The Key to Military Intelligence? A Foundation of Trust

Will Right to Repair Laws Open Up the Tech Industry?

Most people consider consumer electronics disposable. There’s always a new shiny version available, but do consumers really need a new phone or device every year? Should consumers just trust manufacturers? It’s a complex issue, and host Luke Fox welcomed Kyle Wiens, an expert on the subject and founder of iFixit, a repository of repair guides for consumer electronics. He was inspired to create iFixit when he needed to repair an iBook and found no manual online. They didn’t exist, and that’s how the story started. This move actually forced Apple to offer free maintenance and service docs, something others have not. However, iFixit doesn’t have resources for every electronic. “Over 20,000 new gadgets are released at the Consumer Electronics Show every ear. It’s not viable for consumers to do the work that manufacturers should,” Wiens noted. This could change with right to repair laws. In this model, Wiens explained, “There are three legs to it—the information, special tools and software, and the parts.” Right to repair isn’t a new concept; it’s standard in the automotive industry, but tech manufactures want you to trust them for the life of the product. Wiens contended that shouldn’t be consumers' only option. New laws to enable this are on the table. The problem goes beyond consumer electronics to medical devices and farm equipment. They suffer the same challenges, and Wiens explained a scenario with ventilators. “If biomedical technicians in the hospital can’t fix it, it requires a service call, and that causes delays.” Wiens also spoke about how electronics went from purely mechanical to software-driven, which means the manufacturers must pony up the info and tools. Their argument on why they don’t is rather hollow. “They say it’s a safety concern, a cybersecurity risk, or it’s protecting their intellectual property.” These arguments don’t make much sense and likely damage the trust those manufacturers so desire to create.

Bringing Lessons from the Blue Angels into the Corporate World

Trust isn’t tangible. Like any feeling, it’s something that happens in relationships and interactions. Without trust, teams fail. So, how can organizations build high-trust teams? Captain George Dom USM (Ret) joined The Trust Revolution host Luke Fox to discuss the topic. Captain Dom shared his experiences as leader of the Blue Angels and his work in the private sector. He is the founder of the Hight-Trust Leadership Network and currently serves as the COO for ACI Jet. “Flying off aircraft carriers is a graduate education in trust, leadership, and teamwork. The essence of being able to do such things was the sense of building and sustaining high levels of trust,” Captain Dom said. In building this trust, Captain Dom noted it’s the ability to be vulnerable, and to earn trust, a person must be trustworthy. “It’s not binary; it’s a continuum, and you’re at different places with different people. The first step of trust is honesty with self.” Captain Dom discussed that without high levels of trust, teams can’t be high-performing. It also impedes communication, so important decisions are never fully discussed. He believes leaders have to cultivate a high trust culture. “A high trust culture is one where someone can be their real self and show up with the best ideas and be authentic and transparent. That, in turn, drives creativity, adaptability, and resilience.” Captain Dom noted that the trust basics learned as a member of elite teams translate to the corporate world. He described five areas that leaders have to focus on to have high trust teams: character, commitment, competence, connection, and communication.

The Key to Military Intelligence? A Foundation of Trust

Trust is foundational to many relationships and organizations, maybe none more than those in military, intelligence, and government positions. Joining The Trust Revolution and host Luke Fox is a man who has experience in all three, COL Chris Costa. Costa spent 34 years in the Department of Defense as an intelligence officer and counterterrorism and hostage director. COL Costa has played an important role in security and shared his experiences. He’s now retired and is the Executive Director of the International Spy Museum. “Trust is fundamental to being an intelligence officer and serving in the U.S. military. It starts when you take the oath to the constitution,” Costa said. COL Costa explained that trust among service members starts with the foundation of reliance on one other. What he learned about trust in that role, he took with him as he transitioned to the intelligence world. However, the trust in relationships is different. “It’s a double-edged sword in intelligence. You’re building trust with a source, but they could be a double agent.” When working with sources, those people are taking a huge personal risk. They could be captured, interrogated, or executed. COL Costa shared an experience with a young Taliban. “We are interested in the information he had, and we wanted to protect him, but he had to take direction from me.” That relationship was worth the trust instilled in the operative, and COL Costa said the intelligence he provided most likely saved American lives. In his next role as a hostage recovery expert in the White House, there was a new paradigm of trust. Families had to trust that he and his counterparts were doing everything to receive them. “We had an obligation to tell them everything we could without jeopardizing anything.” From a lifetime of service and trust, COL Costa is now providing a means of trust to the public by leading the International Spy Museum in D.C. These exhibits tell important, unknown stories about the power of trust.

How the "Father of Modern Time" Helped Build the Internet

There are many components of trust throughout the internet, and most people don’t realize how far those layers of trust go back. The Trust Revolution looked backward to the internet’s early days and the development of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), invented by guest Dr. David Mills. Dr. Mills, a computer engineer and Internet pioneer is known as the Father of Modern Time. “Protocols and algorithms to synchronize time were my sandbox.” Dr. Mills was on the first task force of the internet in the 1970s. “I was fascinated by what accurate time could be used for,” he said. One of the first experiments was synchronizing a clock with different power grids. When a grid began to lose up to five seconds, it was “time to put more coal on the burner.” Time synchronization became more accurate but wasn’t exact enough, so he developed an algorithm to compensate for disturbances, getting the time down to the low tenth of milliseconds. Today, technology users take time for granted, thinking it's fixed, and never questioning the time it provides. All users can give thanks to Dr. Mills for the innovation behind NTP. He and his early internet colleagues also did something rather remarkable in the 1970s—video calls and streaming. They were “zooming” way before the rest of the world. “We created these distributed conferences and broadcast them to willing universities,” Dr. Mills explained. In those days, bandwidth was low, and infrastructure was just being built. Dr. Mills was also the first director of the Internet Architecture Task Force. “Now that the internet was going to be a working item, there were issues with protocols,” he said. The question was should they use TCP/IP and if that should become the standard. It did, and without it, the internet might still be just a concept.

What Trust Means for Drones in the Highway in the Sky

Trust plays a huge role in technology and with the growing capabilities of drones for delivery. To understand the role of trust in managing the highway in the sky, The Trust Revolution host Luke Fox spoke with Ken Stewart, President and CEO of NUAIR (Northeast UAS Airspace Integration Research Alliance). Stewart has an impressive background, working in wireless telecom, cloud-based software, and federated platforms. Stewart shared how trust shaped his pre-NUAIR career. He worked on a third-party, independent clearinghouse for mobile carriers. “It was a trusted platform in the industry that was able to authenticate and authorize and eventually became big in fraud detection, too.” Another critical role was working on democratizing the network spectrum on demand, which exposed him to working with the FTC. “We devised a way to share it in real-time, and that led to spectrum for autonomous systems.” Stewart led a GE aviation company relating to remote IDs or license plates for drones. “There’s a lot to putting drones in the air, and we had to create a trust network with diverse groups that different objections,” he added. A lot of information and data exchange occurs in spectrum usage, and a trusted partnership was difficult because not all users or their data had verification. With NUAIR, Stewart now has a new vision for the commercialization of drone use cases. “We operate a test site for the industry to test applications. It’s flexible air space the FAA allows us to provide access,” he shared. Users gather data, test ops over people, and design concepts. They also surveil a 50-mile traffic area, gathering important data to support the commercialization efforts of drone delivery. “The idea is a commercial model for UTM that’s scalable and economically viable. We’re working on healthcare delivery as a focus. How can we use drones to do this safely and efficiently?”