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Can technology help close the growing gulf between the need for national security and personal privacy rights?
It's going to be a tense and important negotiation for the foreseeable future, said experts at the Cyberposium 2002 panel at Harvard Business School on "Securing Freedom: How Technology Can Help Protect Our Personal Freedom."
A privacy specialist and four panelists who build cutting-edge security products discussed the strengths and weaknesses of current technology, their greatest opponent—what one panelist called "criminal entrepreneurism,"—and the desire to preserve privacy.
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| You can't just create great technologies and throw them out there. |
| — Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel |
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First, what can technology accomplish on the security front? Existing products as well as those on the horizon are already quite sophisticated, said panelists. High-tech security technology include machines that can identify people according to their physical characteristics or "biometrics" and X-ray machines that scan shipping containers for explosives.
The controversial topic of national identification cards in the United States is not controversial from a technological point of view, they said; it's "absolutely" possible to institute such a system right now, should it be required.
Standing in the way
The real obstacles to effective security technology are everything else. There is public and political resistance. There's the problem of integrating diverse technologies and actually analyzing the resulting data rather than letting it pile up. There's the problem of making technology unpredictable enough to foil hackers and terrorists. And there is the recognition that no single security system will ever be perfect on its own, certainly not enough to thwart people intent on committing suicidal acts of terrorism.
"There is no silver-bullet technology that will capture all types of terrorist threats," said Ralph Sheridan, president and CEO of American Science and Engineering, which makes X-ray detection equipment, including a "BodySearch" product to detect plastic knives and explosives on people. To have a secure society, he added, it is vital to assemble a "gauntlet" of security technologies.
As new products hit the market it's also important to integrate policy along with the way, said Gilman Louie, president and CEO of VC firm In-Q-Tel, which is affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency and works on information technology for national security. "You can't just create great technologies and throw them out there," he said. Examples of flawed technology include those that consistently "read" one person for someone else in situations of identity theft. Technology that believes one person is another, he said, "can really cripple somebody's life."
National ID controversy
The notion of a national ID card system sharpened the discussion on issues of security versus privacy. Sheridan, for instance, said he argued to an aviation subcommittee about the need to match biometrics with a national ID. In that scenario, he said, aviation security entities would pay more attention to flyers not registered in the system. As for those who have registered in a national ID card system, he said aviation security's point of view would be to "begin to take a segment of the population that you now consider sanitized and you don't waste your assets on them....It's very difficult to do this universally, but what you begin to do is create islands of integrity so that you can better focus assets on those people for whom you have no information."
Louie dismissed the notion that national IDs would make flying safer. "The best way to beat the national ID card system is to bribe somebody who already has one," he said. "You can spend billions of dollars and all it takes is to bribe one person who's already cleared to go through the fast lane, and they're in."
"Given these technologies, how do you raise the bar—because they'll never be perfect? Let's be realistic. The trick is to vary your security so it becomes unpredictable. Any of these systems are beatable if the other person knows what to look for. If you know what facial recognition software is looking for through a system of pattern recognition, there are ways to beat it," Louie said.
Norman Geddes, president and CEO of data search company Applied Systems Intelligence, said he personally wouldn't be intimidated by a national ID card system and various other monitoring: The "bottleneck" is still analysis. Colatosti refused to grant any upside to the notion of a national ID system, saying it was a Pandora's box that could be easily misused to justify any number of infringements on personal privacy. Even people who have "nothing to hide" would come to regret the institution of national ID, he said.
Asked if they were ultimately optimistic or pessimistic about a peaceful balance between security and privacy, panelists acknowledged the fine line that security businesses have to walk.
Richard Smith, former chief technology officer of the Privacy Foundation, a group that researches technology and privacy issues, said he doesn't think a day will come when people are routinely monitored in real time. Nevertheless, he is concerned that tracking commonly used for commercial purposes may be used for government surveillance. Louie said the key to true security is to pay attention to the nature of a threat.
Geddes said technology is a powerful security feature when used effectively but, as with anything, it all depends on who is wielding it. "You don't need technology to have a police state," he said.