The following is attributable to Spokesperson Heather Nauert:

Secretary Tillerson spoke today with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. Secretary Tillerson conveyed to the Foreign Minister his profound concern over the detentions of Turkish national employees of our diplomatic mission to Turkey and of several American citizens. Secretary Tillerson emphasized the importance of transparency in the accusations made by the Turkish government and the need for the Turkish government to present the evidence behind these accusations. Secretary Tillerson and Foreign Minister Cavusoglu agreed the two sides would remain in close contact to address U.S. concerns about these detentions.

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Deputy Secretary of State John J. Sullivan will travel to Tokyo and Seoul for a Deputies-level trilateral meeting hosted by the Republic of Korea on October 18. The trilateral meeting will focus on strategic coordination related to the urgent threat from DPRK’s advancing nuclear weapons program and include discussion on regional and global areas of cooperation.

The Deputy Secretary also will hold bilateral meetings in Tokyo from October 16-17 and in Seoul from October 18-19. He looks forward to engaging with U.S. Embassy staff in both Seoul and Tokyo, U.S. Forces Korea in Seoul, as well as representatives from the business community and civil society.

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Participants in the U.S. Department of State’s Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) exchange visitor program will gather at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center on October 12, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. to celebrate the 40th anniversary of U.S.-ASEAN relations and the 50th anniversary of ASEAN. Walter Douglas, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, will preside at the event with Alyson Grunder, Senior Bureau Official of the Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Other guests will include members of the diplomatic community, NGOs, think tanks, academic institutions, and U.S. lawmakers with an interest in Southeast Asia.

YSEALI, the State Department’s flagship youth exchange program focused on Southeast Asia, is key to the United States’ socio-cultural partnership with ASEAN. Created in 2014, YSEALI builds bridges between young leaders and the United States. Over 100,000 youth have joined the YSEALI network to gain leadership skills and work across borders to find solutions to regional and global challenges. YSEALI academic and professional exchanges have provided more than 1,000 youth the opportunity to visit the United States to connect with Americans. An additional 2,000 YSEALI members have participated in regional exchange workshops to build an ASEAN identity and enhance skills in the fields of economic growth, sustainable development, education, and civic engagement.

For further information, please visit the YSEALI website at https://asean.usmission.gov/yseali/ and on Twitter at @YSEALI, @USAsiaPacific, and @ECAatState.

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External links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein.

On October 11, Karen Williams, Senior Advisor for the Bureau of Political Military Affairs, U.S. Department of State; Ambassador Nelson Tabajara, Head of the Department of Defense and Security Affairs, Ministry of External Relations of Brazil; and Admiral Carlos Eduardo Arentz, Deputy-Chief of Policy and Strategy of the Ministry of Defense chaired the 2017 U.S.-Brazil Political-Military Dialogue at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C.

This will be the first iteration of this longstanding security dialogue under the Trump Administration. The U.S.-Brazil Political-Military Dialogue reflects our shared commitment to strengthen bilateral defense and security relations. The dialogue covered a broad array of political military topics including continuing efforts to enhance partnerships in security cooperation, defense trade, and peacekeeping.

For further information, please contact the Office of Congressional and Public Affairs in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at PM-CPA@state.gov, and follow PM on Twitter @StateDeptPM.

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DEPUTY SECRETARY SULLIVAN: Thank you, Thomas, for that introduction. We discovered in talking this morning that if you spend enough time in government you overlap and meet so many people. Thomas and I spent time together at OPIC about 10 years ago.

So good morning, everyone, and thanks for all of you being here and supporting this event. I am encouraged to see so many representatives from various U.S. Government agencies, including, of course, our colleagues from USAID, but from other government agencies, the private sector, academia, nonprofits, and foreign embassies. Your presence underscores the importance of this forum in gathering a group of people from every sector to talk about this exciting technology, so thank you for being here.

Blockchain has the potential to become a transformative technology of our lifetime. It is increasing its footprint in our daily lives every day and is expected to play a major role in trade, business, healthcare management, and finance, and we hope at the State Department as well. We are – we’re – in fact, we are quite confident of that. Through Blockchain we can track movements of goods in the shipping industry; we can verify someone’s ID; we can safely transfer money and payments across borders in real time.

It’s no wonder that Blockchain technology, a market that could grow to more than $40 billion by 2022 according to at least one estimate, has captured the attention of governments and international organizations worldwide. Estonia, a leader in this technology, has embraced the use of Blockchain to offer government-issued digital IDs. Last year, the Georgian Government launched a project in partnership with the private sector to register land titles using a private Blockchain. In the UAE, the government has started a goal of using Blockchain technologies to create a paperless Dubai by 2020. The Singaporean Government has also partnered with the private sector to open a center for Blockchain technology. And finally, the UN is working with a number of companies to create Blockchain pilot projects that help vulnerable populations, such as refugees, by developing economic identities and delivering humanitarian aid more efficiently.

So Blockchain technology is on the move around the world. It is, therefore, essential that we better understand this cutting-edge technology, as it becomes more ubiquitous in our economy. Today, as we consider this far-reaching technology and its potential applications across all sectors, we should have a couple of goals in mind.

First, speaking on behalf of the U.S. Government, we want to educate ourselves about how we can better leverage Blockchain technology. With so many groups here, we recognize the opportunity to explore together the potential applications of this technology, to strengthen our national security, and promote greater economic prosperity. And in particular, we’re excited about the many ways Blockchain technology could also increase transparency and accountability here at the State Department and across the federal government. In the simplest terms, we’re always open to exploring new ways to preform government functions more efficiently and effectively.

This forum also has implications, as Thomas suggested, for our ongoing redesign efforts at the State Department and USAID. We’re interested to learn whether Blockchain technology could have direct applications to many of the key features of our proposed redesign plan – for example, in maximizing the impact and accountability of foreign assistance. Two major challenges in foreign assistance that Blockchain technology could address are, first, corruption, fraud, or misappropriation of funds and, second, inefficiencies within the aid delivery process itself. This forum will include discussions of Blockchain-based aid-tracking systems that promise to bring more transparency to foreign assistance dollars from the donor to the beneficiary. That’s incredibly important to our work here.

Blockchain technology could also play an important role in improving our IT platforms. A breakout group this afternoon will evaluate the attributes of Blockchain technology that are relevant to cyber security, encryption and hashing of data, immutable records, and decentralized and distributed networks. Protecting our cyber infrastructure and providing resilient and relevant technology to the women and men of the State Department and USAID is crucial to helping them do their jobs efficiently all around the world, 24 hours a day.

In addition to learning more about your experiences with this technology and how we can better utilize it at the department and across the federal government, our second goal for this forum is to support public-private collaboration by providing an environment that will enable those potential partnerships to develop. The global challenges we face are too complex for any single entity to tackle alone. We need each other. Through these partnerships, we can take advantage of the creativity, unique capacity, and resources of all sectors to advance our diplomacy and development objectives. Nowhere is this partnership more relevant than with the new technologies that are quickly evolving.

So we look forward to spending the day exploring ways we can further collaborate and build more public-private partnerships. Blockchain technology is not a panacea; it’s not the answer to every problem. But we’re certainly hopeful that the State Department and the federal government can leverage this technology to make us more efficient and better able to serve the American people. And we know, without a doubt, that it will take all of those represented in this room and many more working together to harness this technology for more efficient and effective diplomacy and a stronger, more resilient United States.

Thank you all for being with us today. And I look forward to our discussions at this forum. (Applause.)

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External links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein.