How Tech Becomes Law

Megan Mahle walks us through how she invests in American innovation from the lens of Department of Homeland Security. Through programs like the Small Business Innovation Research grant and the Silicon Valley Innovation Program, DHS enables startups to build new technologies that are useful both for security and commercial purposes.

Check out the Homeland Security Startup Studio CONVERGE event at: https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/hsss-22-converge

Guest bio:

Megan Mahle is the Director of Industry Partnerships at DHS S&T. The role of the Industry Partnerships Division is to lead the formation and sustainment of internal and external partnerships across research and development (R&D) communities. These efforts will enable joint R&D and result in stronger connections with developer and user communities. Industry Partnerships is responsible for innovation mechanisms, such as Small Business Innovation Research, Silicon Valley Innovation Program, Prize Authority, and Broad Agency Announcements, and Post-R&D activities associated with technology transfer and commercialization.

Ms. Mahle has been at S&T since February 2008 serving in several positions, including as the S&T Cyber Security Division (CSD) Business Operations Manager, CSD Program Manager for the Law Enforcement Support portfolio, including the anonymous networks and currencies, cybersecurity forensics and insider threat projects, and program support contractor for the Command, Control and Interoperability Division. Ms. Mahle holds a bachelor’s degree from Mary Washington College and a master’s degree from Catholic University.

About the podcast:

How Tech Becomes Law is a weekly public interest tech podcast about technology, public policy, and career advice. We are your co-hosts, Jinyan Zang and Dhruv Gupta. Each episode uncovers insights from leaders in government, business, journalism, and academia to highlight how technology can be built in the public interest. Interviewees discuss how technology can move society forward, what role they play in shaping this, and how students and young professionals can impact the path forward.

How can we ensure the future of this country is determined by those who'll have to live in it? We speak with Jahnavi Rao, founder of New Voters, which is a non-profit that has helped over 50,000 high school students register to vote across the nation. Jahnavi discusses her work in managing a nationwide, distributed team of volunteers who help students register and make a difference in their high school communities. Jahnavi notes how voting has begun to be politicized, although younger voters on both sides of the aisle are still excited to have their voice heard. Jahnavi talks about her personal experiences in helping students vote, offers advice on her own career, and also discusses the vaccine outreach New Voters conducted over the past year. Listen in to be inspired by the work that she and her team are doing to ensure that young voters feel heard and empowered in an ever-changing world.

Guest bio:

Following the 2016 election, Jahnavi founded New Voters as a club at her high school, where she registered over 85% of her class to vote and mobilized her peers while she herself was too young to vote.

Since then, Jahnavi and the New Voters team have grown the school club into a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit, working with high school student-leaders across America to help them host highly-successful non-partisan voter registration drives at their schools. For the 2020 election, New Voters registered 50,000 high school students across 300 high school chapters.

Outside of New Voters, Jahnavi served as the Founder and Director of High School Engagement at the Harvard Votes Challenge, Co-President of the Harvard South Asian Women's Collective, and is an active cast member of the Harvard College Opera Society. In her free time, you can find Jahnavi listening to Taylor swift and watching vine compilations.

About the podcast:

How Tech Becomes Law is a weekly public interest tech podcast about technology, public policy, and career advice. We are your co-hosts, Jinyan Zang and Dhruv Gupta. Each episode uncovers insights from leaders in government, business, journalism, and academia to highlight how technology can be built in the public interest. Interviewees discuss how technology can move society forward, what role they play in shaping this, and how students and young professionals can impact the path forward.

How do we build a regulator for digital platforms? In this episode, we talk to Tom Wheeler, former Chair of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), about how regulators can balance technological innovation with other public interests such as protecting truth in media, a competitive marketplace, consumer data privacy, and more. Listen to Tom discuss how as the Chair of the FCC, he was able to implement rules to enforce net neutrality, data privacy, cybersecurity, and affordable broadband access for schools across the U.S. Tom discusses in detail about his proposal for a new agile regulator of digital platforms in the U.S. that he worked on with colleagues at Harvard University in order to fight the big con from Big Tech of needing "permissionless innovation" in order for the U.S. to remain competitive. With this new digital platforms regulator, the U.S. can take a leadership position in the world by creating the rules for how technology should interact with Americans rather than ceding control to the E.U., the U.K, or China. One of the areas the regulator can drive innovation is in creating more open data systems where consumers can switch social networks in the future as easily as they can switch phone providers today. Finally, Tom reflects on his illustrious career to offer some advice to recent grads to follow their passions, whether that's to Capitol Hill, to a private tech company, to a regulatory agency, or to a graduate degree. Ultimately, what they just need to get started and what they do for the next 3 years or 5 years is only the beginning of the long arc of their career.

Guest bio:

How can we fix the harms created by social media? In this episode, we talk to Trisha Prabhu from ReThink about addressing cyberbullying and other harms on social media. Listen to Trisha discuss how as a teenager she came to building an anti-cyberbullying app to tackle the problems that she saw firsthand in her community and with her peers and how working on this problem over almost a decade has shaped her perspective on what the future of content moderation can look like. As a scholar, Trisha has dived deep into how the U.S. has confronted the need to balance free speech with other public interests to successfully regulate other media technologies in the past, and she discusses how these historical case studies as well as upcoming regulations in the U.K. and the E.U. show a path forward on creating effective regulations for social media. Finally, as a young woman of color tech founder from Harvard, Trisha talks about what her career journey has been like thus far, what advice she would give to students wanting to pursue a career in public interest tech, and how the tech industry itself can become more welcoming to young people from more diverse backgrounds.

