[LINK] Is technology an Ally?

[Rachel Polanskis]

This I found in comp.unix.solaris.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/27/technology/circuits/27TECH.html?pagewanted=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.


-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia 
grove@zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
      "People don't say sorry in this country" - Max Connors (Seachange)