SNS Tech Trends
Chaos has awakened a giant
Suddenly, the world is a much more dangerous place for terrorists and a much more complicated place for Americans. Here’s a look at the new world order.
By Mark Anderson
Many countries have been the targets of terrorist attacks in the past decade, including the United States. Why should attacking the United States be any more dangerous for Islamic extremists than attacking, say, Israel or Germany? Refinance your car.
Save big bucks.
Invest the difference.
This is the kind of miscalculation that one might forgive a non-U.S. citizen: After all, we look like lazy, arrogant tourists from abroad. Add in America's problems in Vietnam, and what is there to worry about?
What these sloppy student terrorists failed to see in U.S. history is that we come together when attacked -- which did not apply in Vietnam, or in Korea.
We may not do so well fighting others' wars, but we do a first-rate job of fighting our own. In that arena, we have a perfect score. And the reason is that, as we saw the past two weeks, everyone jumps in, the entire nation becomes committed, and no one quits until the job is done. Indeed, I am in many ways more concerned about what we will do, than about what some terrorist may do. We are much, much more dangerous.
Americans are optimistic and forward-thinking: They live in the future, not in the past. While others may see this as a failing, it is the way we are. Although none of us will ever forget the events of this week, most of us are already working on making future improvements, in our own lives, and for those around us.
We tend to turn our anger into action instead of letting it eat away. These events make us stronger as a people and give us a new sense of who we are at a time when we were needful of it. Anyone who would think that these acts would have cowed the American people was simply, and rather stupidly, uninformed about who we are.
For Americans, the Old World is already gone. That was yesterday. Now we're trying to figure out what tomorrow should look like. Here are a few things you can expect within days or weeks:
A reduction in rights
Americans will show a begrudging willingness to surrender additional rights, to ensure safety. This will include allowing roving wiretaps, searches when necessary, increased requirements for identification, and various technical changes in the environment (more sensors and cameras), all for citizens of the United States.
For non-U.S. citizens, there is going to be a much-increased level of surveillance and check-in. I would expect stringent new laws and penalties for illegal aliens, and for those here legally who are not citizens. Who does this harm? No one, on some scale. But certainly the attempt by Vicente Fox and his government to push for amnesty for illegals is completely dead. Also unlikely will be any move for illegals that allows them to stay without a complete review and vetting process.
Non-citizens in the United States just went down 15 notches on the American ladder of life.
Increased use of technology
A smart ID. It is likely we will soon see some form of national ID, after many years of fighting off such a prospect. Unlike passports, green cards and visa papers, these will be extremely difficult to forge, and will probably come in the form of smart cards.
Face-matching. Cameras will be everywhere, and technology such as that deployed in Tampa, Fla., recently (courtesy of Visionics), which matches faces in a crowd with a database of known criminals (or persons of interest), will become a way of life. Big Brother just arrived in force, if you weren't watching.
Building security. Whatever was optional yesterday, just became required. No longer is management responsible only for not losing trade secrets. Today management is responsible for providing a safe and secure workplace. This revolutionizes management's legal and ethical responsibilities, worldwide. Get ready, lawyers.
Chemical sensing. We can assume that airports and other locations will finally shell out the big bucks and include chemical sniffer sensors. One of the hijackers on the Pittsburgh flight supposedly was outfitted with a bomb, and, as far as I can tell, there is nothing today to keep you from covering your body with Semtex (plastique) and walking through those metal detectors at any airport tomorrow morning.
Some new realities
Profiling. We are going to come back at this concept in a different way. All profiling is OK, and how do we protect the rights of those profiled, once stopped? The argument against profiling was always flawed, but always represented real concerns about degradation of individual rights. If you belong to a group that creates more than its share of crimes (such as terrorist acts), you will be questioned or checked, perhaps without your even knowing it, but you will be checked.
The technical problem then becomes not over-relying on profiling, since it represents a weakness in the system; as soon as one profile is developed, it is easy for serious terrorists to send in agents who fit a different profile.
Communications. The cell phone was the star of the first week, as those trapped held last poignant conversations with loved ones from buildings and planes, and as those survivors were able (sometimes, but not in lower Manhattan, which was overwhelmed) to communicate with each other.
We learned a few lessons, with answers we already knew, about our communications systems. For me, near ground zero in D.C., it went like this: Cell phone systems failed first, then land lines failed, and suddenly the only working communications device was Steve Smith's Blackberry from Research in Motion (RIMM, news, msgs), which we used to e-mail in and out.
The Internet, for those who had access to it, remained up and robust, which is what it was designed to do during attack. If you had had a Net Phone, instead of a Verizon (VZ, news, msgs) phone, you would have been just fine, presuming you could get onto the Net. The same is true for a satellite phone, at least to date.
All of which suggests that, as I was hoping to describe to 30 senators last week, we need to get government out of industry's way in building out the wireless Net, and help, not hinder, this project.
Physical security. There is no replacement for armed marshals and locked, secure cockpit doors, since there will never be a time when we will be able to prevent incidents caused by passengers. The sooner this is implemented, the safer air travel will be.
Baggage handling will have to be revolutionized again. For the moment, skycaps are completely out of business. In the airport of the future, we will probably see baggage checking out in front again, but combined with security measures.
A new world order
The world has changed for all of us, worldwide, whether we lost friends and family, or only know those who did. While terrorism has been around for ages, our approach to it, and to finding and punishing those who practice it, has just changed dramatically. While searching out terrorists is completely different from making war against a nation, no single nation has ever been willing to spend the time and energy in this pursuit that the United States is suddenly willing to spend.
The result of the U.S. attacks will be the formation of the successor to Interpol and Europol, a new world policing body, probably led at first by U.S. agencies, with massive new funding levels and an almost unlimited charter. In the early days, this will take the form of various task groups under existing national and international policing and espionage agencies, but I expect a proposal rather quickly to coalesce these groups into a working group with its own anti-terror charter.
People have talked of the missed opportunity that the world had for peace, when President Clinton came so close at Camp David, only to be rebuffed, finally, by Arafat. I have another view: I don't think there was a chance for peace, not because Arafat didn't want it, but because he was unable to agree to it. I suspect that his own backers in the pan-Muslim world, those who are keeping Palestine alive, would not stand for an agreement with Israel.
If this is true, then it is his weakness, combined with the religious ardor of his backers, that has prevented the world from finding peace, and perhaps led to these and other killings. It is worth mentioning here that Osama bin Laden is rumored to disdain Arafat and Palestine for not being true to Fundamentalist Islam.
Terrorism will probably never end, but the cost of considering it, and of condoning it, may become so high that it becomes less common, if not less effective.
Four criminal kamikaze groups left our control on Sept. 11. They were pathetically few but viciously effective, and now their handlers are needing of quick capture or eradication. That much will be doing the world an obvious service.
How we act after that is what matters. |
