Meet Nate Fick, the State Department’s first-ever ambassador for cyberspace
After Iranian proxies hacked Albanian government systems last year, U.S. diplomats in the region sent up a bat signal: Would Nate Fick please come in person to demonstrate solidarity with the U.S. partner under attack?
“I stood in the main square in downtown Tirana, shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. ambassador to Albania and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to send a very visible, public signal of American support for our NATO ally,” says Fick, the State Department’s inaugural ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy.
It was a symbolic moment that underlined the fact that tech is now on the front lines of a new great powers competition. Such photo ops are common in armed conflicts. Countless American and European leaders have dropped into Kyiv, for example, to show support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Until recently, though, aggression in cyberspace hasn’t rated as highly.
That’s now changing due to how pervasively tech underlies every aspect of modern life. Ransomware devastates economies. Disinformation disrupts democracy. Malware cripples infrastructure. Accordingly, the U.S. has gradually pulled cyberspace into the center of its national security strategy.
Upon taking office in 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that digital would be among his key areas of focus. Last year, he launched a new bureau for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, with Fick at its head.
“It’s changing every aspect of our foreign policy,” says Fick, who may have only a couple of years to rally allies abroad and inject tech expertise into the foreign service at home. “So many of the things that the democratic world holds dear . . . depend upon whether we can prevail in this great competition.”
Digitization equals vulnerability
The U.S. is actually behind the eight ball in this fight.
Although the West dominated tech innovation in the ’90s and ’00s, China and more recently Russia have been quicker to grasp how these tools could be used to gain geopolitical advantage around the world. If the Cold War was waged over geography, the new wars are taking place among the 1s and 0s.
“With the digitization of everything comes a vulnerability to everything,” Fick explains.
Countries such as Iran and North Korea have used emerging tech to inflict actual harm. The attack on Albania was reportedly in retaliation for its harboring of an Iranian dissident group. Russia has used the new tools to spread disinformation and sow discord among its adversaries.
Still, there’s a more fundamental fight taking place, one that’s even more closely analogous to the Cold War. China is now exporting its surveillance technologies abroad, and with them its political philosophies about how those systems can be used to control populations. Countries around the globe—such as Malaysia, Ethiopia, Venezuela, and Singapore—have implemented everything from facial-recognition technology to social media tracking systems, some of them purchased from Chinese companies.
A 2019 report from the Brookings Institution sounded the alarm bell. “Digital authoritarianism is reshaping the power balance between democracies and autocracies,” it stated. “If liberal democracies do not present a compelling and cost-effective alternative to the Chinese model of digital governance and infrastructure, the authoritarian tool kit that Beijing has long honed at home will increasingly spread abroad.”
While disparate entities at Foggy Bottom have been working on cyber matters as far back as the Obama administration, creating a bureau-level group with an ambassador at its head signifies that the State Department views these issues as decidedly more strategic. “I report to the deputy secretary of state,” Fick says, referring to Wendy Sherman. “I talk to her all the time. And I can get in and see the secretary anytime something demands his attention.”
The making of a cyber ambassador
Fick isn’t a career foreign service officer, or even a career public servant such as former Secretary of State John Kerry, who was tapped to lead the department’s climate efforts. But if you wanted to design the ideal candidate to lead State’s cyber strategies, you’d probably come up with someone like Fick, who has a hat trick of backgrounds in national security, public policy, and the private sector.
The Dartmouth grad first became known to the general public as the real-world platoon leader portrayed in HBO’s 2008 Generation Kill series, about a unit of Marines fighting in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As with many people who’ve experienced combat firsthand, Fick is determined to work upstream to prevent conflicts from turning into shooting wars.
From the Marine Corps, Fick went to Harvard Business School, and from there to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for a New American Security, founded by Pentagon veteran Michèle Flournoy, whom many expected to become Hillary Clinton’s secretary of defense. (Flournoy was also rumored to be in the running to be President Biden’s Pentagon chief.)
Later, Fick became an operating partner at Menlo Park-based Bessemer Venture Partners, and then CEO of Endgame, a cyber operations platform used by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency as well as financial and commercial companies. (Fick was one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business in 2018 for his work at Endgame.)
“He comes out of the tech industry and knows the issues very well,” says Dmitri Alperovitch, who investigated the 2015-2016 Russian hacks of Democratic National Committee servers and is cofounder and chairman of the national-security focused Silverado Policy Accelerator. “It’s not like he has to learn what Silicon Valley thinks on most of these problems. He’s very well aware.”
Tech is a national security issue
That experience will come in handy. The tech industry has already started grappling with the fact that it’s no longer a world apart, free to create without outside interference. The privacy discussions and emerging regulations of the past few years have made that abundantly clear.
Now the sector has a whole new set of considerations to contemplate—national security, both of the U.S. and other countries. The issues are so urgent that about two dozen nations have started deploying diplomatic envoys specifically to Silicon Valley to interface with the tech world directly.
“It’s become increasingly clear that these new technologies—the companies and the platforms—intrude upon elements of national sovereignty [such as] our democratic institutions, our national conversations, and our elections,” says Martin Rauchbauer, codirector of the Tech Diplomacy Network and Austria’s first tech ambassador to Silicon Valley. “So there was this feeling that if this is ultimately about control of the pillars that make our societies and our political systems, there needs to be also the element of diplomacy.”
Back at the State Department, Fick is working to institutionalize in-house tech expertise so that, going forward, foreign service officers will be as literate in cyber and digital issues as they are in economic and political ones. New training certifies which officers have mastered these topics, and soon the department will take tech competency into account when handing out top embassy slots.
In his few months since taking office, Fick has been jetting around the world, working to build like-minded coalitions with allies and partners on everything from tech standards to regulations to international norms. “We need to start with a positive, attractive, compelling, affirmative vision for the future of tech,” Fick says. “We need to build the big tent . . . to attract companies and countries to our worldview.”
Fick hopes to have at least one person with tech expertise in each of the U.S.’s overseas missions by the end of next year. It was one such trained officer who sounded the alarm on the Albanian crisis last year. “He was capturing all the relevant information, drafting cables, and doing really high-quality reporting back to Washington that gave us visibility into what was happening,” Fick says.
“There are 200 other countries around the world, and bad stuff is happening in a lot of them every day,” he continues. “Effective, timely, informed, sharp communication is really important to focus attention and energy on what matters.”
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