Op-ed: The Tie between Cyber-espionage and Immigration Reform

The following is an op-ed I wrote a while back that never found a home. Rather than let it go to waste, I thought I'd put it here.
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Last week, the White House released a new framework for cybersecurity, aiming to keep American businesses from losing intellectual property to industrial spies and hackers. This has been a theme within this administration, as just months ago, former head of the NSA and US Cyber Command General Keith Alexander, dubbed cybercrime against American businesses the "greatest transfer of wealth in history." Yet if we learned from America's own past efforts at spying on industrial technology, we might focus our energies in protecting America's edge in science and technology on a very different political issue: immigration reform.

Another attempt at the "greatest attempt at technology transfer in history" took place just after World War II, when the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union sent teams of investigators to scour occupied Germany for trade secrets, scientific advances, patents, and documents of all kinds. These teams of scientists and engineers from every industry copied blueprints, interviewed technicians, microfilmed patent applications, and seized prototypes – all the kinds of written information a Chinese or Russian hacker might hope to get from a company's file server today. With the full power of the military government behind them, full access to all kinds of records, and several years to operate, surely there could be no circumstances better suited to stealing technologies. Despite all that, the actual gains from these investigations were far less than the planners in Washington, London, Paris and Moscow hoped and anticipated, and far less than Germans at the time feared.

The trick is that technology doesn't live just in documents, data, and blueprints, and it can rarely be transferred from one context to another using just those tools. Technologies live in societies, and in the people in those societies – those people with what's often called 'know-how' or 'tacit knowledge.' One British policymaker remarked on the key lessons learned from years of efforts in Germany: "In practice...no amount of 'given' information can ever be a substitute for the information obtained in the hard school of practical experience." One of the problems faced by US agents hunting for secrets was "these engineers come out of Germany full of things they want to report but have a great deal of difficulty expressing it in words. We may have to send a skilled copy man from an advertising agency to London in order to turn their reports into clear, explicit English." Whether that day's Don Draper could do the job or not, the problem was that some knowledge – even about technical things like chemical processes, building efficient machine tools, and medical techniques to save lives – is just very difficult to put into words.

If America is serious about maintaining its technological edge – and considering that high technology products and intellectual property are some of our top exports, we certainly ought to be – then keeping talented people in America, and recruiting talent from abroad, is every bit as important to national interest as keeping foreign hackers out. The lowest hanging fruit there is raising the cap in H1B visas, which go to foreign workers who American businesses want when they cannot find anyone at home to do the job, but this is just one part of immigration reform that is urgently needed. America is home to many of the world's best universities, attracting thousands of the very brightest minds from around the world, many of whom want to stay and build businesses and innovate right here – right up until we kick them out, at which point they leave to found competition and create jobs elsewhere in an ever-more-global economy. Meanwhile, government budget cuts via sequestration are putting such a squeeze on US science that many of our citizen scientists, too, are looking overseas for opportunities.

Indeed, the postwar investigators succeeded most famously when people were the targets rather than documents: for example, the famous case of the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, one of the leading minds behind NASA's early successes. Keeping innovators in America and protecting our computers from foreign invasion are not mutually exclusive goals, of course. But if America wants to invent and innovate its way to a stronger economy, the greatest defense against technologies and jobs flowing overseas isn't in the NSA or the DOD. It's in our universities and (God help us all) in Congress' ability to craft long-term immigration policies that help keep technological 'know-how' at the service of American business.