Cementing the State-Silicon Valley Relationship

State Department Policy Planning staff official Jared Cohen announced this week that he would be leaving the administration to head a new "think/do tank" at Google, a move that cements the growing link between Silicon Valley and the State Department.

"I view my departure from government not as a farewell, but as a continuation of the friendships, partnerships, and collaborations that I have been so fortunate to enjoy in the past four years," he wrote in his parting e-mail to State colleagues.

In his four years at State, Cohen has been a vocal advocate for "21st century statecraft." That's the department's all-time buzzword for the use of social media and telecommunications to promote diplomacy and development abroad. Cohen has staged meet-ups between bureaucrats and tech heavyweights such as Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt. He's recognized as the guy who asked Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chairman, to delay site maintenance that would bring the social media network down at the same time as the Iranian postelection protests last year. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Cohen said that spreading the message went hand-in-hand with spreading the medium:

The first [misconception] is that the technology side of 21st-century statecraft is just about State Department officials using Twitter and blogging more -- in other words, that embracing technology is just about more effectively and innovatively communicating and advocating our policy. I think about technology being used as a tool to empower citizens, to promote greater accountability and transparency, to do capacity building.

But adopting privately developed technologies as a vector for public diplomacy can be controversial, a New York Times Magazine article has pointed out.

This new marriage of Silicon Valley and the State Department can, at times, seem almost giddy in its tech evangelism. While it's hard to argue with the merits of helping nongovernmental organizations communicate with one another, there's a danger that close collaboration between the government and the tech world will be read as favoritism or quid pro quo. Anne-Marie Slaughter, director of the policy planning staff, acknowledged as much: "So Google sits here, and Microsoft and Twitter and Facebook, but for all those household names, there are others -- and what are the guidelines to make sure that you're being evenhanded, as government has to be?"

Cohen argues that opening State's doors to the private sector is vital. As he said to Foreign Policy, he can now pursue things that he couldn't do within the federal government.

The big thing is the resources and the capabilities. There are not a couple hundred [computer] engineers in the State Department that can build things; that's just not what government does. You don't necessarily have some of the financial resources to put behind these things. It's really hard to bring talented young people in; there are not a lot mechanisms to do it. On some topics, it's very sensitive for government to be the one doing this.