05-11-2002
GOVERNMENT: The Future Is Here
The federal government often doesn't change the wallpaper until it's so
old it's peeling off the walls. Waiting until then may seem to be less
expensive, but it's really not.
It's May now, the beginning of fire season out West. At the National
Interagency Fire Center in Boise, the pilots are readying their fleet of
spotting planes. Actually, "fleet" is probably not the right
word: Three planes-a King Air B-90, a Super King B-200, and a new Cessna
Citation Bravo, the Forest Service's first jet-patrol the skies. The area
they cover is truly vast. Not just the huge U.S. forests of Alaska and the
Western states, but all of North America. "We've been to fires in
Ontario, Canada, and as far south as Guatemala," Woody Smith, an
electronics technician in Boise said on May 8 while one of the planes was
spotting fires in New Mexico. "We could use a little more help,
sure."
Those planes carry infrared cameras that can spot an 8-inch
"hotspot" from 14,000 feet. They typically detect 10 to 15 fires
while flying their grids-although Smith has spotted as many as 30 in one
night. That's the good news. The bad news is that the planes have no
satellite uplink and no computer network into which they can download this
information. The flight crews relay the information to the fire bosses the
same way they have since the Vietnam War: They land the planes near the
fires and hand the film to an infrared interpreter. It can take from 30
minutes up to four hours to get the information where it needs to
be.
Here's how the U.S. Air Force does a similar task: It launches General
Atomics Aeronautical Systems-built Predators or Northrop Grumman-built
Global Hawks over the skies of Afghanistan and Pakistan at altitudes of up
to 60,000 feet, keeps them up for days on end, and transmits the pictures
they take via satellite to ships in the Persian Gulf. Both types of planes
are drones, meaning they're unmanned. The high-flying Global Hawk jets are
equipped with on-board computers, which control-and even land-the planes.
The Predators are steered by controllers on the ground, who can direct
them to fire weapons at military targets.
On Capitol Hill, the current buzzword for such state-of-the-art hardware
and the accompanying computer systems is "transformational"
technologies. They surely are. But what should Americans think, then,
about that retro fire-fighting gear in Idaho? Why can't Predators fly over
the national parks and zap small fires with chemical retardants before
they grow into dangerous wildfires? Science fiction writer William Gibson
once explained it this way: "The future is here. It's just not
equally distributed." Gibson was referring to the "digital
divide" between well-off Americans and the underclass, but his point
has a broader context, which was brought into clearer focus on September
11, the day the gulf between military technology and, say, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service's passe record-keeping system suddenly seemed
dangerously wide.
'Sideways' Scenarios
When Sterling uttered his lyrical phrase about wallpaper, he was
addressing the National Academy of Sciences' convocation on technology and
education. It was the first year of the Clinton administration. The
Internet was still a cool thing to invoke. Aware that Washington policy
makers were pretty chary of applying high-tech solutions to traditional
social ills, Sterling was positively evangelistic about the possibilities
of a technological future. The author of Zeitgeist and other books told
the assembled wonks that although novelists and futurists tended to weave
best-case or worst-case scenarios, in real life there are mainly
"sideways-case scenarios." He noted that the Internet began as a
Cold War military project but flourished as a tool for scholarly research,
commerce, and play.
"It was designed for purposes of military communication in a United
States devastated by a Soviet nuclear strike-originally, the Internet was
a post-apocalypse command grid," Sterling said. "And look at it
now! It's as if some grim fallout shelter had burst open and a full-scale
Mardi Gras parade had come out. Ladies and gentlemen, I take such enormous
pleasure in this that it's hard to remain properly skeptical. I hope that
in some small way I can help you to share my deep joy and pleasure in the
potential of networks, my joy and pleasure in the fact that the future is
unwritten."
That's one vision. But following Sterling to the dais that day-it was May
10, 1993-was a tall, thin figure with a somewhat darker worldview: William
Gibson himself. The leader of a generation of "cyber-punk"
writers, Gibson is the originator of the term "cyber-space,"
which he coined in his acclaimed 1984 novel, Neuromancer. By then, Gibson
had given considerable thought to the technology Al Gore once dubbed the
"information superhighway." And he knew enough to be
concerned.
