IP: Smart use of tax dollars best boost for national security by Dab Gilmor

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

BY DAN GILLMOR
Mercury News Technology Columnist

OK, we're in trouble. Now let's get a grip, recognizing that panic is the 
enemy of clarity, and find a way to turn turmoil to our long-range advantage.

America is poised to spend uncounted billions of dollars to boost our 
national security. We plainly need to make an investment.

But if we are smart we'll remember that national security is about more 
than weapons and spies -- that economic and social stability are 
national-security issues, too.

We should use this opportunity to invest in things that will help us years 
and decades from now, not just tomorrow and next month. On any list of such 
national investments, three stand out for me right now: public health, 
decentralized communications and energy independence. All have strong 
technology components and also would ultimately be economic boosts for the 
nation.
Despite a belated recognition late in the Clinton presidency that the 
nation's public health system was grossly unprepared for potential, now 
real, threats to America, we are far from having a system that can protect 
us from or properly respond to known dangers, much less new ones being 
concocted by mass murderers out there.

Medicine makes progress in all wars, a sad but real effect of slaughter. 
Emergency care has gotten vastly better because of treatment of battlefield 
trauma, for example.

Being prepared in the new war means more than stockpiling drugs and 
vaccines that may or may not work with certain diseases. It means 
developing a public-health system that has vastly better capacity to 
discover, treat and then prevent outbreaks set off by terrorists.

The progress we've seen in bioengineering and biotechnology, both of which 
increasingly rely on information technology, is heartening. Start-ups and 
big companies are on the verge of creating the tools we must develop to 
deal with disease or chemically created outbreaks.

The benefits would extend beyond managing bioterrorism. If we can have a 
system this agile and robust, we'll be better prepared for all kinds of 
medical trouble and ultimately have in place a structure to support a 
vastly healthier America in a general way.

Creating a nationwide broadband network is less obviously a 
national-security issue. Here's the rationale, and a prescription for 
getting it done.

The need to decentralize is plain enough, given the logical tendency of 
terrorists to attack targets where they can create the most death and 
destruction of property -- the latter including data without which 
companies cannot continue -- in one evil act. Maintaining communications 
during crises is essential, and the best way to do it is to make sure that 
attacks or natural catastrophes can't wipe out major portions of the 
communications grid.

We also know that tomorrow's economy will be based in large part on 
information. Fail-safe broadband communications would give us vastly more 
flexibility in the way we work, learn and, yes, play. New industries would 
emerge and help drive the economy forward.

America should resolve to build fiber-optic connections to virtually every 
home and business. The taxpayers should pay for this, but the government 
should not control the result. It should ensure that we all have the 
connections we need, and then get out of the way as entrepreneurs and big 
companies alike light up the fiber.

Our energy mess is ongoing and appalling. America depends on sources of 
energy that are both interruptible and non-renewable.

Technology can help solve this, if we resolve to build a system that relies 
first on conservation and then on renewable energy sources. We need to curb 
our thirst for oil. And we need to rely on decentralized, micro-power 
plants, not the massive plants and power lines that are so vulnerable to 
attacks.

These are investments, not pork-barrel schemes. And we should pay for them 
the old-fashioned way -- by investing our tax dollars.

The first step, but probably not the last one, should be to rescind the 
outrageous, unbalanced tax cuts for the rich that were enacted earlier this 
year. That idea will infuriate the selfish few who are getting the most 
benefits from the cuts, but I hope they'll remember something.

This is a national emergency. Bin Laden and his associates want to kill us 
and bring down the world economy. These murderers and zealots think we 
Americans are soft, that in our selfish penchant for SUVs and bigger houses 
and luxuries, we are going to wilt under the pressure.
We should be willing to make some sacrifices in this war -- and that means 
more than just waiting in long lines at airports.

I stand to benefit personally from the tax cuts. But I would much rather 
invest in America's health, communications and energy independence, just as 
the nation invested in battleships during World War II and the interstate 
highway system a decade later, than have more spare cash.


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