Guest bio:

Let’s bring the government into the 21st Century. We chat with Jake Kramer, managing partner at FedTech, who tells us more about their work in the dual use technology space. With FedTech, Jake works with the Department of Defense, Department of Education, NASA, NIST, and more to incubate, invest in, and inspire new deep-tech startups who will turn around and sell their tools to the federal government, strengthening technical capabilities across the board. Jake highlights the effort the federal government is putting into innovation, the pace at which development is increasing, and new trends in the space. Finally, Jake highlights his path from serving in the Army to working in entrepreneurship, finance, and innovation.

Guest bio:

How do we take action with data and ensure it’s used for good? Sarah Williams, Professor at MIT, joins us to discuss her work using data to evoke change. Sarah discusses her various projects, such as the Digital Matatus and Million Dollar Blocks, and how she both came across in designing them and also in constraining them to ensure they have the intended impact. She also discusses her framework to make smarter and more careful decisions with data, highlighting each principle with examples. Finally, Sarah talks about her path to combining data with design, maps with policy, and the twists and turns her career took to get her where she is.

Guest bio:

What is the future of money? In this episode, we talk to Tim Massad, former Chair of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission about how to regulate stablecoins, central bank digital currencies (CDBCs), and other cryptocurrencies. Tim discusses how his experience with helping the U.S. government implement its bail-out of large banks during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis has influenced his perspective on the benefits and risks of stablecoins. Tim also talks about how he is in favor of promoting more competition in the financial sector including from new crypto firms in order to speed up payments in the U.S. while still protecting consumer interests. Finally, Tim encourages young lawyers to seek out opportunities to work on hard problems at the cutting edge of finance, technology, regulations, and more in their careers in order to do meaningful work to make life better for the average American. 

Guest bio:

What happens when thousands of middle schoolers and high schoolers show their apps to Congress? In this episode, we talk to Joe Alessi of the Congressional App Challenge about how more than 40,000 middle schoolers and high schoolers from around the US have participated in one of the largest hackathons in the US every year and even influenced how Members of Congress think about the role of technology in their home districts. Listen to Joe talk about how the Congressional App Challenge got started in 2015 and has since seen participation in more than 75% of Congressional Districts on a bipartisan basis. Joe also discusses what kinds of apps students are working on, how many students are overcoming the challenges of limited computer science resources as well as the additional burdens of the pandemic, and how participating in the Congressional App Challenge has enabled many students, who may be too young to vote, to express their concerns through technology to Members of Congress. Now that many alums of the Congressional App Challenge are in college and even starting their careers, Joe talks about how there is an ever-growing community of past participants who can support each other and pay it forward by guiding the next generation of young students looking to make a positive impact with technology. 

Guest bio:

How does a Presidential campaign target voters with ads online? In this episode, we talk to Megan Clasen of the Biden 2020 campaign about the role of digital political ads when campaigning in the US today. Listen to Megan discuss how the Biden 2020 campaign was able to target specific persuasion messages to the relevant voters and how digital political ads have evolved from her first campaign, Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential campaign, to working on JB Pritzker's campaign for the Governor of Illinois in 2018 to working for Kamala Harris and then Joe Biden's campaigns for President in 2020. Megan also discusses what it feels like to be on the frontlines of fighting misinformation on social media as well as her experience as a female entrepreneur by starting Gambit Strategies, a social media advertising consulting firm, this past year. 

Guest bio:

What role does data and tech play in the future of news? In this episode, we talk to Robin Berjon of The New York Times about why it's important for news and media companies to have a strong data privacy system in place to gain the trust of their users. Listen to Robin discuss how the EU's GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has pushed the notice and consent model to the limit, why technologists and policymakers have to work together to preserve data privacy and fight misinformation, and why news organizations need to work together to create a more financially sustainable content aggregation platform that benefits both the journalists writing the news and the online platforms sharing the news. Finally, listen to Robin discuss how he's spent his career working on "dumpster fire" hard problems to solve and why that's his advice for young professionals looking for problems to work on today.

Guest bio:

How can tech address inequality? In this episode, we talk to Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee of the Brookings Institution about algorithmic discrimination and broadband access. Listen to Nicol talk about why she thinks addressing algorithmic discrimination is so important, why algorithms reflect and reinforce existing structural inequalities in society, and how computer scientists and social scientists can work together to find better solutions. Nicol also talks about her upcoming book, Digitally Invisible: How the internet is creating the new underclass, where she went to 7 communities around the US to see and understand the lives of those who live on the wrong side of the digital divide. Listen to Nicol talk about seeing students carrying phones with them in Arizona in case their parents get deported and also seeing students on the stoop of their school in Alabama in order to get internet access. The pandemic has brought new challenges but also opportunities on closing the digital divide, especially with new federal infrastructure funding for broadband access. Finally, listen to Nicol reflect on her own journey as a Black female sociologist working on tech policy in Washington, DC, and hear her advice for young professionals starting their journeys today. 

Guest bio:

This is How Tech Becomes Law, a weekly public interest tech podcast about technology, public policy, and career advice. We are your co-hosts, Jinyan Zang and Dhruv Gupta.

How Tech Becomes Law uncovers insights from leaders in government, business, journalism, and academia to highlight how technology can be built in the public interest. Interviewees discuss how technology can move society forward, what role they play in shaping this, and how students and young professionals can impact the path forward.