How Security Tech has Evolved to Make Us Safer (or not) Since 9/11
“I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. is down! I repeat, we have no I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E.!”
- Lisa, Team America: World Police*
Numbers and dates sometimes seem to take on an oversized significance. One could posit that the random patterns AI sometimes finds in a stream are the equivalent of the random patterns burned into the human noggins by repetition, creating reputation. This could lead to a topic for another time: does human bias lead to implicit programmatic bias by accident? Only the ones and zeroes know, and those got buried in the compiler eons ago in computer years.
Anyway, some date combinations evoke visceral reactions among the subsets of populaces. Drop a 12/25 into a Western Culture discussion, and the twinkly lights and a sudden introduction of forestry into the household takes mental hold. In China, mention of 8/8 sends the wedding planner industry into a tizzy. Some dates are less about happiness. In former days, a mention of 12/7 (though they called it December 7th back then) brought out the somber reactions of those who remember when our nation was lured into war by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Though fading, that pattern still evokes a response.
These days, the date of today’s publication seems to resonate in the minds of many, 9/11. It’s fresh in the cultural mind, and the global implications of the day a bit more than two decades ago keep washing ashore like some geopolitical flotsam. Among we, the tech weenies, a lot of the response drifted to the feeling that technology needed to create change to protect the innocent. We’re only accidental technocrats, after all. Two subjects drift to mind, proving that patterns evoke patterns.
One that we can address later in detail was the realization that redundancy and continuity involved more than putting the backup tapes in the basement of the same building. The needed push of number-crunching close to the trading floor (someone wrote about distance and latency recently, can’t remember where…) was fighting the pull of real-estate values and commute times. One firm’s bright techie idea of building some redundancy across the Hudson in New Jersey led to copycats that did the same. That migration alone likely shortened the closure of the largest markets to six calendar days from the months it would have otherwise taken.
On another vector, though, the fairly new power the computer industry was feeling resonated off the political firewalls: “We can use technology to make us all safer against global threats.” The bright engineering minds educated in the 30-year trough of relative international peace saw the opportunity for sea change. Even as we said it, the creep of horror at what technology as a tool might unleash sowed the seeds of its own inertia.
Yer Humble Author (YHA) remembers not long after the infamous date visiting one of the largest database vendors in the world with a shiny new concept server. Said system would throw all of its 32 threads across eight processors at a then-incredible 8TB of DRAM. It was 20 years ago, you stand on the shoulders of ants, friends. Rhetorically, YHA asked the team of think-biggers what Homeland Security could do with an 8TB in-memory database. The conversation that followed was interesting, and a little scary, though the implications seemed to point to the positive…if you squinted.
Now that a quick trip to the open-source Gits and the virtual card swipe at Amazon provides everyone similar capability, how has technology made the globe safer against the shadowy baddies? Well, many of the apparent changes in safety and security seem to be fractional, in the diddly over squat range. Technology purchasing in the hopes of a more secure globe certainly absorbs the tax dollars of many, but our tools don’t appear to have created that vital change that moves us into the realm of 60’s Star Trek unity. Some of us want the transporter, airports really suck post-9/11.
And therein lies the conundrum. Technology is a tool. The redundant tools that saved the backsides of the finance industry aren’t all that different from those analytics tools that get tossed at global metadata for security. And yet, the conflicting thought processes – political of all stripes, apolitical liberty, the need for consensus of committee, trying to explain all this to leadership who stopped at algebra – grind some tools to a nub of inefficiency. The tool is not to blame, it’s the users. Accidental technocrats, untie (sic).
Hope should never be lost where technology is available. The leaps of innovation repeatedly outperform the bloat of human decision making. And maybe the human bias projecting into machine bias is a re-reflection of the same human bias. We’d probably just feel better on some digitally-significant days if we didn’t always stand in our own way.
*(Seriously, that might have been the only quote from the movie that could be used in a family-friendly space. But now that you’re at the end, you know that’s the only movie we could have used.)
