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 Dr Peter Neumann point to the renewed interest -- and perhaps unfounded confidence -- in technologies to confirm identities and track movements.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"Overendowing high-tech solutions is riskful," Neumann said, "in the absence of adequate understanding of the limitations of the technology and the frailties and perversities of human nature."
Kurzweil and Neumann, a computer scientist at SRI International, a research group in Menlo Park, California, were among six technology experts invited by The New York Times 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.
New York Times: What role will technological innovation play in responding to terrorism?
Lawrence 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.
Ray 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.
Whitfield 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.
New York Times: 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?
Peter 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.
Bruce 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 1960s 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 [ie, 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 US$10,000 be reported to the IRS, that I must show identification to travel, etc.
Severo 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.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
Tropical Storm Usagi strengthened to a typhoon yesterday morning and remains on track to brush past southeastern Taiwan from tomorrow to Sunday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was approximately 950km east-southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan proper’s southernmost point, the CWA said. It is expected to enter the Bashi Channel and then turn north, moving into waters southeast of Taiwan, it said. The agency said it could issue a sea warning in the early hours of today and a land warning in the afternoon. As of 2pm yesterday, the storm was moving at
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
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