"Realistically speaking, I look at the proposals being made here and
I marvel," Gibson said wryly in response to the
computer-in-every-classroom talk that dominated the seminar. "A
system that in some cases isn't able to teach basic evolution-a system
bedeviled by the religious agendas of textbook censors-now proceeds to
throw itself open to a barrage of ultra-high-bandwidth information from a
world of Serbian race-hatred, Moslem fundamentalism, and Chinese Mao
Zedong thought."
Thus did the world's foremost science fiction writer reveal his skepticism
about human nature and his prescience: The sectarian fanatics who attacked
the United States eight years later, killing some 3,000 people,
communicated with each other through cyber-space, researched potential
targets in cyber-space-and continue to spew their hatred through
cyber-space. The murderers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl
had a free Hotmail account. The point is that technology itself is not a
force for evil or a force for good. "It's just a force," says
Gregory Fossedal, chairman of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution,
"that is determined by the good or evil of human beings who use
it."
There is also a parallel conundrum associated with technology: In a
free-market democracy with a tradition of individualism (the United
States), the very factors that help produce a stunning gusher of
innovation-unfettered intellectual freedom, a profit motive, the fact that
no one is really in charge-also serve to impede government's ability to
deploy such technologies to their maximum efficiency.
After America was attacked, President Bush and the top officials of his
government reordered their departments, their priorities, and their very
lives for the purpose of stopping terrorism. They reflexively turned to
cutting-edge technology to help them. "We think there's a market for
these products that are either on the research board or in the back of
your mind-or down the road," Office of Homeland Security Director Tom
Ridge told the Electronic Industries Alliance on April 23. "Biotech,
infotech, you name it. We're going to look to the technology
sector."
Ridge is certainly correct to turn to Silicon Valley for help in solving
the nation's problems. But as it happens, incorporating technology wisely
was already Washington's challenge before September 11. There are numerous
technologies that, if deployed by government, would improve the quality of
life, preserve natural resources, save money, address seemingly
intractable social and economic problems and, in the process,
fundamentally alter the nature of the debate on age-old Washington
political questions.
Consider the forest fires that those pilots in Boise are supposed to
battle with their 1960s technology. In 1988, after a devastating wildfire
ravaged one-third of Yellowstone National Park, the nation debated the
wisdom of the Park Service's "let it burn" policy. In truth,
that policy-whatever its ecological merits-has long been the de facto
policy for the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management in dealing
with most major fires. These agencies simply lack the wherewithal to put
out large fires in roadless areas. But the technology to fight them may
already exist.
Today, during a big fire, Forest Service crews utilize pictures from
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites to help set
their perimeters. But much greater technology is on hand. The oceanic
agency's future NPOESS sensors and NASA's existing Hyperion sensors are
capable of using hyperspectral imagery-colors not discernable by the human
eye. This means these satellites could determine the water content, and
thus the flammability level, of the nearby flora. They could measure wind
direction and thereby predict where a fire would be in an hour.
In addition, the Defense Department has recently signed contracts with
Lockheed Martin and TRW to launch a fleet of satellites that could change
everything. It's called the SBIRS High and SBIRS Low programs. (It's
pronounced "sibbers," and stands for Space-Based Infrared
System). SBIRS Low will consist of some two dozen TRW satellites with
amazing capabilities. Their primary mission will be to detect missile
launches, but these fast-moving birds could do much more. They could not
only identify a fire as soon as it broke out, they could conceivably
identify the human who started it.
But they could do all this only if the Air Force agrees to share satellite
time, if the Forest Service buys the computers to process all this
information, and if it trains its people to use them-and so forth.
"That's where you'd need an advocate in the agencies," says
Richard Dal Bello, executive director of the Satellite Industry
Association. "Is there somebody there who knows enough to get it
done? Is there anybody in Congress who cares? That's the human dimension,
where the magic we call politics comes in."
Would this be expensive? Yes, but how much does a forest cost? Or a human
life? In 1994, nine smoke jumpers and five members of a Colorado
"hotshot" crew were killed when a small 50-acre blaze blew up
into a 2,400-acre wildfire on a July afternoon on Storm King Mountain.
Those firefighters had basically the same equipment (axes, saws, shovels,
and parachutes) as the 13 smoke jumpers who died in Montana's infamous
Mann Gulch fire-in 1949. Add to the cost of human lives and wildlife and
timber this number: $1 billion. That's how much the federal government
spent fighting forest fires in 1994 without computers.
