[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 9 (Monday, March 6, 2000)]
[Pages 443-449]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Aspen Institute in San Jose, California

March 3, 2000

    Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Eric. I 
appreciate your kind remarks, except I don't want you telling anybody 
that. [Laughter]
    I'm delighted to be here with my friend Reed Hundt, our former FCC 
Chairman. And President Johnson, thank you for having us here at the 
Aspen Institute. Senator Feinstein, thank you for coming out with me 
this morning, along with Congresswoman Tauscher. And I thank 
Representative Eshoo for coming and Representative Lofgren for welcoming 
us to her district.
    Governor Leavitt, thank you for being here. Governor Leavitt is the 
leader of the Governors this year. He just spent 3 days with me in 
Washington. I thought he would find something else to do. If he spends 
any more time with me, they'll run him out of the Republican Party. 
[Laughter] However, being a Baptist, not a Mormon, I believe in deathbed 
conversions. You're always welcome over here. [Laughter]
    I want to thank Mayor Gonzalez for welcoming us. And I thank Mayor 
Menino for being here, and our former Governors, Roy Romer and Gaston 
Caperton and former Mayor Schmoke from Baltimore. And I thank Bill 
Kennard, our present FCC Chair, for coming out with me today.

Gun Control Legislation

    I do want to talk a little bit about the meaning of this 50th 
anniversary of the Aspen Institute, but because this is my only 
opportunity to speak to the American people through the press today, 
there was a late-developing event last night in the Congress I'd like to 
comment on, related to the gun violence and what our national response 
should be in the wake of the tragic shootings this week.
    Over the last couple of days, I have once again asked Congress to 
meet and pass commonsense gun safety legislation that they've been 
sitting on for 8 months. Let me mention, in the aftermath of the 
Columbine shootings, I asked the Congress to pass legislation that would 
provide for child trigger locks on all guns, close the loophole in the 
Brady law which requires background checks for guns bought at gun shops 
but not at gun shows or urban flea markets, and ban the importation of 
large capacity ammunition clips, which are now illegal under the assault 
weapons ban that Senator Feinstein gave us, if they're domestic. And I 
asked for also a national law on adult supervision responsibility if 
children were recklessly allowed to get guns, and that's, of course, 
exactly what happened in the case, the tragic case in Michigan.
    Well, anyway, 8 months ago the House passed a version and the Senate 
passed a version. And from my point of view, the Senate bill was much 
better; it was much stronger, and it passed when the Vice President cast 
the tie-breaking vote. But for 8 months there's been no action on this 
legislation, so I asked for it.
    Well, last night, Senator Boxer offered a nonbinding resolution that 
would put the Senate on record as saying we need to pass commonsense gun 
safety legislation now. And after all we went through this week, the 
resolution failed on a 49-49 tie, with 100 percent of the Democratic 
Senators and 10 percent of the Republican Senators voting for it, and 90 
percent of the Republican Senators voted against it.
    Now, this is not a partisan issue, I don't believe, anywhere but 
Washington, DC. Again, it's a great credit--you've got to give credit 
where credit is due--it's a great credit to the power of the NRA in 
Washington. Just this morning they said they were going to launch a $20 
million campaign to target Members of Congress who do this kind of 
thing, try to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children.
    And right now they're running ads that treat the possibility that we 
could have technology to develop smart guns--that is, guns that could 
only be fired by their owners--as some sort of a joke. Well, I don't 
think it's very funny when a 6-year-old can pick up a gun and go shoot 
another 6-year-old, and a child safety lock would have prevented

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it; smart gun technology would have prevented it. We know the Brady 
background check law has kept half a million felons, fugitives, and 
stalkers from getting guns, and I think that we ought to close the 
loophole that allows a lot of people to buy at these gun shows and not 
do the background checks. They work.
    And I believe, and I know Senator Feinstein believes, that we ought 
to ask handgun owners to have a license, the way we ask drivers to do.
    But the main thing I want to talk about now is there is a practical 
bill before the Congress which would deal with the fact that we're 
losing 12 kids a day to gun violence. And in addition to the intentional 
deaths, the accidental death rates of children under 15 by guns is 9 
times higher in the United States than in the next 24 biggest industrial 
countries combined.
    So I ask you--I know I didn't come here to talk about this, and I 
know the American people may think I'm a broken record about it, but I 
think the older you get--you said something about when you get to 50 you 
begin to--whatever you said about being 50, I'm not so sure. [Laughter] 
The Vice President once gave me a birthday present that said that the 
Cherokees believed that people didn't achieve full maturity until they 
were 51. All I know is that if you've ever had a child, everything else 
seems small by comparison, including the most wonderful job in the 
world. And I think this is crazy what we're doing.
    I come from a State where half the people have a hunting and fishing 
license. I fired my first .22 when I was 10, 11, 12 years old. This has 
nothing to do with any of this. We are a big, complex society, and we 
can save more of our children. We've got a 30-year low in the murder 
rate, 30-year low in the gun death rate, but we can make this the safest 
big country in the world, and we can do it without undermining the 
personal liberties of other people. So I hope you'll forgive me, but I 
wanted to say that, get that off my chest, and ask them to send me the 
bill in the next few days.

