IP: Soliciting ideas to fight terrorism is right approach by Dan Gilmor

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

The Pentagon is ``looking high and low for good ideas to combat 
terrorism.'' Good idea.
On the DefenseLink Web site (www.defenselink.mil), the public face of the 
U.S. military, you'll find a link to a request for ``Your Ideas to Counter 
Terrorism.'' It's on the lower right-hand side of the page.
Assuming someone at the Defense Department actually reads every suggestion, 
and that others are willing to act on smart initiatives that didn't 
originate within the military, this site is potentially a valuable piece of 
our response to modern threats.
The military and law enforcement are, almost by definition, centralized 
entities. But they're facing a decentralized opponent in a kind of combat 
known as ``asymmetrical warfare'' -- where one side is big and powerful by 
traditional measures, but vulnerable to massive damage in an age where one 
individual or small group can leverage technology in horrific ways.
There's growing recognition of the value in decentralizing people and data 
at a time when big, centralized operations may be targets. But we need to 
find ways to use technology in another way, to bring the nation's 
collective energy and brainpower to bear on the threat.
As Sun Microsystems' Bill Joy has said so memorably, the smartest people 
don't work for any one organization. Tapping the power of everyone is the 
way to accomplish things -- and technology is giving us the ability to do 
more of that.
The Pentagon's Web site, more of a national suggestion box than anything, 
is a start. But it's only that.
I hope people from the military and law-enforcement, not to mention the 
diplomatic and public-health communities, are logging into a variety of 
online chat rooms and discussion boards where smart (OK, also not-so-smart) 
people are discussing the situation. I'm not expert enough on such things 
to know how valid their ideas are, but I almost always learn something when 
I visit tech-related boards, even though I have to sort through plenty of 
dross to find the valuable stuff.
John Robb, who served in the U.S. Air Force special operations unit and is 
now president and chief operating officer at Silicon Valley-based UserLand 
Software, has been thinking about asymmetry and its consequences. I asked 
him how we could use the power at the edges of networks and society to 
counteract the bad guys.
Among his suggestions: ``Build a feedback loop'' that greatly expands on 
the Pentagon's suggestion box but also narrows down the individual questions.
``Marshall McLuhan first proposed this (and I believe it): For any problem 
there is a person or persons in a large population of educated people that 
don't see it as a problem,'' Robb wrote in an e-mail. ``We need a feedback 
loop that can filter up knowledge and insight. For example: If you have 
seen a loophole in airport security and have a solution as to how to 
correct it, there should be a mechanism for getting that information to the 
people that can make the change.''
Note the direction of the information, from the bottom to the top -- or, as 
I prefer to see it, from the edge to the middle.
An extension of the feedback loop, Robb said, is to create much more 
targeted ``knowledge networks'' tapping into specific pools of information.
``Our foreign service and military units don't have enough Pushtu 
speakers,'' he wrote, referring to one of Afghanistan's dominant languages. 
``However, I am sure we have tens of thousands living in the U.S. right 
now. Why not tap them for expertise in real-time?'' How? By giving soldiers 
satellite phones they can use to call Pushtu speakers who could serve as 
translators.
The public-health world could take smart advantage of these kinds of 
techniques. Bioterrorism, in fact, may absolutely require them.
Ronald E. LaPorte, a public-health expert at the University of Pittsburgh, 
has proposed an ``Internet civil defense'' using the power of networks to 
help neighbors watch out for each other. It would operate along similar 
lines as the ad-hoc software virus protection system, he told USA Today 
last month, where people find the virus and others find ways to combat it.
Would such a system work? Who knows? But the Lancet medical journal, which 
has extremely high standards, thought enough of the idea to publish an 
article co-authored by LaPorte. In other words, it's worth looking into.
When the stakes are this high, and the threat this different, we should be 
looking for the best ideas wherever they originate. I'm betting that the 
center won't hold if we waste the power at the edges.
Do you have ideas along these lines? Please come to my online discussion 
forum. Your ideas are, no doubt, better than mine. But that's the whole 
point. We need to think about this together.


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