Getting Smart
So-called "smart cards," which contain chips or microprocessors,
have offered a technologically feasible way to keep track of visitors to
the United States for more than five years. By including biometric
information, smart cards could provide much more security, as fake-proof
identity cards, for everything from driver's licenses to passports and
visas. Until recently, civil libertarians chaffed at the idea of national
identity cards, and state legislatures balked at the cost. That may be
about to change. On May 1, two Virginia congressmen, Republican Tom Davis
and Democrat James P. Moran, introduced a bill directing states to turn
their driver's licenses into smart cards. "We think what happened
September 11 makes a compelling case to do it now," Moran
said.
There is more where this came from. Existing technology could give
Americans smart cars, smart roads, smart energy meters-and much smarter
consumer medical devices. David J. Farber, a University of Pennsylvania
professor who is an expert in engineering and telecommunications, said one
example of a medical advance that is already feasible would be a chip
embedded in the arm of a person with Type I diabetes. Such a chip could
modulate the flow of insulin into the body far more precisely than today's
insulin pumps. It could also record and transmit minute-to-minute data
about blood-sugar levels, and dial 911 if a patient fell into insulin
shock.
In an interview, Farber suggested that if Congress had more diabetics,
federal money for such systems would be plentiful. That's probably not
precisely the problem, but he is onto something about technology and
Capitol Hill. The most recent edition of Vital Statistics on Congress
shows that only one member of either the House or the Senate has an
aeronautics background, nine have engineering backgrounds, and 17 have
backgrounds in medicine. (Only one senator, Democrat Maria Cantwell of
Washington state, worked for an Internet company.) By contrast, 218 of the
535 members are lawyers.
It stands to reason, therefore, that policy makers shy away from
technologies that give off even a whiff of Big Brother-and few of the new
potential technologies are as benign as Farber's diabetes chip.
"Satellites and computers have given us the ability to look at things
and deduce what's going on in a way that was never possible before,"
Farber said. "If you looked at all the information available about
people-where they spend their money, who they talk to, who they meet, what
they're reading, where they are at any given time-you could prevent a lot
of crime, and probably terrorism.... But it's not an inexpensive
proposition, and most Americans wouldn't enjoy being looked at all the
time. A lot of things you could do, we aren't doing, because of the
Constitution."
Yet, paradoxically, some of Americans' most cherished freedoms are at a
crossroads-and technology may be their salvation. The enduring image of
the 2000 presidential election is of beleaguered voting officials peering
in confusion at mangled voting cards, the detritus of ancient, low-tech
voting machinery that has no more place in modern America than spats and
spittoons.
"I mean, that's the right symbol!" said former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, recalling those infamous hanging chads. "The average
[error] rate in voting in America is 1.6 percent. The average [accuracy]
rate for an automatic teller machine is better than 6-sigma, which is
99.9999. It's better than that. Now, is there a hint here? We're not
talking about the future. We're talking about bringing government into the
21st century. That's all we're talking about. Just catch up with all the
things that occur in the consumer world and occur in the business world
today."
Gingrich's current passion is how transformational technologies in
general, and nanotechnology in particular, are the key to maintaining
American pre-eminence. In speeches and interviews emphasizing the need for
Washington to embrace a high-tech future, he's been known to casually
suggest a tripling of the education budget. "We are on the verge of
creating an extraordinary explosion of new solutions that will
dramatically improve our lives, our communities, and the delivery of
societal and governmental goods and services," he said at a recent
American Enterprise Institute seminar. Yet official Washington often
resists technological solutions. This is most problematic when government
is the only entity that can viably fund them.
Public education is an example of a program so big only government can
really pay for it. But bigness itself is part of the problem. Although
reading and comprehension test scores, especially among minority students,
have been mired for a generation, the education establishment is too
unwieldy to quickly embrace high-tech solutions. One of the most promising
technologies emerged from studies into the workings of the brain by
Michael Merzenich of the University of California (San Francisco) and
Paula Tallal of the Rutgers University neuroscience center in Newark, N.J.
After discovering what portions of the brain are responsible for learning,
recognition, and memory, Merzenich coupled this research with modern
computer technology and launched Scientific Learning. The company, based
in Oakland, Calif., has produced a sophisticated learning program that
routinely raises student reading and comprehension skills by a full grade
level in six weeks. A 6-year-old sits at a computer, puts on headphones,
and does five separate exercises (disguised as computer games) for 20
minutes each. There are up to 900 levels for each exercise, which the
computer automatically calibrates to the individual student as it runs
through the progressions. The repetition would wear out a teacher, but the
computer doesn't mind.