Privacy on the Internet and the Digital Divide

    Now, I think it was interesting--I was thinking about what things 
were like when the Aspen Institute started 50 years ago. The first 
conference took place as scientists were close to giving us our first 
glimpse of the double helix, and there was a revolution in 
communications technology: color television. From that day to this, the 
Aspen Institute has had a proud tradition of informed and enlightened 
dialog on emerging national and global issues.
    And of course, I look out on this audience, and some of you were 
referred to by me or by previous speakers, that all of you are people on 
the front lines of change, all of you are people who care very much 
about our future, all of you are people who have a greater grasp of what 
is going on than most people have time to gain, given their own lives 
and responsibilities. And that's why it's important that you gather and 
think about these things.
    There is no question that one of the reasons that--and perhaps the 
primary reason this has been both the longest and the strongest economic 
expansion in history is because of the explosion of technology. The 
high-tech companies alone account for only 8 percent of our employment, 
but they've been 30 percent of our growth. And perhaps even more 
profound, the technological innovations that are the core business of 
many of the companies represented in this room, and certainly in this 
area, are rippling through the whole rest of the economy, adding to the 
overall productivity of the American economy in ways that frankly have 
not been 
measurable.
    I'll just give you one example. In 1992, after the election, when I 
gathered our economic team around the table at the Governor's Mansion at 
home in Arkansas, I asked these economists, many of whom were young and 
vigorous people, I said, ``Now, how low can we get the unemployment rate 
before inflation sets in, the Fed will have to raise interest rates, and 
we'll be back in the tack again? How low can it go?''
    And a couple of them said 6 percent. A couple of them said 5.5 
percent. They were

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universal in their belief that if we ever got the unemployment rate down 
to 5 percent and it stayed there, we'd have raging inflation, and we'd 
have to break it, and it would be the end of the recovery. And these 
were people, obviously, that had a--they were members, by and large, of 
my party; they shared my political philosophy, though they had a 
philosophical predisposition toward believing that low unemployment was 
a very good thing however it was achieved. Yet, they thought that.
    Why is that? Because economists had no tools, as recently as 1992, 
to measure the impact of technology on this economy--something that 
Governor Romer's son was pointing out to us before, I think before 
anybody else, at least that I know of in the country--had no tools to 
appreciate what the impact on productivity would be and how it would 
rifle through the economy and lift the whole thing in a way that would 
enable us to have 4 percent unemployment for a sustained period of time. 
We had the new unemployment figures come out today. We had 4.1 percent, 
and we're almost bumping 21 million new jobs now, in the last 7 years.
    And the biggest concern we've had about inflation is the rising oil 
prices, which is part of the old economy, if you will, and something 
that has to be worked out a different way. But it's very interesting. 
And let me give you an example of why we've had a hard time 
understanding what the potential of the economy is.
    We, the people who do this work, started to count software 
investment as a part of GDP only in October of 1999. It's amazing. Think 
about this. We began counting retail sales as part of GDP in 1947. And 
we've done it about the same way ever since. Yesterday we got a new 
benchmark for the new economy when the Department of Commerce yesterday 
released its first-ever quarterly report on E-commerce, telling us the 
Internet sales interesting fourth quarter of last year, the holiday 
season, were $5.3 billion--about $65 of those attributable to the 
President. [Laughter]
    Now, that was more than twice the previous year. But many believe 
that E-commerce will climb to $1.3 trillion--trillion--a year within 
just the next 3 years. When I became President in 1993, there were 50 
sites on the World Wide Web. Today, there are more than 10 million. I 
visited a company involved in the web last week in northern Virginia, 
UUNET. They did their first contract in 1988; by 1994, they had 40 
employees. They have 8,000 now.
    So we now know that we have a new and different economy. We now are 
beginning to figure out, a, how to measure it and, b, how to assess 
where tomorrow's growth will come from. I also think it's very important 
that we assess precisely what the role of Government should and should 
not be. And I want to commend Governor Leavitt here for taking on the 
completely thankless task of trying to figure out how Internet sales 
should be dealt with in the taxation systems of State and local 
government. You talk about a stone-dead loser. [Laughter] It is a 
totally thankless--I admire him for many reasons, but shouldering this 
burden may be the most compelling example that he really has a good 
heart and willingness to do what has to be done.
    But if you think about it, how this is managed is an example of what 
will be a whole new set of questions about what the role of Government 
should be. And they can't all be answered now because things are 
developing too fast. And let me just suggest that I think that our 
guideposts ought to be that we should have a Government that tries its 
best to establish the conditions and then to give individual Americans 
the tools necessary to make the most of this emerging economy.
    Vice President Gore and I have really worked hard on that. We 
negotiated historic trade agreements on information technology, to open 
markets, establishing conditions. We tried to bring our export control 
policies up to date and still be sensitive to what our national security 
people say. That's the framework, the conditions. Maybe one of the most 
important things we did was to fight for the right kind of comprehensive 
telecommunications reform in the first overhaul of that bill in 60 
years. And we worked very hard in the White House to make sure that it 
was a reform that was oriented toward competition, toward giving new 
firms a chance to enter new markets and entrepreneurs a chance to really 
create wealth and jobs out of their ideas.

