Tools And Weapons

Tools and Weapons is Microsoft president Brad Smith's account, written with communications executive Carol Ann Browne, of what it is like to sit at the center of the tech industry's collisions with government, security, and society. Drawing on Smith's role in Microsoft's response to crises including the WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware attacks, government demands for user data after the Snowden revelations, and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, the authors argue that a company whose products remake how the world works, fights, and communicates cannot treat those consequences as someone else's problem.

The book moves between behind-the-scenes negotiations with heads of state and regulators and a wider reckoning with the era's hardest technology questions: how to police cybercrime and cyberwarfare when nation-states weaponize the same tools consumers rely on every day; what obligations tech companies have as facial recognition and artificial intelligence move from labs into policing and hiring; and what a "Digital Geneva Convention" - Smith's proposed treaty limiting cyberweapons - would actually require of governments and companies alike.

An instant New York Times bestseller on publication in 2019, with a foreword by Bill Gates, Tools and Weapons is a firsthand guide to the promise and the peril of a world remade by digital technology, from two people who helped build it.