Professor, author and CEO of Clearly Innovative, Aaron Saunders talks about the challenges of being African-American in the tech industry.

Transcript

ERIC WESTERVELT, HOST:

Today, we’re going to dig into the challenges people of color face when it comes to navigating the tech industry. For African-Americans, rising through the ranks of the tech world is challenging on its own. Aaron Saunders is taking what he’s learned and using it to prepare young black programmers-in-training for the tough realities of a career where almost everyone is white. As part of our Black History Month series called BlackAnd, where we bring you stories of people navigating more than one identity, today we’re going to talk about being black in the tech industry. Aaron Saunders is CEO of Clearly Innovative, a tech company here in Washington, D.C., that builds a range of digital products. He joins us in our studio in Washington. Aaron, welcome to the program.

AARON SAUNDERS: Thank you very much.

WESTERVELT: So tell us your story. You’re in your 50s. Growing up, did you have a mentor that guided you toward tech, or did you find it on your own?

SAUNDERS: Actually, it is a funny story. I found tech on my own in school. I was small, got picked up quite frequently. And so I chose to stay in the library during lunch time. There was a large box sitting in the corner which happened to be a Commodore 64 that the librarians did not really understand what to do with it. So I said hey, can I open it up? So I opened up the box, read the manuals, taught myself how to program in BASIC. And that’s kind of where it all started. And that was in sixth grade.

WESTERVELT: Started schooling the librarians a little bit…

SAUNDERS: Yeah.

WESTERVELT: …On how to use their computer?

SAUNDERS: (Laughter) Yes, yes.

WESTERVELT: In your early years starting out, how common was it to run into other African-Americans in the tech field?

SAUNDERS: It was nonexistent. In the early years and even after – you know, when I was working in New York in the ’80s, I was a consultant for IBM. And I would go into meetings, and they were literally no other people of color in the room on either side of the table in most cases. I was senior-level architect. I would lead teams; I would lead projects and I spent a lot of time doing client-facing work. I would usually go into meetings and sit down and far too often, the client assumed that the person next to me was Aaron Saunders and that I was not Aaron Saunders the architect. And the person next to me was not African-American. It was very frustrating because especially in the consulting business, you’re basically selling yourself, right? You’re walking in a room; you’re telling the client hey, we’re going to get this done for you. Please pay us a lot of money to do this before you even do any work. And I think for African-Americans it’s a huge challenge because people come to the table with preconceived notions about our capabilities and what we can do. So you have to try even harder to get that point across that yes, I can get this done for you, yes, I am capable, yes, I belong here.

WESTERVELT: Silicon Valley tech companies have pledged to do more to create a more diverse workforce. Why do you think it’s taking so long and it’s so hard for them?

SAUNDERS: Because there aren’t any black people there. I mean, you’re – you know what I mean? It’s real simple. As well-intentioned as they are, right, it’s still challenging for a room full of nondiverse people to figure out how to address diversity, right? I know there’s a big push right now to address the lack of diversity in tech through HBCUs.

WESTERVELT: Historically black colleges and universities.

SAUNDERS: Yes. The bulk of the HBCUs are on the East Coast. The bulk of the tech companies are on the West Coast. You’re not going to solve this problem by just dropping in for a weekend or for a job fair. It’s going to take a committed kind of – for lack of a better word, you know, on-the-ground war.

WESTERVELT: When you meet tech companies there and talk about diversity, do you feel like you’re coming at it from really different places?

SAUNDERS: I think as an African-American when I discuss tech and tech diversity, I definitely am coming from a different place than most of the people that I’m talking to because you’re discussing things with them that they simply can’t wrap their head around. For example, take a person of color who’s grown up in a black community, went to high school in a prominent black community, probably went to a predominantly-black college. And even if they got that job at that great tech company now, it’s a complete culture shock. Beyond even what they’re capable of doing technically, they now need to kind of handled this, you know, this dualism of who they are and who they believe they need to be to be successful in the workplace.

WESTERVELT: It’s not just as simple as hiring? It’s…

SAUNDERS: It’s not just as simple as hiring.

WESTERVELT: You’re also teaching in Howard University’s computer science department. How do you approach preparing young students of color not just technically but in a tech world that’s still not inclusive?

SAUNDERS: So one of the things that I do when I first start my class is I ask my students how much programming experience they have. And the very first semester that I taught, what I found interesting was that some of my students had never programmed before they’d got to college. And I clearly articulated to them that if you want a job in the Valley, the people that you’re competing with for those jobs, a lot them probably started programming sixth, seventh, eighth grade and have been doing it for years. And so it’s a focus on making that extra effort and that extra commitment to kind of get back on track to be successful and be competitive.