The program is beginning to catch on as a teaching tool, but only on a
painstakingly slow, district-by-district basis. Will the Education
Department bless it? Company CEO Sheryle J. Bolton, citing the
accountability provisions passed in this year's so-called No Child Left
Behind education bill, hopes so. "We'll see," she said.
"But `No Child Left Behind' certainly fits our mission
statement."
Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park,
Calif., says that for technology to slowly work its way up to the national
level in this way is now the norm. "There used to be a trickle-down
effect in technology," he said. "The government got the best
stuff first-the astronauts got what they needed, and then the rest of us
got Tang for breakfast. It doesn't work that way anymore. Now a
15-year-old buys a supercomputer before his father-even if his father is a
colonel in the Pentagon-gets his hands on it. I'm not kidding. That
supercomputer is called Sony PlayStation 2. It's so powerful, if it was
made in this country you probably couldn't export it."
John Markoff, who covers Silicon Valley for The New York Times, once
dubbed this phenomenon the "inversion" of the computer business.
Saffo calls it the "bubble-up effect" and says he noticed it
when he and some other futurists toured the Navy aircraft carrier USS
Enterprise. It may have the same name as the famous ship of Star Trek, but
the carrier is hardly space-age. "We realized," Saffo said,
"that with our PalmPilots and laptops we had more computer power in
our backpacks than they had on their whole ship."
The reasons for this include cumbersome procurement rules, the amount of
money the government is willing to pay-and, mostly, the scale of the
worldwide consumer market. The Pentagon might buy a couple hundred
thousand supercomputers, but Sony is selling millions. Also, the
government's real need is not handheld hardware; it's the development of
massive, self-organizing systems that constitute a new science in itself.
This discipline is known variously as "complexity science," or
"complex adaptive systems," or sometimes just plain old
"chaos" theory.
One Santa Fe, N.M., company, BiosGroup, specializes in developing
"self-organizing systems" that solve the problem of
informational bottlenecks. Even before September 11, this firm had landed
several government contracts-DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, is particularly interested in applying complexity science-but now,
even laypeople in Congress understand how crucial it is. "We had
enough information [about the September 11 terrorists]. It was staring us
in the face," says James W. Herriot, vice president for science at
BiosGroup. "But somehow, nobody connected the dots together. We have
billions of parts of information, but not enough human brainpower to sort
through it all. There are lots of intelligent people in government, and
they know that the system we have is a disaster. It won't be fixed by
cutting the INS in half, although that might be politically satisfying. It
will be solved by engineering systems according to this new
science."
Still another factor relates to government's failure to embrace
state-of-the-art technology: the tricky nature of making decisions in the
fishbowl of an open democracy. "It's not that government is uniquely
unwise, it's that they're more accountable for failure," says Esther
Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings. "If a business tries something
and it doesn't work, they go on. If government does it, they get exposed
and ridiculed-voted out of office. The stakes are different in
government."
Dyson found this out the hard way after she served as the first chairman
of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. It is a
nonprofit set up to bring order to the granting of Web addresses, but it
received continual criticism from every direction. Asked how it would be
possible to get government to be less risk-averse, Dyson turned the
question back onto her questioner-onto the media. "For one thing, you
guys have to stop jumping on them," she said. "Politics should
be less vicious, and there needs to be more understanding that we need
courage and experiment and innovation in government as well as in the
private sector." Gary Chapman, coordinator of the 21st Century
Project at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the
University of Texas, echoes this point. He also maintains that government
has problems that private-sector executives can't begin to
imagine.
"The chief problem that government has is the same problem the phone
companies have: They can't deploy systems that break, or which at least
have a high degree of risk of breaking," Chapman said. "Not only
do government systems typically have to work tolerably well, they have to
serve everyone equitably and they have to be semitransparent in terms of
their development, budgets, and accountability."
Overcoming Skepticism
These two points underscore the reality that there is no exact
private-sector equivalent to midterm elections and the Electoral College.
Take the corporate average fuel economy standards, known as CAFE.
