IP: 2001: a year shaped by one day BY DAN GILLMOR

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

2001: a year shaped by one day

BY DAN GILLMOR

Mercury News Technology Columnist

We will always view 2001 through the lens of Sept. 11. The distortions, 
minor and major, have warped the way we see ourselves and the world. 
Silicon Valley and the technology arena felt the attacks as much as any 
place or industry.

So as I write the first of my two annual year-end columns, noting the 
highlights and lowlights of the previous 12 months, I'm inevitably 
observing the valley and the industry in a different context. Matters that 
didn't seem vital four months ago have surged to the foreground, and some 
things that held my rapt attention now feel almost trivial.

Normally, I list the lowlights and come back with the highlights in a 
subsequent column. In keeping with the past year's shock to our systems, it 
makes more sense to try a different approach. We'll focus this week on the 
reverberations, positive and negative, of Sept. 11.

Technology's triumph

After the United States fought Iraq a decade ago, we learned hard lessons 
about the limitations of high-tech weapons. The bombs weren't as smart, and 
the anti-missile systems weren't as accurate, as the Pentagon had claimed.

But a decade of research and development has brought us -- for better and 
worse -- much closer to the long-predicted new age of warfare. Weapons 
augmented by vastly more machine intelligence gave a visible boost to the 
anti-Taliban side in Afghanistan. Unmanned surveillance planes and 
enormously powerful spy satellites provided vital information.

No bombing campaign can be entirely ``surgical,'' as spinmeisters like to 
say. But the United States this year took advantage of increasingly 
intelligent targeting systems to hit military targets and, more than any 
combatant in any recent war, to avoid civilian casualties.

People were part of the military equation, as always, but technology served 
them well. Soldiers on the ground used advanced communications gear to help 
bomber and missile crews be more precise in their targeting.

Leveraging harm

Modern ways also triumphed for the murderers of Sept. 11. The day's horrors 
in New York and Washington brought home a grim strategic fact.

The think-tankers call it ``asymmetrical warfare'' -- applying leverage to 
technology and globalism in ways that give individuals or small groups 
disproportionate power to destroy -- and it's a prevailing reality for our 
times.

The Boeing airplanes used as missiles are marvels of modernity. The 
terrorists used our open society and infrastructure, so replete with 
sophisticated communications and financial technologies, to operate 
efficiently yet almost unnoticed as they plotted their brutality.
It's still unclear whether people connected to the attackers traded 
electronically on futures markets to generate massive profits, knowing that 
their deeds would cause certain companies' stock prices to tank in the 
aftermath. But they could have done so.

The Internet didn't collapse Sept. 11, but that may only be because no one 
attacked it with any serious force. The widespread gaps in network and 
software security are an invitation to hackers, some of whom are going to 
be dramatically more malevolent than in the past.

Asymmetrical conflict with even worse weapons seems inevitable. The 
murderer(s) who fueled our fears with anthrax used up-to-date chemical and 
biological methods, but such potential exists widely. Alarmingly, the 
ability of smart people to launch biological and chemical menaces is 
growing quickly, and we have few defenses.

Techno-cures

We can develop defenses, or at least fast-reaction capabilities. Again, 
technology will be essential.

Sniffing out explosives when screening airline baggage is just one 
essential step. The threat of nuclear weapons in cities almost requires 
some way of detecting such devices.
Just as worrisome in the long run will be biological weapons. Here again, 
we'll need an ability to rapidly sense and then respond to the threat.

Our centralized society, in which we concentrate people and resources in 
ways that invite the attention of madmen, suggests another countermeasure. 
We can use sophisticated communications and collaboration technologies -- 
first by building fast, ubiquitous networks -- to decentralize. Better 
network security will be a vital part of the mix.

Surveillance state

The Sept. 11 murderers have surely accomplished one of their goals. They 
have made America significantly less free.

The new mavens of security have convinced a majority of the people that 
major intrusions on liberty matter less than modest gains in safety. 
Technology is one of their chief tools.
Silicon Valley companies are lining up to provide the tools for the 
surveillance society that John Ashcroft is demanding. Their eagerness to 
sacrifice liberty by padding their pockets is predictable, but sad.

I wonder if they have fully contemplated the consequences. Silicon Valley's 
economic greatness, and America's, stems in part from our open society's 
tolerance -- no, our appreciation -- for non-conformist individualism and 
risk. If we lose those qualities, and we may, we will regret it.
Next week: The rest of the year in technology.

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