WESTERVELT: Aaron Saunders is CEO of Clearly Innovative. He joined us in our Washington, D.C. studios. Aaron’s story BlackAnd in tech is the final part of our Black History Month series BlackAnd, which features different voices of those balancing multiple identities. To look back on the series, you can search for #BlackAnd on Twitter as well as on npr.org. Aaron, thanks for coming in.

SAUNDERS: Thank you very much.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

The European Central Bank is considering abandoning the 500 euro note. Harvard University’s Peter Sands explains why the 500 euro note is the currency of choice for organized crime and terrorists.

Transcript

ERIC WESTERVELT, HOST:

Ever thought of getting rid of the $100 bill? What about the 500-euro note? The European Central Bank right now is talking about getting rid of the big note, which is a controversial move for some countries tied to the euro, especially Germany. Critics of the 500-euro note saying it’s the currency of choice for organized crime groups looking to use cash for drug trafficking, corruption, money laundering, even for terrorist activities. Some even call the 500 euro the bin Laden. Meanwhile, supporters of the 500 note fear the move is a step toward getting rid of all cash transactions. Peter Sands is a former bank executive who’s now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He wrote a report on why such high-dollar currency should be eliminated to make it tougher for criminals to transfer funds. And Peter Sands joins us now. Thanks for being with us.

PETER SANDS: Hi.

WESTERVELT: What’s your evidence that these big bills do in fact fuel criminality and corruption and even terrorism? Do we have hard evidence of that?

SANDS: I don’t think it’s right to say they necessarily fuel or encourage them. What high-denomination notes are doing is making it easier for the criminals to do what they want to do. And by taking them away, you’re simply making their lives harder. People underestimate how sort of heavy cash is. If you want to move a million dollars in $20 bills, it weighs 110 pounds. It’s actually pretty hard for a single individual to carry surreptitiously 110 pounds. In 500-euro notes, that’s less than 4 pounds.

WESTERVELT: There’s been some strong pushback, especially from Germany. Why are the Germans been so strong in support of the big note?

SANDS: It’s funny that high-denomination notes in almost every currency carry symbolism to people. And I think that is certainly true in Germany. You know, Germany’s history with currency has had its up and downs from the sort of terrible disaster the Weimar Republic to the Deutsche mark being very much a symbol of the resurgence of Germany in the postwar era.

WESTERVELT: One of the main arguments is that restricting cash could force that money back into banks, which is as we’ve seen in the past not always as reliable or 100 percent reliable.

SANDS: Well, for all the mistakes and gaps in the scrutiny and surveillance systems the bank have, at least they have some. The reality is we have no idea what’s happening in the criminal flows of cash because cash is completely anonymous and leaves no transaction record.

WESTERVELT: And aren’t there legitimate reasons for carrying 500-euro notes?

SANDS: Look, there are some legitimate reasons. People like high-denomination notes for giving gifts. They like it as emergency money when they’re traveling. But you’ve got to trade that off against the fact that when we do seizures of drug trafficking or human traffickers or you’re looking at the way that terrorist organizations finance themselves, you will find that a very large percentage of what is going on is being driven by high-denomination notes.

WESTERVELT: What about here in the U.S.? Is the Ben Franklin in any danger?

SANDS: I think there should be a debate as to the level of issuance and the role of the hundred-dollar bill. There are about 30 hundred-dollar bills for every U.S. citizen, yet the role they play in everyday life is extremely small. Around 5 percent of American adults have a hundred-dollar bill in their pocket at any one time. Yet somebody is holding those bills. And if you look at the data on seizures of drug cash, say, crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, the stuff that gets seized is almost invariably in hundred-dollar bills.

WESTERVELT: That’s former banker Peter Sands. He’s now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Peter, thanks for speak with us.

SANDS: Thank you, Eric.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

Apple and the FBI are facing off in court over an encrypted iPhone 5C that was used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The phone stopped backing up to the cloud, which the investigators have already searched, several weeks before the Dec. 2 attack.

It’s unclear what, if anything remains on the phone, but the Justice Department says it has “reason to believe” that Farook used that iPhone to communicate “with some of the very people” he and his wife killed.

Apple and the government, however, are at odds over a court order that investigators got to compel Apple to help them circumvent the iPhone’s security systems. Right now, the phone is protected by a PIN code that the FBI doesn’t know — and trying to guess it could cause the phone’s data to be deleted.

