[IP] Can IT Redeem Politics Gone Wrong?]

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Can IT Redeem Politics Gone Wrong?
From:    "Seth Grimes" <grimes@altaplana.com>
Date:    Fri, June 8, 2007 10:45 pm
To:      "David Farber" <dave@farber.net>
Cc:      "Seth Grimes" <grimes@altaplana.com>
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Dave, I thought I'd share I blog entry I wrote today with you and, if you
wish, with IP: "Can IT Redeem Politics Gone Wrong?"

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/06/can_it_redeem_p.html

Can IT Redeem Politics Gone Wrong?

Retired Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, former director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, currently an executive at a Washington DC IT
solutions provider, gives exactly the keynote presentation one would
expect. He gives a keynote whose essence I've heard before: IT is a
information sponge that can clean up some nasty, real-world spills. I
heard this theme in 2003 when Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of
defense, spoke at a Capital Hill program on data mining. It was the
rationale for DARPA's ill-fated-but-resurgent Total Information Awareness
program. It bespeaks an attitude that would apply IT on a massive scale in
a rear-guard attempt to contain a political situation gone horribly wrong
- we have to do something, right? - with not a moment's thought given to
alternative paths.

I heard Admiral Jacoby at the government users conference of an analytical
technology company I follow. Don't get me wrong: the advocated technology
solution seems compelling, capable, and even necessary. It also has great
spin-offs in life sciences, industry, and business. I'm simply
disappointed that the message seems to be, mimicking Clausewitz's famous
line, "technology is the answer to a failing war," a message that ignores
that potential for technology to address root causes and even to change
the conditions that gave rise to current threats.

Admiral Jacoby, in his former intelligence job and in his current role at
a defense contractor, has been a proponent of technologies that generate
knowledge usable by analysts in the fight against terrorists. Terrorist
networks are exploiting modern communications technologies.  The admiral
believes that the traditional "paradigm," filtering masses of information
for presentation to analysts, should be turned on its head. "You don't try
to decide on the front-end what's important. You try to put the
information into a format where analysts" can work with "the full volume
and variety of inputs of information, which has only been magnified in
recent years."

Fair enough, but not enough. We can try to use data mining to forestall
terrorist attacks. We can also use it for precision marketing, to predict
and reduce customer churn, to forecast product sales. Could our government
not do a bit of data mining to understand why someone becomes a terrorist
and then do some scenario analysis to see if we can constructively create
conditions that will address root causes?

I know that military and intelligence leaders "get it." The Washington
Post cites Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, White House nominee as Iraq War
coordinator, as having "told senators at a confirmation hearing that Iraqi
factions 'have show so far very little progress' toward the reconciliation
necessary to step the bloodshed. If that does not change, he said, 'we're
not likely to see much difference in the security situation' a year from
now." ("Nominee to Coordinate War Offers Grim Forecast on Iraq," June 8,
2007.)

Admiral Jacoby, in his tech-conference keynote, said that "we need to
harness the best capabilities and imagination that's available... in
government, military, and civil service... plus industry, plus academia,
plus think tanks here and abroad... to create an orchestrated [analytical]
environment that allows us to deal with difficult threats... in the
decades to come."

Contrast with a statement of architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff's: "At
the height of the cold war, architect-engineers like Buckminster Fuller
envisioned marshaling the immense resources of the American military-
industrial complex to create a more ecologically balanced world." ("Why
are They Greener Than We Are," New York Times Magazine, May 20,2007.)

These two visions each call for the application of similar knowledge
resources at similar scales in the face of similarly perceived threats.
One vision is all reactive containment, all expansive single-mindedness.
The other is confident that technology can craft a better world despite
hugely difficult conditions. I recognize the necessity of the one vision
but dearly wish that our politically fixated government, and its thought
leaders as exemplified by Admiral Jacoby, would at least consider the
second.


Seth Grimes is a Washington DC computing analyst at Alta Plana Corporation
and a long-time member of Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility.




--
Seth Grimes   Alta Plana Corp, analytical computing & data management
               Intelligent Enterprise magazine (CMP), Contributing Editor
grimes@altaplana.com       http://altaplana.com    301-270-0795





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