IP: The New Economy's First War?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: David Akin <dakin () ctv ca>
> To: "'farber () cis upenn edu'" <farber () cis upenn edu>
> Subject: The New Economy's First War?
> Date:  Tue, 30 Oct 2001 23:00:09 -0500
> X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21)
>
> Hi Dave -- Hi IPers!
>
> Toronto just finished hosting the International Association of Chiefs of
> Police. The annual conference attracted 18,000 in San Diego last year. Even
> though it was nearly November in Toronto and it's tough nowadays to get
> people to travel, 15,000 law enforcement types have been up here for the
> last few days.
>
> A Comdex-sized trade show (OK: I exaggerate but not by much) accompanies
> these IACP conferences featuring some very cool law enforcement vehicles,
> guns, and gadgets.
>
> But the trade show part also features vendors like Sun, Oracle, Motorola,
> and lots of other tech companies -- not much of a surprise, I suppose, but,
> given the new security imperatives in North America, I was keen to see what
> sorts of software and hardware solutions the tech industry is pitching at
> law enforcement. Software companies are pitching the idea that they can
> design database programs that can pull objects out of disparate legacy
> databases and, using real-time, on-the-fly queries, can mine all sorts of
> data right down to the traffic ticket data and tie that into federal and
> state (and, I assume, international) bad guy databases. "There was probably
> a lot of information about the people who did this [the Sept. 11 attacks] in
> the system. We just didn't know about it," an integrator who sells to the
> crime/law enforcement community said in a presentation today.
>
> Motorola's PrintTrak division has been selling fingerprinting technology for
> years. They have a new product that lets officers in the field take your
> fingerprint at a roadside stop, send that print over a wireless network back
> to HQ, compare it to millions of other prints in a federal and/or state
> database and let the the officer on the scene know who that fingerprint
> belongs to and what they're all about.
>
> Motorola is also  positioning fingerprinting stuff as a border control
> technology. (The intelligence that US special ops forces in Afghanistan were
> collecting? Probabably fingerprints from whatever facility they were in
> which they'll dump into US Immigration Dept. databases for future checks.)
> Canada is the the single largest trading partner of the U.S.,of course, and
> most of that trade is in trucks going back and forth along the world's
> longest undefended border. Can technology keep this border open and still
> secure it? Blessed if I know.
>
> It's all neat stuff when you see it up close. Some cops are using some
> pretty cool apps. In San Diego, they're running an app called Yahoo for
> Cops. They have two servers running this app: One server is called Cagney,
> the other is Lacey. Meanwhile, a company called The Templar Corp. is selling
> MyInformant.com as a portal for law enforcement types.
>
> And here's my solicitation to Ipers: I'm interested in hearing your thoughts
> on this premise (off-list to dakin () globeandmail ca please cc 
> dave () farber net], if you care): For the
> last 60 years, the U.S. military has looked to Boeing, Lockheed-Martin,
> MacDonnell Douglas and the aeronautics/aviation industry to invent and
> manufacture the weapons it needed to prosecute WWII, Korea, the Vietnam War,
> the Gulf War, etc. But now, for the War on Terrorism, the most valuable
> weapons the U.S. military needs won't be produced by those aeronautics
> businesses. This time, the U.S. military will be looking to Oracle, Sun,
> EDS, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Microsoft and the rest of the U.S. tech
> industry to give it the sophisticated database analysis and communications
> tools it needs to find the terrorist needles in the world's haystacks. This
> is the New Economy's first war, the first war of the dot-com generation. Am
> I exaggerating? Do folks in the tech business feel this sense of mission?
>
>
> Thanks, Dave.
>
> David Akin
> ----------
> National Business and Technology Correspondent, CTV News
> Contributing Writer, The Globe and Mail
> ----------
> 444 Front St. W.
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> VOX: 416.313.2503
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> dakin () ctv ca / dakin () globeandmail ca
> http://www.ctvnews.com / http://www.globeandmail.ca


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