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  • From: "Christian Stalberg" <cstalberg AT develop.net>
  • To: <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Cc: <cpsr-rtp AT cpsr.org>
  • Subject: Fw: In the Next Chapter, Is Technology an Ally?
  • Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 06:59:33 -0400


this was just too good to not share it with fellow techies...


>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/27/technology/circuits/27TECH.html?pagewante
d=print
>
> September 27, 2001
>
> In the Next Chapter, Is Technology an Ally?
>
> By KATIE HAFNER
>
> Over the last two weeks, computer scientists and others who think
> about technology have wondered aloud about its likely role in
> countering terrorism -- or in carrying it out. Have the limitations
> and dangers of technology been overlooked? Where, on the other hand,
> might technological innovation emerge or be redirected as a result of
> recent events?
>
> For Ray Kurzweil, an expert in artificial intelligence and an
> innovative figure in computing, the events are already accelerating
> technologies that allow work, and people, to be dispersed rather than
> centralized. Security experts like Peter Neumann point to the renewed
> interest - and perhaps unfounded confidence - in technologies to
> confirm identities and track movements.
>
> "Overendowing high-tech solutions is riskful," Dr. Neumann said, "in
> the absence of adequate understanding of the limitations of the
> technology and the frailties and perversities of human nature."
>
> Mr. Kurzweil and Dr. Neumann, a computer scientist at SRI
> International, a research group in Menlo Park, Calif., were among six
> technology experts invited by Circuits to assess the challenges
> ahead. The other participants were Bruce Sterling, a science fiction
> author who writes frequently about technology; Lawrence Lessig, a
> professor at Stanford Law School who has written extensively on law
> and the Internet; Severo Ornstein, a retired hardware engineer and
> one of the computer scientists who worked on the original Arpanet,
> the precursor to the Internet; and Whitfield Diffie, the inventor of
> public key cryptography, a method of encoding electronic
> communications.
>
> Each has been in the public eye for a decade or more, thinking and
> writing about the promise and peril of technology. Some are more
> sanguine than others about a high-tech society.
>
> Their discussion, conducted last weekend by e-mail, touched on
> technology's possible uses in fostering security and on the issues
> that will arise along the way. Here are excerpts from the
> conversation.
>
> Q. What role will technological innovation play in responding to
terrorism?
>
> Lessig These attacks could spur a great deal of technological
> innovation. The hard question is whether the innovation will be
> tailored to protect privacy as well as support legitimate state
> interests in surveillance and control. We as a culture think too
> crudely about technologies for surveillance. The conflict is always
> framed as some grand either/or. But if we kept pressure on the
> innovators and, in particular, the government, to develop
> technologies that did both, we could preserve important aspects of
> our freedom, while responding to the real threats presented by the
> attacks.
>
> Kurzweil The Sept. 11 tragedy will accelerate a profound trend
> already well under way from centralized technologies to distributed
> ones and from the real world to the virtual world. Centralized
> technologies are subject to disruption and disaster. They also tend
> to be inefficient, wasteful and harmful to the environment.
> Distributed technologies, on the other hand, tend to be flexible,
> efficient and relatively benign in their environment effects.
>
> In the immediate aftermath of this crisis, we already see a dramatic
> movement away from meetings and conferences in the real world to
> those in the virtual world, including Web- based meetings,
> Internet-based videoconferencing and other examples of virtual
> communication.
>
> Despite the recent collapse of market value in telecommunications,
> bandwidth nonetheless continues to expand exponentially, which will
> continue to improve the resolution and sense of realism in the
> virtual world. We'll see a great deal of innovation to overcome many
> of the current limitations.
>
> Diffie Revision of the air traffic control system together with that
> of other industrial command and control phenomena will push
> reliability and security in computing and computer communications.
> Such systems may provide a testing ground for the command and control
> of ballistic missile defense systems in which response times may be
> slower but the spectrum of phenomena requiring analysis will be
> broader.
>
> Attempts to control the use of cryptography and other security
> measures will make the development of improved command and control
> networks more difficult and may impede this task by limiting the
> people who can contribute to approved government and contractor
> personnel.
>
> Lessig This "scenario of terror" was not low tech, for its impact was
> not just the impact of the souls who were lost. As powerful was the
> effect of a world watching as it occurred. The technology of a
> networked world meant that scores of television cameras would be
> trained on the south tower, to capture the horror of the delayed
> second impact. And the extraordinary impact of these killings in two
> cities is the product of a heavily integrated - technologically
> integrated - world community. Terrorists take advantage of this