The FBI wants Apple to write software that would give it unlimited attempts at the PIN with a computer program, but Apple’s answer is a hard no. In a motion to dismiss the court’s order, filed Thursday, the company says it has cooperated with investigators as much as it can, and this software request is dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional.

Here are five key quotes from the filing that outline Apple’s argument — plus one swipe at the FBI’s computer skills:

A Slippery Slope

The FBI says the custom-written software would be for this phone specifically. Apple doesn’t buy it:

“The government says: ‘Just this once’ and ‘Just this phone.’ But the government knows those statements are not true; indeed the government has filed multiple other applications for similar orders, some of which are pending in other courts. … If this order is permitted to stand, it will only be a matter of days before some other prosecutor, in some other important case, before some other judge, seeks a similar order using this case as precedent.”

A Dangerous Precedent

“… compelling Apple to create software in this case will set a dangerous precedent for conscripting Apple and other technology companies to develop technology to do the government’s bidding in untold future criminal investigations. If the government can invoke the All Writs Act to compel Apple to create a special operating system that undermines important security measures on the iPhone, it could argue in future cases that the courts should compel Apple to create a version to track the location of suspects, or secretly use the iPhone’s microphone and camera to record sound and video.”

An Overreaching Court

The court order instructing Apple to comply cites the All Writs Act, which broadly permits courts to “issue all writs necessary or appropriate” and has been used to compel companies to assist law enforcement in investigations. But Apple says this request overreaches the court’s authority — that this particular court order is creating a new power, not using an existing one. Only Congress, by passing a new law, could make such a demand legal, Apple argues:

“[The All Writs Act] does not grant the courts free-wheeling authority to change the substantive law, resolve policy disputes, or exercise new powers that Congress has not afforded them. … Congress has never authorized judges to compel innocent third parties to provide decryption services to the FBI. Indeed, Congress has expressly withheld that authority in other contexts, and this issue is currently the subject of a raging national policy debate among members of Congress, the President, the FBI Director, and state and local prosecutors.”

A Tenuous Connection

The Supreme Court has previously found that the All Writs Act can be used to force a company’s cooperation, provided that the company was not “far removed” from the case in question. Apple argues it is, indeed, far removed:

“The All Writs Act does not allow the government to compel a manufacturer’s assistance merely because it has placed a good into the stream of commerce. Apple is no more connected to this phone than General Motors is to a company car used by a fraudster on his daily commute. … Indeed, the government’s position has no limits and, if accepted, would eviscerate the ‘remoteness’ factor entirely, as any company that offers products or services to consumers could be conscripted to assist with an investigation, no matter how attenuated their connection to the criminal activity. This is not, and never has been, the law.”

A Violation Of Constitutional Rights

“Under well-settled law, computer code is treated as speech within the meaning of the First Amendment,” Apple says.

Under some conditions, the government can force companies to make statements of various kinds. But Apple argues that in this case, given the uncertain value of what’s on the iPhone, the investigators failed to prove a compelling state interest in getting into the device and so lack a constitutional reason to compel Apple to speak — especially when the “speech” (aka code the company would write) is in direct opposition to Apple’s public stance in favor of encryption and security.

Apple also argues that the request violates the company’s Fifth Amendment right to due process:

” … the government’s requested order, by conscripting a private party with an extraordinarily attenuated connection to the crime to do the government’s bidding in a way that is statutorily unauthorized, highly burdensome, and contrary to the party’s core principles, violates Apple’s substantive due process right to be free from ‘arbitrary deprivation of [its] liberty by government.’ “

And As A Bonus … A “Shoulda Asked Sooner”

Apple also suggested that the FBI’s current problem is one of its own making — that federal investigators who lacked sufficient knowledge of Apple’s security systems blocked themselves from an easier way of accessing much of the phone’s data:

“Unfortunately, the FBI, without consulting Apple or reviewing its public guidance regarding iOS, changed the iCloud password associated with one of the attacker’s accounts, foreclosing the possibility of the phone initiating an automatic iCloud back-up of its data to a known Wi-Fi network …which could have obviated the need to unlock the phone and thus for the extraordinary order the government now seeks. Had the FBI consulted Apple first, this litigation may not have been necessary.”

via GIPHY

Would you have a computer drive for you?

Some say yes if the computer is accurate and has no bugs in it, while some say no because they want to be in control and they enjoy driving.

A University of Michigan survey found that about 90 percent of Americans have some concerns about the concept of self-driving cars. But most also say that they do want some aspects of the car to be automated.

Whatever Americans think, the legal and regulatory groundwork is being laid right now for a drastically different transportation landscape — one where we ride around in cars that drive themselves. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google this month that the self-driving car system can be recognized as the driver.

NPR’s Robert Siegel will talk to several key players in the industry this week about the emerging world of self-driving cars. Today, he spoke with U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.

Interview Highlights

On the safety of self-driving cars

We actually have some studies that some private sector folks have done suggesting that the combination of autonomous and connected vehicles would potentially reduce our fatalities by 80 percent — that is a pretty significant number when you consider we have almost 33,000 fatalities on the road every year.

On the California Department of Motor Vehicles’ proposed regulations that self-driving cars would be required to have a licensed driver inside

Obviously, where technology is today that is definitely a good principle and of course, we would not suggest putting something unsafe on the road. That’s why we have federal motor vehicle standards in the first place and by the way, our interpretation of a driver as one of these driverless systems doesn’t mean that the car itself meets all of our standards. There are still some questions that have to be resolved by the technology company as to whether those vehicles meet our standards. … I can’t tell you definitively today that our view will be that having a licensed driver in the car is a requirement or should be a requirement of operating a driverless car.

On other questions the U.S. Department of Transportation is concerned about

Let’s think about what it takes to get a driver’s license in the first place. When I came out of high school I was ready to get my driver’s license and the expectation at that time was the driver would be fully engaged 100 percent of the time when he or she was operating a vehicle. In a world where the vehicle is doing more of the driving task, we are also asking questions of ourselves how we train people to drive in cars like that.

On how the government should be proactive in testing new technology

Under our old methodology, we would have waited for an auto company to come up with a driverless car and we would have had to learn the entire system at one time and that would have taken years and years and we wouldn’t have been as familiar with it. The way we’re doing it now, taking interpretations like … the car being a driver under our safety standards, these interpretations are also teaching us, and so as we learn, we are going to be better and better until we are able to keep pace with innovation and I think safety will benefit as well.

On Tuesday, Siegel will talk to Brian Soublet, deputy director and chief legal counsel for the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

Apple shareholders will be voting on a proposal at the annual meeting Feb. 26. It’s a proposal that the company opposes, which calls for the tech leader to increase diversity in its senior management.

Antonio Maldonado owns more than $2,000 worth of stock in Apple and he’s been pushing the company to increase what he calls an “abysmal” lack of diversity at the top level. In 2015, the company had one Hispanic and four African-American members among the 103 people Apple considers executives, senior officials and managers. Seventy-three of those top executives were white men.

“They believe that they’re making a lot of progress and that their numbers are great in upper management. And [my belief] is actually quite the opposite,” Maldonado told NPR’s Michel Martin.

He says he first became interested in this issue while discussing tech careers with his son. “We were reviewing the website for Apple. And he just made a quick quirp and just said ‘Oh look at that, I’ll be the first person of color up there.’

“That stuck in my mind, believe it or not,” he says. “And for three years I did some research and I started challenging Apple directly about this. And unfortunately, they never gave me sufficient answers as to why it was occurring, so I decided to come up with this.”

Maldonado’s shareholder proposal requests “that the board of directors adopt an accelerated recruitment policy,” which would require Apple “to increase the diversity of senior management and its Board of Directors, two bodies that presently fails to adequately represent diversity (particularly Hispanic, African-American, Native-American and other people of colour).”

Apple’s board opposes the proposal. The company argues it “is unduly burdensome and not necessary because Apple has demonstrated to shareholders its commitment to inclusion and diversity, which are core values for our company.” Company lawyers also said the proposal would “micro-manage” hiring decisions and that it was impossible to implement because it would “require the candidates the Company recruits” to accept job offers.

Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote that the company was “committed to fostering and advancing inclusion and diversity across Apple and all the communities we’re a part of.” At other levels besides the top suite, Apple’s diversity improved slightly in 2015.

As part of diversity efforts, the company points to its move to provide scholarships to historically black colleges, donations of Apple products to schools as part of President Obama’s ConnectED initiative, and sponsoring the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

At the top level, five of Apple’s eight board members are white men. James A. Bell, the former president of Boeing who is African-American, was elected to the board in October 2015. Almost all of the 18 executives listed on Apple’s website are white men. Two executives are African-American women.

“Unfortunately when they start pointing to something like that, it tends to be tokenism,” Maldonado says of the two black executives. “Let’s just look at the facts. For instance, in the board of directors, it was a span of 18 years between having black members within the board of directors.”

