The responses to last week’s post were a bit different from what I expected. But they raised some important questions about resilience that warrant careful consideration in light of this concept’s prominence in the proposed DHS budgetrequest to Congress.
Conventional models of disaster resilience, like the one developed by Michel Bruneau and Kathleen Tierney, characterize resilience as a function expressed over time and domains – physical/technical, organizational, social, and economic – as robustness, redundancy, and resourcefulness. Others add a fourth element – re-design or re-engineering – to express the extent to which resources have to be reprioritized or repurposed to achieve the goals of a given recovery.
In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, many people are wondering how anyone, much less a whole society, can overcome such a catastrophe. This question strikes at the heart of resilience.
From a distance, Haitian infrastructure, government, civil society, and the economy have looked decidedly non-robust. The apparent dependence on outside aid suggests no real redundancy or resources beyond those available in the form of international aid and institutional relief.
Most of Haiti’s institutions and much of its infrastructure were either primitive or in poor condition before the disaster struck. But evidence has already begun to emerge that Haitians are getting on with their lives in a social and economic sense despite the institutional and physical devastationthat surrounds them.
The limited and focused effort to grasp recovery so soon suggests something important about Haiti (if not human nature itself) and offers insights into what we can expect from its people in the short-term. This nascent recovery requires little re-engineering or reprioritization on the part of Haitians: Most will do their best to take care of one another, as they always have.
These people, so accustomed to deprivation and loss, given few options besides continual struggle will strive to make the most of any opportunity. The question for the international community and Haiti’s leaders is more complex. How much control will they cede to engage the Haitian people in a recovery effort that addresses the fundamental technical, organizational, social and economic vulnerabilities that created the current catastrophe?
Haiti’s recovery is not just a question of how long it will take to clear debris, restore services, and rebuild infrastructure. In Haiti, as elsewhere, recoveryrequires reflection. What kind of country does Haiti want to become? What will it take to get there? How can the Haitian people turn this challenge into an opportunity to move beyond their past? What is the international community willing to do to foster sustainable development that engages the Haitian people in determining and achieving their aspirations?
Just in case you’ve been hiding in some undisclosed secure location for the past week, it’s worth noting that Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on the heels of announcing record profits, intends to reveal the company’s latest offering today. In a much anticipated and widely discussed move, he is expected to unveil Apple’s latest foray into the tablet computer market. If successful, as expected, Apple’s product will establish a whole new category, which Jobs himself has claimed to be the most important work of his life. Others have simply hailed it as a “game changer.”
Okay, now that I have your attention, I would like to recap some of the other issues competing for your attention today:
- President Obama will address a joint session of Congress tonight in his first State of the Union Address; he is expected, among other things, to call for a freeze in non-defense discretionary spending in an effort to curb the federal budget deficit.
- Massachusetts voters in a stunning defeat for Democrats elected Republican Scott Brown to fill the unexpired term of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy, undermining the Democrats’ filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate.
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it clear that the U.S. House of Representatives lacked sufficient votes to pass the Senate health care reform bill in its current form, which resulted in calls for a stripped down agreement or at least further delay.
- Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden claimed credit for the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. jetliner by a Nigerian radical.
- Oregon voters, counter to the assumed public backlash over tax-and-spend business-as-usual politics, voted to raise their own taxes.
- A series of bombing in the Iraqi capitol killed scores of people and raised questions about the effectiveness of Iraqi security forces.
- Iraq executed convicted mass-murderer and Saddam Hussein cousin AliHassan al-Majeed, better know in the west as “Chemical Ali” for his gas ttacks against the country’s Kurdish and Shiite minorities in the north and south, respectively.
- In a striking precedent, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned two of its own precedents, deciding by a 5-4 majority to allow corporations to contribute unlimited amounts of cash to national electoral campaigns.
- And, oh yeah, hundreds of thousands of Haitians died after a massive earthquake struck their impoverished nation leaving millions homeless.
Now, which of these stories has the most sweeping implications for U.S. national security?
For my money, it’s the Supreme Court decision. In an almost unprecedented statement yesterday, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor criticized the decision as an, “arms race” that will be a “problem for maintaining an independent judiciary.” Her concerns do not reflect the lingering Senate stalemate over appointments to the federal bench rooted in partisan bickering over judicial ideology. Rather, she’s concerned that the vast majority of state and local judges are elected.
