A Global, Digital Manhattan Project for Homeland Security
speech to the 2002 IEEE Homeland Security Conference, April 17, 2002
by W. David Stephenson
In fact, I will propose today a combined initiative by government and business that will combine one powerful Internet tool — XML — with one aspect of Internet thinking — linking everything — to create a global digital Manhattan Project. This project can simultaneously eliminate much of the terrorist threat through seamless information flow, reduce the cost of government operations, and stimulate global economic development.
However, I have no illusions about the short-term potential for an integrated Homeland Security system — based on integrated, holistic thinking. That is because it is so different from the linear and hierarchical ways in which the limits of prior communications technologies forced us to think and communicate that such a change will be difficult for all of us.
Let me briefly explain how the three aspects of “Internet thinking” would improve Homeland Security.
First, we must empower individuals
Informed, empowered individuals can act on their own, either in a crisis or in preventing one, without having to wait helplessly until they are told what to do. Such a shift would make emergency response a partnership between the public and government.
This partnership would parallel the World War II civilian volunteer involvement in Civil Defense. People used spotter cards showing the outlines of Axis planes to watch the skies for possible invaders, then report them.
A combination of wireless devices such as PDAs and cell phones, with content customized via a portal personalized by each resident to meet his or her needs, could be the contemporary equivalent of the plane spotters’ cards. As Sept.11th illustrated, wireless devices’ mobility and ability to still operate during a disaster, make them ideal for this function. Such a system would allow localized response without requiring municipalities to add expensive new infrastructure.
It could have a variety of important uses, some of which private vendors are already implementing:
- Issuing instant text-based emergency alerts.
- Providing evacuation information that a businessperson could download before attending a meeting in an unfamiliar high-rise building.
- Disseminating an electronic 10 Most Wanted list, coupled with a response system to alert authorities you had seen a suspect via a single-button text-based system that wouldn’t alert the suspect — or put the tipster at risk.
Eventually, GPS-based systems would allow sending individuals real-time, customized notices with differing evacuation routes depending on their exact location at the time of an emergency, potentially reducing traffic jams.
Unfortunately, evidence to date indicates that the government regards individuals’ contribution to Homeland Security as more of a public relations gesture than substantive reality.
For example, the “Terrorist Activity Form” on the FBI Web site, looks suspiciously like an old text-based form simply reproduced on the Web, lacking a way to differentiate between tips regarding an imminent dire threat and those just providing background information. By contrast, if the FBI was using “Internet thinking,” it could produce an interactive reporting form, guiding a person through criteria to assign a potential threat to one of the Office of Homeland Security’s 5 levels of urgency.
This would both educate the public about how to prioritize their tips and make certain that crucial, time-sensitive tips would be instantly and automatically available to all relevant law enforcement and intelligence personnel. They would not have to to wait until a clerk had gotten around to transferring information from the tip Web site to other databases.
The second hallmark of Internet thinking is closing the loop.
The Internet allows you to design closed-loop processes to speed learning and apply it rapidly. This contrasts with old paper-based systems in which it was difficult to get information from the end of the process back to those managing the beginning to facilitate revisions.
Several breaches in airport security before Sept. 11 were reported to authorities but not acted upon because they weren’t shared by relevant agencies. Businesses used to suffer from similar lapses of information sharing when paper-based reporting and linear communication was the only available method. Now, companies use Internet-enabled Customer-Relationship Management (CRM) software so that all information about an individual customer is at the fingertips of the person dealing with that customer. Seizing on the similarity between that need and government’s needs to give those dealing with a potential terrorist access to information gathered by all agencies, Siebel is marketing a “Solutions for Homeland Security” package. It allows agencies to coordinate information sources, including maps and other spatial data, and communicate it via phone, fax, email, Web or face-to-face.
Internet-based systems — and thinking — would allow information to be fed back so security processes could be continuously revised based on real-life experience. This is particularly important in a situation such as the current one, in which officials must deal with situations that were unimaginable in prior scenario planning.
Designing in feedback loops and facilitating information sharing will require two important changes in government thinking processes to capitalize on the full power of Internet technology.
The first is systems thinking.
Pioneered by Prof. Jay Forrester at MIT (and popularized as a business tool by his student Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline), systems thinking involves looking at all aspects of a complex situation as they inter-relate and influence each other, rather than simply analyzing each component in isolation.
