Idées Fortes
Eyes Wide Shut
In the information age, global geospatial data is more than mere intelligence - it's a matter of life and death. Gathered by government operated and commercial satellites, it is the foundation for effective warfighting, public diplomacy, and sustainable development. Geospatial data without the accuracy and reliability required by the US military - generally a scale of 1:50,000 or better, roughly 10-meter resolution - cannot be used to generate automated all-source intelligence, to conduct productive coordinated peacekeeping operations, or to effectively monitor environmental or economic activity.
Yet despite spending at least US$10 billion a year in overhead reconnaissance, the United States is without an accurate map for 90 percent of the world upon which its security and its economy depend. According to public statistics from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), less than 10 percent of the earth has been mapped with 10-meter resolution. Another now-public study found that of the 69 countries judged highly likely to require a US Marine Corps presence in the 1990s, there was no imagery or maps for 22 of them, old data for only the ports and capital cities for another 37, and very old information for all of the remaining 10.
To be sure, the US has a competitive advantage in the field of geographic information systems. (See "Private Spy," in this issue.) And top government officials seem to have seen the clear need for accurately and reliably mapping the planet. In 1995, then Secretary of State Warren Christopher stated publicly that the environment was a national security issue meriting the highest level of attention. Timothy Wirth, undersecretary of state for global affairs, also presented the Earthmap Report, which called for the development of an easily accessible, spatially accurate, public-domain digitized base map of the earth's features. Unfortunately, the final version of the report settled for loose language to which no one can be held accountable.
The planned mapping satellites were never built. As a result, the US never created a wide-area surveillance capability but relied instead on satellites optimized to monitor specific Soviet military silos. The Defense Mapping Agency, NIMA's predecessor, was forced to build a legacy system completely unsuitable for integrating commercial imagery from any source. Surprise, surprise - you get what you pay for.
Furthermore, you pay for what you don't get. Today's extremely expensive military aircraft and precision-guided munitions are worthless without accurate, high resolution imagery and mapping data. Jets launched from aircraft carriers are generally limited to five minutes over the battle area. The precision munitions, meanwhile, are just point-and-shoot weapons in the absence of adequate geospatial data. There is no sensor-to-shooter interface, and there isn't a weapons or mobility system built today that is assured of having meaningful geospatial data or even intelligence warning data. We invest in the vehicles before we build the roads! The result is a classic paper-tiger military, unable to respond effectively to no-notice contingencies; unable to cope with low, slow, single-ton targets; unable to conduct operations requiring patience and a sustainable low-key presence. And without reliable geospatial data in hand, the various commanders-in-chief responsible for preparing to conduct regional operations will need at least 60 to 90 days' lead time to obtain the maps essential to their work.
When Christopher elevated the environment to the level of national security, he did so in part because of the president's emphasis on sustainable development, and in part because he appreciated the importance of an accurate understanding of the environment across time and space. Unfortunately, when NIMA was created, it was placed within the defense budget, where 86 percent of funding for the US intelligence community resides. Thus NIMA became a defense property.
Enthralled with classified systems, the office of the secretary of defense has failed to adequately budget for the procurement of commercial imagery. Of course, a broad-based perspective is critical for analyzing economic, environmental, and military affairs - like other open source information, geospatial data reduces the costs of strategic intelligence significantly. Perhaps ironically, only by becoming a truly national agency and meeting the needs of civilians can NIMA hope to fulfill the needs of the military.
What will it take to get our approach to global geospatial data back on track? NIMA today spends $3 million a year on commercial imagery. The best estimates available suggest that an annual $250 to $500 million will be needed - roughly $2 to $5 billion over the next six years - together with a radical change in our national policy such that we accept commercial imagery as the foundation, using classified information only in extremis.
If the so-called Year 2000 problem represents the death of time in cyberspace, the lack of maps reflects the darkness in which we will wander without a national commitment to the integration of commercial imagery with classified information. Unless the spies open the door to all geospatial data, America will remain lost in cyberspace.
Memes: Return on Investment
Big donations, pragmatists insist, are the best way to get Congress to protect freedom in cyberspace. It's no coincidence that the media powerhouses are big donors to Congress, and that they get incredible returns for their money. But will fatcat lobbying by the Business Software Alliance really benefit anyone but Microsoft and company? Better to clear all special interest money from the campaign finance playing field. However, a history of piecemeal reforms - from the Corrupt Practices Act of 1910 to today's complex system of contribution limits - suggests that plugging one hole just opens up another. What's needed is a complete alternative that ends candidates' dependence on special interest money. Adopted by Maine and Vermont, with bids under way in more than a dozen states, Clean Money Campaign Reform gives candidates who meet a threshold of public support "clean," disinterested funding - but only if they agree to take no private money and abide by spending limits. The way to fully protect the public interest is full public financing.
