Facebook’s former security chief warns of tech’s ‘negative impacts’ — and has a plan to help solve them

For two years, Alex Stamos was the Facebook executive tasked with defending the company’s systems against Russian interference and other critical threats. Now the former chief security officer, who left the social network in Aug, says Facebook — and the entire technology industry — needs a systems of checks and balances to help it weigh the complex decisions Silicon Valley companies are making in areas including security and democratic expression. Stamos plans to announce the creation of an institute to do that, in some of his first public remarks since leaving Facebook and joining Stanford University as an adjunct professor and Hoover fellow.  He hopes the new institute, called the Stanford Internet Observatory, will help unite “sometimes warring factions” of academia, tech companies and Washington policymakers to work together to help solve “the negative impacts technology can have on society,” he said. The Observatory will aim to assist technology companies in their investigations — “a bridge between multiple platforms fighting the same problems,” he said — by sharing data and providing more transparency and accountability to their security challenges.