust.

I am proud of the Task Force’s work on privacy and trust. Technology has incredible potential to increase opportunity for students, from personalization of learning to learning anytime and anywhere. Cloud services offer attractive benefits and are being rapidly deployed in schools to support a number of distinct functions, from data analytics and student reporting, to basic productivity functions such as email, data storage and document editing. However, the use of technology and cloud services also opens up serious questions around student privacy and the use of student data.

Recognizing changing expectations about technology, privacy and safety, the Task Force recommends fostering “collaborative efforts at all levels to establish trusted environments for learning.” The Task Force acknowledges that trust frameworks aren’t easy to create; they will require innovative approaches to policy and regulation, new technological solutions and the development of programs that educate teachers, parents and students about the risks and rewards of being online. These frameworks will constantly evolve as new technologies introduce new tensions that require new solutions.

Microsoft supports the call for an industry-wide discussion aimed at creating more consistent and uniform commitments to student privacy by technology vendors who sell their products, services and devices into the education market. I look forward to continuing to work on this critical issue.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank, reaffirming that abstract ideas are not eligible for patent protection. The Court correctly distinguished Alice’s invalid business method patents from valid patents that advance technology.

We applaud the Court for its ruling, and in particular their recognition that the patents in question are not software patents. The Alice claims describe a method for reducing risk in financial transactions, with no connection to any technological innovation.

The Court’s opinion follows closely the amicus brief we submitted with HP and Adobe, and recognizes that software inventions are eligible for patents, especially where they “improve the functioning of the computer itself … [or] effect an improvement in any other technology or technical field.” [p.15] 

Software patents are no different than other technological or industrial inventions that are patent-eligible under Section 101. Software now powers nearly every inventive device, service and product in our world today. Virtually every industry and sector of the economy has been transformed by software. The Alice decision is an affirmation that these innovations are patent-eligible.

This ruling will preserve patent protection for software-enabled technologies that is critical to incentivizing innovation in every industry and sector of the economy.