Process mapping is a crucial tool for systems thinking. You identify the participants in a process, the kinds of information gathered and action taken, and diagram how that information flows from one step to another.
This is the sort of process that had to be done retroactively to trace the route of anthrax-contaminated letters. Had process mapping been done prospectively, as part of an effort to streamline mail delivery, lives — and money — might both have been saved. The crucial goal in an process-mapping based systems approach to Homeland Security would be to identify all of the places where information gathered by one agency should flow automatically because that data could also be valuable to other agencies. The map should also identify current processes that conclude in a “dead end,” where data is simply archived (vs. being acted upon), isn[base ‘]t revised on a timely basis, or doesn’t provide insights to revise processes based on relevant experience. Ideally, with such a system, the old linear, paper-based information flows — which of necessity meant important information would end up in file cabinets or data bases — should now be replaced with cyclical ones. They should be designed so that information automatically flows back to the beginning of a process so that process can be fine-tuned — or eliminated if it doesn’t provide value.
Second, systems thinking requires government-wide knowledge management programs.
Knowledge management — or KM — uses Internet-based technology to identify all of the knowledge resources residing within an organization, and, most important, the tacit knowledge formerly residing only in the memory and thoughts of individual workers. KM then brings this information together so that everyone working on a new problem can tap the legacy of past experience and insights. Encouragingly, the State Department, working with consultants from Accenture, has created an important first step toward such a knowledge management system: the Overseas Presence Interagency Collaboration System prototype. This project was launched in response to the lack of intelligence revealed by the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Its development and deployment has been accelerated in the wake of 9/11.
The Collaboration System’s goal is to provide knowledge management and collaboration tools over an intranet to 40 federal agencies with overseas operations — fortuitously, the same 40 agencies that must communicate domestically for Homeland Security. The Overseas Presence Interagency Collaboration System will allow users to create “communities of interest” that will instantly bring together experts from multiple agencies that must coordinate to track and avoid new threats.
Finally — and most important — the third benefit of Internet thinking is that it allows you to link everything This characteristic of the Internet — and the new way of structuring government processes that it allows — relates closely to the prior one of designing closed-loop systems and knowledge management systems to share data.
This ability to link everything is the Internet’s most powerful attribute to overcome lack of coordination among the Homeland Security agencies. With the Internet, for the first time it becomes possible to share data seamlessly and with many uses simultaneously.
For example, take the problem of the voluminous data on threats that each agency accumulates, but which is difficult to share. The reasons aren’t just institutional barriers such as agency rivalries, but also technological ones, particularly the cost of replacing legacy databases compiled with a wide range of vendor technologies with a current, unified architecture.
Companies such as Fidelity Investments facing the same problem of incompatible legacy systems are coordinating their databases using eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. In the case of Homeland Security, adding XML “tags” such as to existing data bases would let data from one agency flow automatically via the Web to another, where it could be acted upon without human intervention. Intelligence data formerly locked in one agency’s database could be shared seamlessly by others on a real-time basis.
XML also offers an additional bonus to government given the current state of the economy. Widespread adoption of XML could also be an important global economic stimulus, while cutting the cost of delivering government services. That is because an XML subset, ebXML, deals specifically with business process needs.
Similarly, another XML subset, XBRL, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is used to describe financial statements, and was designed to make the business reporting supply chain more efficient and streamlined. XBRL could simplify and speed the tracking of suspicious fund transfers and possible money laundering similar to those allegedly done by al-Barrakat. All US financial institutions must file reports on such activities with the FBI. Because those reports are now done on paper, agents had to manually read the reports after Sept. 11 to try to document the terrorists’ money trail.
What if the global business community was to collaborate with the United Nations and their own governments to implement ebXML, XBRL, and XML in general on a crash basis? Global security would benefit immediately because of the seamless flow of security data. Accelerated, universal rollout of ebXML and XBRL would cut operating costs of governments here and abroad, and it would stimulate the global economy.
I suggest that these benefits warrant serious consideration of a global electronic Manhattan Project, uniting business and governments worldwide in an accelerated effort to deploy XML to simultaneously improve security and foster mutually-beneficial economic development. Inevitably, the Internet will play a major role in the Office of Homeland Security’s planning. The critical test will be whether the Internet is just employed tactically, as an alternative communications medium, or whether the Internet, and the new approaches to crisis planning that it allows — empowering individuals, closing the loop, and linking everything — fundamentally transforms the way government acts now and in the future.
Thank you.