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    And I think it's clear to me now, looking back, that the fights we 
waged to try to be pro-competitive, pro-entrepreneur, in that rather 
herculean legislative battle, had even more positive impacts than I had 
imagined they would.
    Those are the conditions. What about the tools, the E-rate, which 
the FCC did? And I want to thank both our former and our present 
Chairman of the FCC for their support of this. We got discounted 
Internet rates for schools and libraries, which increased the percentage 
of our school classrooms connected to the Internet from 3 percent in 
1994, when the Vice President and I did our first NetDay in San 
Francisco, to 63 percent in 1999. And we're up to over 90 percent of the 
schools have at least one connection. And we'll soon be at a point where 
the only schools that don't have at least one connection will be schools 
that are literally too old and decrepit to be wired, which is a problem 
for another day. But we have a lot of our--urban school systems have 
school buildings with an average age of 65 or 70 years of the school 
buildings, and it's a very difficult problem.
    But we're on our way to universal student access because of the E-
rates. Otherwise, without the E-rate, a lot of these schools could never 
have afforded to hook up, and a lot of these small libraries in rural 
areas could never have afforded to hook up.
    We've also worked to accelerate the Federal investment in research 
and development and to conditions to help you extend it by an extension 
of the research and experimentation tax credit and by expanding our 
national science and technology budget every year. After all, 
Government-funded research helped to spark everything from the Internet 
to communication satellites.
    This year we have proposed an increase of $600 million in 
information technology research and almost $500 million for a major new 
initiative in nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate matter at the 
atomic and molecular level, something that will, in my view, give you a 
whole new generation of revolutions in this remarkable area.
    Now, we only know some of the likely developments as a result of 
this R&D. We know it is highly likely that soon we'll have technology 
that will put all the contents in the Library of Congress in a device 
the size of a sugar cube and find and treat cancerous tumors when 
they're just a few cells in size so that you won't have to have the 
ravages of side effects of cancer treatment, and the effectiveness of 
the treatment will be far greater than it is today. And those are only 
two things. There are many other things. If this nanotechnology business 
really works, and we can figure out how to, in effect, use that to 
develop information storage, then what will happen within a reasonably 
few years is literally beyond the limits of my poor imagination.
    So I will say again--but we do know this; we know that whatever 
happens, the Government's role, in my judgment, should be to try to 
establish the conditions in which good people, working hard, will be 
rewarded in a way that will be positive for society as a whole and then 
to give people the tools to make sure that everybody has a chance, no 
matter where they start in life. That, I think, to me, will in all 
probability be the key responsibilities of Government for quite a long 
while to come.
    And if they are well-fulfilled, whether it's in maintaining fiscal 
responsibility and paying down the debt so that there is more money 
available for investment capital to start all these new firms and give 
life to all these new ideas or investing more in education and in what 
works and in giving States like California that have pioneered charter 
schools the right to have more and the support they need to have more, 
or giving every kid who is in a tough neighborhood the right to an 
after-school or a summer school program--those things will have to be 
done so that we have both the conditions and the tools consistent with a 
society that is both successful and genuinely egalitarian.
    Now, I know that the Forum on Communications and Society is also 
working hard to be a catalyst for change and for better and broader use 
of technology. Of all the areas where we might work together, I would 
suggest that there are two which are absolutely vital to keep the 
information economy and all America growing strong. The first is 
Internet security and privacy, and the second is closing the digital 
divide. The first, from our