Hire Learning
Still smarting from a disappointing ranking in U.S. News & World Report, Stanford University recently promised to make itself more competitive in and outside the classroom. The new Educational Ventures Office, said Stanford president Gerhard Casper, will leverage the teaching faculty's creativity into marketable commodities. In fact, the agency takes the blurring of learning and earning to its logical extreme: product innovation is now part of the academic mission.Of course, intellectual capital is the stock-in-trade of the information age, and what better source of brainpower than the ivory tower. Once the purest form of knowledge workers, professors have long been instructed to publish or perish. Stanford merely hopes to unleash increasing returns by shifting the bottom line from quarterly journals to quarterly profits. As big thoughts increasingly bring big bucks, the marketplace of ideas will finally be free to follow its industrial imperative. The networked economy will be raised on learning architectures. The question is who will own these flat pyramids - and who will build them.
The Lying Game
Can machines think? Can the truth set you free? You may be in for a surprise.
Alan Turing, of course, turned the original question into a celebrated test of computing machinery and intelligence. Rather than attack head-on, Turing recast the problem into what he called the "imitation game." The game, spelled out in a classic paper published in 1950, has three players: a man, a woman, and an interrogator - of either sex - who must determine which of the players is the woman. The interrogator communicates in text-only mode and knows the players only by ambiguous pseudonyms. The rules further require that the woman always tell the interrogator the truth. The man, on the other hand, must always lie.
Though the machinations he proposed for the man haven't aged well - tell the interrogator you have long hair, for example - Turing accurately predicted that computers would be capable of playing the imitation game only "by the end of this century." Sure enough, "the first formal instantiation of a Turing test" - the Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence - was not awarded until 1991. And despite the many unforeseen enigmas of modernity, the competition continues to share Turing's preoccupation with sexual stereotypes. Take the beginning of the conversation that carried the April 29, 1997, contest:
Did you see that story on CNN last night about the lesbian couple who came out at a White House party on Sunday?
No. I just came in yesterday. I'm still kind of jet lagged.Ellen Degeneres was one of them - she was kissing her lover in front of Bill Clinton. Do you think he was very embarrassed?
The Turing test certainly takes on another layer of meaning in light of what is now generally known about Turing's private life. Devised in a time and place that demanded painstaking propriety, the game's mechanical "imitation" of a woman, Freudians might suggest, was a latent expression of Turing's own homosexuality. Indeed, the mathematician died as reviled for transgressing one code as he was revered for cracking another. Brought to trial under British sodomy laws in 1952, Turing refused to deny the charges; he did, according to biographer Andrew Hodges, accept the court mandated penalty of estrogen injections in lieu of a prison sentence. Turing's modern-day disciple Hugh Loebner credits the computing pioneer for inspiring not only his annual AI contest, but also his manifesto for sexual freedom.
Whatever Turing's place in today's gender identity debates, perhaps most interesting is his idea to have the computer play the role of deceiver. The AI program Turing had in mind was not so much a machine capable of natural language understanding as a program capable of lying. The intriguing suggestion is that intelligence itself is a kind of artifice, a deception. This raises a deeper question: Is the feeling of guilt associated with self-doubt and duplicity illusory, or is it in some way connected to the fundamental basis of consciousness?
Triangulation
If God knew what He was doing, then Man is the Essence of God. If Man, in turn, halfway knows what he is doing, then Machines are the Essence of Man. God. Man. Machine. A strange, but certainly not an unholy Trinity.
God clones Himself in Man. Man clones himself in machines. Machines, if properly built, can carry our most fragile dreams through a million light years of travel without breakage. Such machines ... are the armor of our Life Force....
With it we shall wrestle gravity, capture light, shrink Time, measure Space, and survive, man within machine within God.
Putting the Bite on Y2K
Embedded processors drive your car and your VCR, home alarm systems and Global Positioning Systems. And like land mines, they sit waiting for us to stumble over them as the last two digits of the date turn to 00 when the dreaded Year 2000 arrives. But while the media fixate on the dangers of muddled bank statements, organized crime may seize processors and software to rule Y2K. What better day to exploit failure points in the physical security of banks. A flood of alarms, each requiring investigation, will create multiple openings for a virtual hack. Plus, Y2K sets up the perfect "chipping" opportunity. During the Gulf War, the US used a front company to ship printers with booby-trapped chips to Iran. Similarly, wide-scale replacement of peripherals for Y2K could enable a long-term chipping compromise by organized crime. Of course, the paper trail necessary for prosecution will be caught in the same confusion. The clock is ticking.