Automakers' light trucks are now required to average 20.7 miles per
gallon, while their passenger cars must average 27.5 mpg. Those standards
haven't been raised in a decade, because of the clout of the Big Three
automakers and their unions based in the battleground state of Michigan.
In the wake of September 11, there were calls, even from conservatives,
for stepped-up energy conservation, which the administration skirted by
embracing fuel-cell research, a promising but far-off antidote. Refusing
to raise CAFE standards was a purely political decision. It was not a
science-based decision-for the simple reason that the technology to vastly
increase conservation is already here. It was on display three months ago
at the Detroit auto show. There, Honda unveiled its Civic Hybrid, a car
that averages 50 mpg.
Sometimes the problem isn't politics. It's a lack of imagination. DNA
forensics is a glaring example, and a classic case of Bruce Sterling's
sideways-case scenarios. In 1975, an Oxford-trained English biochemist
named Alec Jeffreys attempted to clone a mammalian single-copy gene. He
failed, but he did manage to devise a method of detecting single-copy
genes. By September 1984, still pursuing biomedical research, Jeffreys,
then at the University of Leicester, successfully tested a system of
probing for genetic sequences in human DNA. The implications were
immediately obvious. "It was clear that these hyper-variable DNA
patterns offered the promise of a truly individual-specific identification
system," he wrote.
Cops on both sides of the Atlantic began using DNA evidence in the
prosecution of rape and murder suspects. But with little federal guidance,
law enforcement authorities in the United States had no standardized rules
for collecting such evidence. Requirements varied from state to state, as
did the willingness to use DNA evidence as a tool for proving the
innocence of some jailed defendants. Some courts and prosecutors have been
so hostile to using DNA to help defendants that private do-gooders have
filled the breach. In Kentucky, a retired Presbyterian minister raised
$5,000 for a DNA test of a convicted rapist named William Thomas Gregory,
who'd always proclaimed his innocence. Gregory was telling the truth. Two
years ago, the test confirmed his innocence and he was released-the first
Kentucky inmate to be freed by DNA evidence. The Innocence Project,
started in 1992 by defense lawyers Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld,
has been instrumental in freeing more than 100 inmates. In Virginia,
authorities are proud of their state-of-the-art Biotech Two forensics
laboratory in Richmond, but it took a large donation from crime novelist
Patricia Cornwell to build it.
Virginia has the best DNA database in the country because a 1990 law
required DNA samples from every felon admitted into the state's penal
system. In most places, backlogs are the rule. New York City has more DNA
evidence sitting, untested, in "rape kits" in police stations'
evidence rooms than in its lab-meaning that untold numbers of rapists and
killers are roaming the streets for want of a single lab test. National
Organization for Women President Kim Gandy terms this situation a
"national disgrace," and she's not alone. In its fiscal 2003
budget, the Bush administration asked Congress for a 100 percent increase
in federal funds to help local police departments reduce this backlog.
Several lawmakers, led by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., want more. On March
13, Nadler proposed increasing the current $50 million a year earmarked
for this purpose over the next two years to $250 million.
This would be a good start, as is the FBI's national database, CODIS. But
what a technologically savvy federal government would have done is
construct a new lab with a dedicated supercomputer that would clear up old
cases, reconcile claims of innocence with the evidence, and match up new
DNA evidence from current rape cases in real time.
If Congress had a sense of irony, it could name such a facility the
Buckland-Pitchfork DNA Laboratory, after the two Britons whose stories
rival any plot a science fiction writer could weave. Rodney Buckland was
the feeble-minded 17-year-old freed for rape and murder after Alec
Jeffreys's lab established that DNA from semen on two 15-year-old girls
was not his. Colin Pitchfork, a local flasher, was the one who was nabbed
after English detectives required 5,000 men in three villages to submit to
DNA tests.
There are all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the Fourth
Amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, why cops in
the United States couldn't round up 5,000 men for DNA testing. There are
also legitimate reasons, aside from technophobia, why juries don't
automatically believe the government's forensic experts. It has been left
to the nation's front-line prosecutors to tackle this skepticism head-on.
One of them, San Diego County Deputy District Attorney George
"Woody" Clarke, has come up with an admonition that could be
posted in procurement offices and appropriating committees across
Washington.
"Anything done by humans is subject to error," he says.
"The technology itself is never wrong."
Carl M. Cannon
National Journal