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point of view, relates to conditions; the second relates to giving all 
Americans the tools they need to make the most of their own lives in 
this remarkable time.
    We know we have to keep cyberspace open and free because it sparks 
creativity and innovation, because its infinite networks can do so much 
to bring us together. But we also know that cyberspace must be a 
community of shared responsibilities and common values.
    Last month I met with high-tech leaders to talk about making our 
networks more secure and resilient. They urged the Federal Government to 
do something we have committed to do, to lead by example, to take that 
responsibility very seriously. We have formed a Government-industry 
partnership for security. I've requested more than $2 billion from 
Congress to fund cybersecurity initiatives and research.
    Today I'm ordering a review of every Federal agency to determine our 
vulnerability to denial-of-service attacks and to make sure that Federal 
computers cannot be used by outsiders to attack others. They will be 
reporting back to my Chief of Staff, John 
Podesta, so that we can prepare a strong response. And I hope industry 
will follow that example.
    We must also do more to uphold Americans' high expectations that 
their right to privacy will be protected online. That includes making 
sure that as Government works to protect our citizens in cyberspace, it 
does not infringe on our civil liberties. We must not undermine freedom 
in the name of freedom.
    Our administration has encouraged Internet firms to work together to 
raise privacy standards. The response has been good. The share of 
commercial websites with privacy policies went from 15 percent to 66 
percent in just one year. That's a very impressive record.
    But the American people know it's still not enough. Some subjects 
are so sensitive, I believe they should have legal protection: our 
medical records, our financial records, any interactions with our 
children online. Business must find ways to give Americans the 
confidence they expect in these and other privacy concerns. So today I 
think we must all ask ourselves, and everyone in this area, do you have 
privacy policies you can be proud of? Do you have privacy policies you 
would be glad to have reported in the media? I hope that all of you will 
work with us and work together among ourselves to maximize the 
possibilities of an open Internet by securing Americans' fundamental 
right to privacy.
    I can tell you that I spend--you know, one of the things I have 
tried to do as the President is to avoid becoming isolated from the 
concerns of ordinary citizens, and among other things, I have a special 
zip code for old-fashioned mail at the White House that I gave to a 
bunch of people that I grew up with who are just citizens in all walks 
of life. And for 7 years now, they've written me about what people were 
mad at me about. [Laughter] They've written me when people thought I 
made a mistake. They've written me when they thought the Government was 
totally irrelevant to their lives because they were concerned about 
other things.
    And I also spend a lot of time just talking to people. You know, 
when I go places, very often I'll stop and just go down and have an 
unscheduled stop and get out and shake hands with people and ask them 
what's on their mind. People are worried about this. This is a big deal 
to people. You know, ordinary folks, even people who aren't online yet, 
are very excited about the prospects of this age so many of you have 
done so much to create. But they are really concerned about this. They 
are afraid they will have no place to hide.
    And so I would argue again that the continuing success of this 
phenomenal enterprise, which has no parallel in history, requires us to 
seriously take into account the core of what makes America a unique 
place, that freedom requires a certain space of privacy.
    Now, I also would say, to go to my second condition--that's about 
the conditions; this is about the tools--I think business must work with 
us to make sure that we close the faultline between those who have 
access to computers and to the Internet and those who do not. It has now 
become known as the digital divide.
    This spring I will take another one of my new markets tours designed 
to convince the private sector that places in America which

