Carlos Moreira Article

1. 4 7ZERMATT SUMMIT EDITION
Humanizing
technology
With his cybersecurity
company WISekey,
Swiss entrepreneur
Carlos Moreira is on a
mission ‘to put people
back at the center of
the Internet’.
F
ACEBOOK IS SELLING OUR
personal data. Fake
news influences pub-
lic opinion and chang-
es the outcome of
elections. Artificial
intelligence threatens
to make human beings second class
citizens in their own world. There are
plenty of reasons to be concerned about
the future of technology. Yes, questions
are asked and debates organized, but in
the global center of technology—Silicon
Valley—business is still mostly as usu-
al: billions are made with initiatives that
make our lives easier but that also have
side-effects that remain—convenient-
ly—more or less hidden.
Is there a healthier alternative? The
answer to that question leads, halfway
across the globe, to Geneva. In this city
that hosts the European headquarters
of the United Nations (UN), Swiss entre-
preneur Carlos Moreira, is on a mission
to protect the individual in the hi-tech
world. Moreira has unexpected creden-
tials. He was Chief Security Officer of the
UN for many years. That experience led
him to starting WISekey, a cybersecurity
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2. 4 8 ZERMATT SUMMIT EDITION
company in 1999. “Our vision is to put
people back at the center of gravity of
the Internet”, Moreira says. “The human
part of the Internet was never designed;
it started as a connection of computers.”
In Moreira’s vision of “humaniz-
ing technology”, objects, hardware,
the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial
Intelligence (AI), blockchain and much
more are used as tools to serve, empow-
er and rotate around humans, but never
to replace people. “The human being is
the most perfect algorithm. We are the
most complete technology ever put on
this planet”, he says.
Respect for the human being makes
sense in Geneva, a world capital of hu-
man rights. But how can the city at the
edge of the Alps lead a counter-rev-
olution against the Internet giants of
California? Moreira: “People tend to
forget that the world wide web was in-
vented here in Geneva in 1990.” Indeed,
English scientist Tim Berners-Lee is
credited with writing the code for the
first web browser while employed at
the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN) in Geneva. “Silicon
Valley has been very smart in building
a ten trillion-dollar ecosystem out of an
invention that was done in Switzerland,”
Moreira continues.
Geneva is also the capital of inter-
national standards. The city hosts
the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO), which to date—
according to the ISO website—has
registered 22,266 standards that the
whole world agrees on. “Standards are
required for the Internet as well”, says
Moreira. “The Internet cannot continue
to be abused by some companies that
are making a lot of money by turning
people into objects of their operations.”
The Swiss entrepreneur is blunt: “There
is absolutely no way that you can create
a company with a market valuation of
a trillion dollars (a reference to Apple
that recently set that record—JK) by just
doing things right. You can only do so by
making abuses.”
Moreira is encouraged by the recent
public outrage about Facebook’s poli-
cies around private data. “Global public
opinion is going in our direction. A few
years ago, people did not understand us
when we warned them that they should
be careful with social media networks,
because they were stealing their data.”
The WISekey alternative is sim-
ple: there should be a clear difference
between your data and your so-called
Personal Identifiable Information (PII).
In other words: you can store your vaca-
tion and family pictures online, and you
can book your tickets as well as your
tennis court appointments. However,
there is no need to connect that infor-
mation to your personal identity—
where you live, who your spouse and
your children are, et cetera. “Data pro-
viders and servers don’t need to know
who you are”, says Moreira. The “who
you are” is private and should always re-
main under your consent. You may want
to share that information with another
party, but such sharing should only be
possible because you unconditionally
give your consent. It is a very different
model. Moreira: “The Internet compa-
nies of Silicon Valley have become tre-
mendously wealthy because they make
money by monetizing your personal in-
formation.”
It seems almost impossible to imag-
ine how to re-capture your privacy and
still continue to use the Internet as you
do today. However, that is exactly what
WISeKey, as the first provider in the
world, has been offering since 2010. The
company offers an app (WISeID in the
app store and WISeID.com) that allows
users to encrypt their Facebook account,
their browser, text messages et cetera to
protect the privacy of their communica-
tion. WISeKey protects against hacking
but it also protects your personal infor-
mation from being involuntarily used
for advertising.
“There is
absolutely no
way that you
can create
a company
with a market
valuation of a
trillion dollars
by just doing
things right”
Though you may not have heard about
WISeKey yet, don’t think that the Swiss
company, that is listed at the Zurich
stock exchange, is a niche player. The
company has customers in more than
140 countries and WISeKey protection
has been installed on 3.6 billion web
browsers and 1.6 billion mobile oper-
ating systems. In addition, WISeKey
encryption is included in 250 million
emails sent every year as well as in one
billion chips.
WISeKey also plays a pioneering in
the development of a technology that—
in Moreira’s vision—will play a key role
in the future organization of societies:
the blockchain. Moreira: “We need to
demystify blockchain. The technology
provides one specific function that the
Internet does not yet have: the transfer
of value.” The Internet allows us to eas-
ily exchange information. But we never
send the real thing. We send copies and
keep the original documents ourselves.
That does not work with money. If I send
you $100, I cannot keep that $100 at

3. 4 9ZERMATT SUMMIT EDITION
the same time. That is the problem that
blockchain solves. The technology pro-
vides a decentralized ledger that guar-
antees that when I send $100, I don’t
have that amount anymore.
Today, we use banks to guarantee
these transactions. “But they collect a lot
of money doing that”, says Moreira. He
foresees that peer-to-peer and coin-to-
coin transactions will ultimately replace
the role of the banks in what will be
perhaps the most disruptive revolution
caused by the Internet. WISeKey aims
to lead the blockchain development to
make sure that “users can remain in
constant control of their digital identi-
ty”. The company’s involvement with the
blockchain technology is so critical, ac-
cording to Moreira, because the technol-
ogy will reach further and deeper than
financial transactions only. WISeKEy
has designed an electronic voting sys-
tem based on blockchain. Blockchain
can also be used to register land titles
in developing countries which protects
farmers against government corruption.
After 20 years of building foundations
and with a “cybersecurity DNA” deeply
embedded at the core of the company,
Carlo Moreira sees WISeKey emerg-
ing as a global platform to provide a
safe and secure alternative for Google,
Youtube, Facebook, et cetera. This will
be a place where users can connect all
elements—the Internet of Things—of
their online lives. The challenge is mas-
sive. In the next two years an estimated
50 billion devices will be connected. In
some ten years, there will be five billion
people and one trillion devices online.
“The challenge for cybersecurity is go-
ing to be exponential”, says Moreira.
“We need to grow very fast to cope with
that threat.” WISeKey is working with
governments and international orga-
nizations to meet the challenges of the
next generation of the Internet. It is
a long-term future of—what Moreira
calls—“sustainable” technology that
serves people “in better and more effi-
cient ways without abusing and replac-
ing them”.
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