> technology to have the effect they seek. Elsewhere, in places without
> this technology, it would not have the same effect.
>
> Diffie Larry, this is a great observation. I wonder if it will be
> possible to discover whether the attackers had that subtlety of
> thought.
>
> Q. Larry Lessig says that the hard question is whether innovation
> will be tailored to protect privacy as well as support legitimate
> state interests in surveillance and control. Do you agree that we as
> a culture tend to think too crudely about technologies for
> surveillance? Where do you think the trade-offs should be?
>
> Neumann The most elaborate technological measures are likely to be
> inadequate, misused and subverted. Surveillance is all too easily
> misused. Trapdoors in cryptography to facilitate law enforcement can
> be misused. Existing system security is seriously flawed. As a
> result, we must avoid expecting technological security measures to be
> adequate in protecting privacy. So, ultimately, we have a
> double-edged sword. Techniques to protect can be used to subvert,
> attack or otherwise compromise human rights, nation states and
> organizations. The problems are inherently human, and technology can
> be used for good or bad.
>
> Sterling The question is badly put. I don't worry much about Big
> Brother states surveilling average citizens. It's just not
> cost-effective, and what Mom says in Peoria just doesn't interest the
> serious power players in spydom. I do worry plenty about sneaky
> political operatives carrying out dirty-tricks campaigns against the
> private lives of prominent politicians. The payoff there is huge. It
> can destabilize legitimate governments more effectively than
> terrorism.
>
> I don't think there's a good trade- off here. If we're going to use
> surveillance as a weapon, then we should trust our democratic
> traditions and arm the population with it.
>
> Kurzweil The nature of these terrorist attacks and the organization
> behind it puts civil liberties in general at odds with legitimate
> state interests in surveillance and control. The entire basis of our
> law enforcement system, and indeed much of our thinking about
> security, is based on an assumption that people are motivated to
> preserve their own lives and well-being. That is the logic behind all
> of our strategies from law enforcement on the local level to mutual
> assured destruction on the world stage. But a foe that values the
> destruction of both its enemy and itself is not amenable to this line
> of attack.
>
> Lessig This is a critically important insight. The real problem we
> face is not slowness in technological innovation. The real problem is
> slowness in legal and civil rights innovation in response to the
> technological change. It was not until the late 1960's that the
> Supreme Court finally held that wiretapping was regulated by the
> Fourth Amendment.
>
> The reason for this failing has lots to do with the way lawyers
> think. We are reactive traditionalists. It is hard to think
> creatively. But if we used the same kind of innovative creativity
> that our Framers used in crafting our government, we could craft
> creative balances between technological capabilities and human
> weakness. Technologies can't be guaranteed to be used only for the
> good. But technologies placed within well-crafted institutional
> structures can be made more likely safe than not.
>
> Diffie (Disclosure: I am in the protection business.)
>
> In my view the natural trade-off is a broad public right to inquire
> (i.e., listen to the radio, point infrared sensors around, make video
> recordings, analyze the data from the sensors with computers, etc.)
> and the right of the individual to employ protection from
> surveillance (cryptography, insulated walls, wearing a mask, using
> pseudonyms, etc.). This presumes a commercial right to make and sell
> products that support the individual's desire for privacy.
>
> I read in the documents of the revolutionary era a recognition of a
> broad right of the individual to act on self-perceived interest and
> generally not to be required to cooperate with someone else's view of
> those interests. This seems to me roughly what freedom means. The
> trends in contemporary society that most bother me are not so much
> government use of wiretaps or video cameras but such things as the
> requirement that cash transactions over $10,000 be reported to the
> I.R.S., that I must show identification to travel, etc.
>
> Ornstein I think there is a genuine tension between the desire for
> security and for privacy/individual freedom. This is just an instance
> of the more general conflict between the needs and desires of the
> individual and those of the larger society.
>
> Today's technology permits small numbers of people to wreak a
> disproportionate amount of havoc. (Without jet airplanes, the
> hijackers couldn't have done much damage with their box cutters.) I
> suspect the debate about where to draw the security line will
> probably be ongoing and will depend on how much damage occurs in the
> future: The more damage, the tighter we'll circle the wagons.
>
> Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
>
> --
> Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.
> Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
> "The Life of Reason," 1906, George Santayana (1863-1952)
> --
> Robert Guerra <rguerra AT yahoo.com>
> PGP Keys <http://pgp.greatvideo.com/keys/rguerra/>
>




  • Fw: In the Next Chapter, Is Technology an Ally?, Christian Stalberg, 09/28/2001

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