Maldonado says the recent additions of women and African-Americans to the board and group of senior executives was the result of pressure from groups like the Rainbow PUSH coalition of Jesse Jackson. Jackson told Bloomberg last year that it’s a small sign that “Apple is moving in the right direction.”

But “the company lags far behind Facebook, Google and Microsoft” among diversity in senior management, according to Engadget.

Issues of diversity at Apple are reflective of the technology industry as a whole, which is dominated by white men. Activists have prodded tech firms to begin issuing regular diversity reports on their progress.

Maldonado’s proposal is nonbinding. But “it does nudge a company to actually act rightly. It’s a black mark on their brand if they decide to go against something that the shareholders want,” he says. “After all, the company’s owned by shareholders, not by individuals. So therefore they have to comply eventually to shareholders’ requests. Even though it may not be today or tomorrow, eventually they have to.”

At least 25 board diversity resolutions were filed in 2015, according to the Thirty Percent Coalition, which supports having more women on company boards. Since 2000, 57 resolutions to increase diversity at publicly-traded companies have gone to a vote, though none have been approved, Edward Kamonjoh of Institutional Shareholder Services told Bloomberg.

“Our goal of course is to hopefully get this to pass,” says Maldonado. And if it doesn’t, he plans to bring it up again.

A new pirate website called Sci-Hub allows free access to academic journals behind paywalls. Heather Joseph, an advocate for legal open access, explains the situation to Linda Wertheimer.

Transcript

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

University libraries have been forced to cut back on the number of academic journals that they subscribe to because it has become too expensive. Some faculty are now soliciting illegal copies of articles from peers at other institutions. Others are pulling down articles from the self-described pirate website called Sci-Hub. It’s based in Russia and claims to have made nearly 50 million articles available for free in violation of international copyright law. I’m joined now by Heather Joseph, who’s been following this development. Her organization is called SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. The group advocates for legal open access to academic journals. Ms. Joseph, thank you very much for joining us.

HEATHER JOSEPH: Thank you for having me.

WERTHEIMER: So how do the academic journals that are charging a lot of money for what – for their subscriptions, what is their justification?

JOSEPH: Well, the justification I think is a good one for nonprofit organizations like Scholarly Societies that really do operate on pretty much a cost recovery model. The commercial ventures, though, that have the profit margins in the 30 and 40 percent range, there really is no justification. They’re profit-maximizing businesses, which is fine. The question is, should such businesses be built around information that’s vital to the public’s good and the public’s health?

WERTHEIMER: When these scholars do articles, who gets – do they get any of that money?

JOSEPH: They’re unpaid. The authors of these articles traditionally contribute the work of writing the articles, the work of reviewing and verifying the information, and they’re not paid.

WERTHEIMER: I can see why universities might feel that they were paying too much.

JOSEPH: Yes, indeed.

WERTHEIMER: So now we have the pirate website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to journals. What has been the reaction to this in the academy?

JOSEPH: Well, I think researchers take for granted that they’re – they’ve been forced into a system of workarounds to try to get access to the articles that they need to do their research. Typically, a researcher will have legal access to only between 50 and 70 percent of the articles that they need to do their work. So I think this database, Sci-Hub, was just another step in a process that researchers have sadly become used to doing.

WERTHEIMER: It’s not just academics. We might all decide that we need to pull up a paper on, say – I mean, something that we all do every day is look up any diseases we are afraid we might have.

JOSEPH: That’s exactly right. I think that’s first and foremost the value you can see immediately. Whenever you’re diagnosed or a family member is diagnosed with an illness, we just – we go to the web, and we want the latest verified information. And unfortunately, most of the articles that we’ll run into will have a pay wall that will say, you need to pay $10, $15, $20, even $30 for an individual view of an article.

WERTHEIMER: I understand you have some unhappy personal experience of this.

JOSEPH: Actually, my son has Type 1 juvenile diabetes. So when he was diagnosed, of course, the first thing that I did when we got home from the hospital was try to find information that would keep him safe through the night. And I think it was my personal eye-opening experience as to just how expensive it was to try to get basic scientific information, which, by the way, much of it was funded by the NIH, institutions that my tax dollars have supported the research. So I was sort of doubly exercised over this issue of wanting to provide better, open, equitable access to this information.

WERTHEIMER: Heather Joseph, she is with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, SPARC. Thank you very much.

JOSEPH: Thank you for having me.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.