Members of Congress have developed a familiarity with new toys like Blackberries and iPhones, but that has not translated into enthusiasm for dealing with the disputes they can ignite. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Silicon Valley: D.C. doesn't get tech

BlackBerrys, iPhones and Droids may dot congressional committee chambers and sometimes — despite rules to the contrary — appear on the House and Senate floors. But a growing frustration still pervades Silicon Valley that there is more than distance separating Washington and Silicon Valley. There’s a gap in knowledge, too. Washington doesn’t get tech.

Some call it Capitol Hill’s own “digital divide” — the growing gap in understanding between lawmakers responsible for resolving the tech community’s most pressing issues and the industry leaders who first call attention to these issues.


The gap is all the more worrisome to tech industry leaders because of the speed with which new devices and practices are clashing with old ways of doing business.

While staff members of committees with jurisdiction over these complex, wonky matters have come to know them cold, congressional members themselves seem to be lagging. Closing that gap is crucial, some valley leaders say, as technology increasingly intersects with larger questions about economic recovery and individual rights.

On one hand, firsthand experience with groundbreaking gadgets has eroded members’ apprehensions about technology, according to Michael Petricone, senior vice president of government affairs at the Consumer Electronics Association.

“What you’ve found relatively recently is that the explosion in social media ... has had the impact of giving members of Congress a hands-on experience with technology on a regular basis,” he told POLITICO.

But a familiarity with those new toys has not translated into enthusiasm for dealing with the disputes they can ignite.

While lawmakers often speak nebulously about the promise of technology, some of the field’s unsexy dilemmas persist.

For example, a bill to inventory wireless spectrum — the frequencies that allow cell phones to transmit data —is stuck in the Senate. Much-anticipated patent reforms remain on the sidelines, tech research bills are mired in deficit politics and efforts to upgrade decades-old e-mail subpoena rules move at a snail mail’s pace.

Both chambers do have some members well known in Washington and Silicon Valley for their willingness to call attention to those issues. The list includes Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), as well as Sens. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), Mark Udall (D-Colo.), John Kerry (D-Mass.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), among others.

However, some in the tech community say the list ought to be longer — and tech issues more prominent in the national political conversation.

Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, said there is still “more work” to be done to illustrate for lawmakers the nuances of the innovation economy in which they legislate. The onus, he said, is on his group of more than 300 Silicon Valley chief executives and their colleagues to better explain their needs.

“I wish you could take Silicon Valley and put it inside the Beltway,” said Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of News Corp. and founder of the privacy advisory firm SSP Blue. “That way, the interaction that would result from that would raise the tech knowledge and awareness in the policy circles.”

The need for that Washington-Silicon Valley mind-meld could not have been any more obvious than this May, when a House subcommittee began exploring ways to rewrite evidence rules that govern e-mails and documents stored in distant databases.

“I think I will acknowledge at the outset how ill-prepared technologically I feel to engage in this discussion,” Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) told the House Judiciary subcommittee that handles civil liberties. “I feel like a Neanderthal in this area.”

He wasn’t alone. Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) later asked one witness whether he could “look into Rep. Watt’s cloud” — the term that describes the practice of storing data and applications on third-party servers.

“No, no, no, no,” assured Jim Dempsey, the vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology. He later found himself diluting his arguments about the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — the point of the hearing — with basic explanations of a practice that undergirds modern e-mail inboxes.

Watt later told POLITICO he planned to bulk up on that debate, as he has with other complex issues like financial regulatory reform. But, he stressed, “even for those who understand the technology, it’s moving too fast for them to keep up and keep the laws abreast.

“This stuff is moving so fast, I don’t even have a Facebook, I don’t Twitter, I had never heard of whatever that term was they were using [at the hearing],” he said, referring to the cloud computing confusion.

But the examples abound elsewhere. Take a 2008 hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee about privacy and online behavior-based advertising. The discussion seemed to fall apart when Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and others seemed not to understand the term “cookies.”

Lawmakers have since learned this one: Cookies allow websites to gear content to a Web user’s behavior. However, while the underlying privacy concerns expressed during that 2008 hearing have resonated across Capitol Hill for years, legislation addressing those gripes has hardly budged, though a new Internet privacy bill spearheaded by Boucher this year does show promise.

It was former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), once the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, who famously described the Internet in 2006 as a “series of tubes.” But four years later, when that same panel considered the merger of Comcast and NBC, Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) admitted to his colleagues he used the Internet at most for an hour each day.

Even more recently, a June hearing on the FCC’s plan to rein in Internet companies became muddled after some House appropriators questioned whether the agency’s Net neutrality plans would allow child pornography to flourish. Not only is child pornography already illegal, it is not even the FCC that polices it — that has long been the chief responsibility of its cousin, the Federal Trade Commission.

Still, tech experts like Goodlatte, chairman of the House GOP High Technology Working Group, told POLITICO that delay is not necessarily attributable to lawmakers’ level of expertise. Rather, he said it is the sad byproduct of a legislative process that moves slowly — at least, when compared to that of the tech community.

“The Constitution didn’t envision laws being made at the pace of technological change,” said Lofgren, whose district includes part of the valley. “And oftentimes that’s not a bad thing.”

Some in Washington say it is, in fact, Silicon Valley that should learn to live with the realities of policymaking. “I’ve never really heard a member of Congress say technology is not important; I’ve heard a lot of tech leaders say, ‘I don’t need politics, I don’t need Washington, policy is going to hurt us,’” Dempsey said long after that perplexing May hearing at which he testified.

The House Judiciary subcommittee has since returned to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act— more forcefully and more informed. But even as D.C. and the Valley draw nearer, some tech evangelists lament there is still much work to be done.

“There is a huge expanse that is not just the distance in miles between our nation’s Capitol and the world’s innovation capital,” Guardino said. “But the good news is the bridge building has been going on for years.”

“If you build bridges well, you can cross any expanse,” he continued. “But it is a constant, constant effort.”