“I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E. is down! I repeat, we have no I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E.!”
- Lisa, Team America: World Police*
Numbers and dates sometimes seem to take on an oversized significance. One could posit that the random patterns AI sometimes finds in a stream are the equivalent of the random patterns burned into the human noggins by repetition, creating reputation. This could lead to a topic for another time: does human bias lead to implicit programmatic bias by accident? Only the ones and zeroes know, and those got buried in the compiler eons ago in computer years.
Anyway, some date combinations evoke visceral reactions among the subsets of populaces. Drop a 12/25 into a Western Culture discussion, and the twinkly lights and a sudden introduction of forestry into the household takes mental hold. In China, mention of 8/8 sends the wedding planner industry into a tizzy. Some dates are less about happiness. In former days, a mention of 12/7 (though they called it December 7th back then) brought out the somber reactions of those who remember when our nation was lured into war by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Though fading, that pattern still evokes a response.
These days, the date of today’s publication seems to resonate in the minds of many, 9/11. It’s fresh in the cultural mind, and the global implications of the day a bit more than two decades ago keep washing ashore like some geopolitical flotsam. Among we, the tech weenies, a lot of the response drifted to the feeling that technology needed to create change to protect the innocent. We’re only accidental technocrats, after all. Two subjects drift to mind, proving that patterns evoke patterns.
One that we can address later in detail was the realization that redundancy and continuity involved more than putting the backup tapes in the basement of the same building. The needed push of number-crunching close to the trading floor (someone wrote about distance and latency recently, can’t remember where…) was fighting the pull of real-estate values and commute times. One firm’s bright techie idea of building some redundancy across the Hudson in New Jersey led to copycats that did the same. That migration alone likely shortened the closure of the largest markets to six calendar days from the months it would have otherwise taken.
On another vector, though, the fairly new power the computer industry was feeling resonated off the political firewalls: “We can use technology to make us all safer against global threats.” The bright engineering minds educated in the 30-year trough of relative international peace saw the opportunity for sea change. Even as we said it, the creep of horror at what technology as a tool might unleash sowed the seeds of its own inertia.
Yer Humble Author (YHA) remembers not long after the infamous date visiting one of the largest database vendors in the world with a shiny new concept server. Said system would throw all of its 32 threads across eight processors at a then-incredible 8TB of DRAM. It was 20 years ago, you stand on the shoulders of ants, friends. Rhetorically, YHA asked the team of think-biggers what Homeland Security could do with an 8TB in-memory database. The conversation that followed was interesting, and a little scary, though the implications seemed to point to the positive…if you squinted.
Now that a quick trip to the open-source Gits and the virtual card swipe at Amazon provides everyone similar capability, how has technology made the globe safer against the shadowy baddies? Well, many of the apparent changes in safety and security seem to be fractional, in the diddly over squat range. Technology purchasing in the hopes of a more secure globe certainly absorbs the tax dollars of many, but our tools don’t appear to have created that vital change that moves us into the realm of 60’s Star Trek unity. Some of us want the transporter, airports really suck post-9/11.
And therein lies the conundrum. Technology is a tool. The redundant tools that saved the backsides of the finance industry aren’t all that different from those analytics tools that get tossed at global metadata for security. And yet, the conflicting thought processes – political of all stripes, apolitical liberty, the need for consensus of committee, trying to explain all this to leadership who stopped at algebra – grind some tools to a nub of inefficiency. The tool is not to blame, it’s the users. Accidental technocrats, untie (sic).
Hope should never be lost where technology is available. The leaps of innovation repeatedly outperform the bloat of human decision making. And maybe the human bias projecting into machine bias is a re-reflection of the same human bias. We’d probably just feel better on some digitally-significant days if we didn’t always stand in our own way.
*(Seriously, that might have been the only quote from the movie that could be used in a family-friendly space. But now that you’re at the end, you know that’s the only movie we could have used.)