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have still not fully participated in our economy are great new markets. 
The Indian reservations, the rural areas, the inner-city neighborhoods 
are opportunities for us, and we know the only way we can fully maximize 
them is to bring the information age to every family in every community, 
yes, first to make sure all our schools have the technology and then 
that all our teachers know how to maximize it and use it but also to 
make sure that adults have access, as well.
    I want to congratulate Mayor Menino on what Boston has done, opening 
more than 80 community technology centers in underserved areas to serve 
adults, while bringing thousands of computers into schools and setting 
up training and job training programs with private sector partners. We 
should do this all over the country. I've asked Congress for tax 
incentives for companies that donate computers for technology training 
for every single new teacher in this country, and for funding to 
establish 1,000 community technology centers so that adults can also 
have access to the information economy.
    I've proposed a pilot project with industry to bring computers and 
the Internet to low income families, like Oakland's ClickStart or the 
program started by Governor King of Maine yesterday, where he's really 
going to try to get a laptop into the home of every family. It's an 
amazing thing. Let me say, he's going to do it. They will start with the 
seventh graders. Let me explain what the program is in Maine, if you 
didn't see it. They're going to start by giving every seventh grader a 
laptop, but the way they're going to do it is to make sure that the 
seventh grader will also be able to take the computer home and to try to 
involve the parents in it. And that, I think, is a remarkably good 
thing.
    I never will forget visiting a program in northern New Jersey that 
Lucent did with a school district there, where most of the kids were 
first-generation Americans, and their parents were immigrants whose 
primary language was not English. And because they were just picking one 
school district, they could make sure that there were computers in the 
home, as well. So they got all these people who would never dream of 
using a
computer to start using it in a way that enabled them to E-mail the 
teachers, E-mail the principal, and they had a dramatic drop in the 
school dropout rate and a dramatic increase in the student performance 
rate because of the connections between the two.
    So it will be interesting to follow how the Maine program works out. 
I want to give credit where credit is due. Governor Caperton, when he 
was Governor of West Virginia, was the first Governor in the country to 
virtually computerize all of the elementary schools in his State and 
give all of his kids access to this kind of technology, and most of us 
were just trying to follow in the wake here. But this is very exciting 
stuff.
    But again I will say to you, I don't think education is enough here. 
We have a chance to bring the benefits of enterprise to areas that have 
been left behind. We've got Indian reservations in this country where 
the unemployment rate is 70 percent. The unemployment rate in this 
Nation is 4.1 percent today. We have lots and lots of urban 
neighborhoods and rural areas where unemployment is still in double 
digits, where people want to work and can be trained. And a part of 
making people, especially those who are physically isolated--because 
they're in rural areas or distant Indian reservations or physically 
isolated in cities because they don't have cars to get around--a part of 
bringing them into this economy is using technology to bridge the 
distances, not only between what they know and what skills they have but 
actually where they are.
    So I think this is a big deal and, as I said in the State of the 
Union Address, if we don't do this now when we've got the strongest 
economy in our lifetime, when will we ever get around to it? We actually 
have a chance to let everybody ride along with the American economy. 
Doubtless it will slow down some day; doubtless we'll have another 
recession someday. But at least people ought to have a chance to take 
the elevator up since they get to stay on the ground floor when it's 
down. And we'll never have a better chance than we have now to do this.

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    So, in closing, let me just say, if I could make one request of 
every technology whiz in this room, it would be this: Your skills and 
your ideas and the companies that you have created have the potential 
for so much good. But no sector of the economy can be totally isolated 
from the health of the overall society. So this is a case where what is 
morally right and what is economically intelligent coincide. We have to 
think about how the networks that you dominate can close the gaps that 
divide us, light the darkness that clouds us, and spread the freedom 
that lets each of us have the chance to live our dreams.
    If we do it right, if we can make every American technologically 
literate, if we can make our Government wise not only in its own use of 
technology but in setting those conditions and giving those tools, if we 
keep building the right kind of information economy, which respects 
privacy and has security but is an entrepreneur's dream, then what we 
have achieved in the last 7 years will be just a small prolog of what 
will occur in the years ahead.
    But I'm absolutely convinced we'll do it only if we're committed to 
doing it together, if we believe everyone counts, if we believe everyone 
should have a chance, if we believe everyone has a role to play, and if 
we believe we all do better when we help each other. That's a pretty 
old-fashioned statement to end a new economy speech on, but it's the 
very best I can do.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:08 a.m. in the Silicon Valley Conference 
Center at Novell Headquarters. In his remarks, he referred to Eric 
Schmidt, chief executive officer, Novell; Elmer W. Johnson, president, 
Aspen Institute; Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah; Mayor Ron Gonzales of 
San Jose; Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston, MA; former Governors Roy 
Romer of Colorado and Gaston Caperton of West Virginia; former Mayor 
Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore, MD; Paul M. Romer, professor of economics, 
Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Gov. Angus S. King, Jr., of 
Maine.