Confidence in and the independence of the judiciary represents an important bulwark against the deepening partisan divide and associated erosion of public confidence in the other two branches. Without it, confidence in government, or for that matter our constitutional form of government, becomes increasingly suspect if not downright untenable.
The vastly different electoral results in the Massachusetts Senate race and the Oregon tax referendum only serve to illustrate the difficulty characterizing the political mood of the country with any precision. That said, both illustrate deep skepticism and growing cynicism surrounding the established political order.
At the same time, the overwhelming, even unprecedented public response to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti should give us hope. Most Americans still care deeply and passionately about the plight of others. They want to help. But as the mood attending events in Iraq and Afghanistan illustrate, they do not like getting their hands bit by those who benefit from aid.
This leaves me wondering what Jobs’ announcement today and the veritable furore surrounding it says about us as a country and a people. Apple is not just a huge, profitable company that produces innovative products. Its brand has taken on the air of cultural metaphor. Despite some recent criticism of the company’s environmental record, Apple has often been credited with doing well by doing good.
This brings me back to the potential threat posed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. If the global financial crisis has taught us anything, companies have no inherent moral code that impels them to do right by others. In contrast, biological evidence of an evolutionary bias toward altruism among individuals is well-established and growing.
When assembled in a group, our tendency toward altruism finds expression in efforts to conform our behavior to perceived group norms. When those norms run contrary to morals or accepted notions of the public good, we often have difficulty detecting the discrepancy much less changing the overall mood of the group. We’re more likely to consider our own views aberrant than that of the perceived group will. This pack mentality makes us susceptible to all sorts of unintended, and more importantly, unsuspected, evil.
An independent judiciary provides an important check on the pack mentality that often infects corporate bodies, including mobs in the legislative and executive branches of government. Allowing corporations, often under the control of interests hostile to the public good and sometimes under the influence of foreign nationals or others not otherwise allowed to participate in elections, to contribute freely to campaigns, especially judicial campaigns, poses an unchecked threat to our liberty.
Threat to our liberty are neither limited to nor dominated by international terrorism and the radical extremism that breeds it. A failure to give adequate expression to our best intentions by providing a durable and independent check on our own impetuous behavior poses just as great a threat to our liberty.
If the anticipation surrounding Apple’s announcement is any indication, we may need intervention of the clinical rather than the political sort sooner rather than later. With any luck, we will see the error of our ways and insist on the essential distinction between our individual and corporate lives.
In the meantime, enjoy your iSlate, iTablet, MacPad or whatever it’s called and don’t forget to vote. Take it away Steve Jobs …
The Haiti earthquake response, now in its eighth day, has already begun to illustrate the difficulties confronting American leadership in the Information Age and the Age of Terrorism. These two great trends, both prone to exploitation by extreme points-of-view and over-the-top rhetoric, put the United States in an unenviable damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t position. As such, a commitment to our values matters more than ever.
During a BBC news broadcast yesterday, callers from around the world offered deeply divided opinions of the response effort and the United States’ role in it so far. More than a few offered their own interpretations of the motivations behind these actions, which, it is safe to say, vary substantially from official accounts.
Mainstream U.S. media have been quick to criticize too, quickly highlighting what they consider both the extreme highlights and lowlights of the response efforts so far. Perhaps the most counterproductive of these efforts has been the tendency of media to compare and contrast the responses of different international teams.
I have been particularly struck by the effort to paint the United States response as lumbering, self-serving, obstructionist, and over-the-top. In contrast, some international teams have been lauded as nimble, quick, precise, and caring.
As William Cumming noted in his comment on my last post, this is a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. Both Katrina and the Indian Ocean Tsunami pale in comparison. In the first instance, not due to the scale of the destruction but in the lower death toll. In the latter, not due to the immense human toll but in the widely distributed scope of the damage.
Port-au-Prince encompasses the worst aspects of both of these disasters: The earthquake wrought devastation that is both immense and intense because it is concentrated in such a small and densely populated urban area already affected by great deprivation.
Such a massive disaster requires an equally massive response. But this poses another difficult dilemma. I say dilemma not problem, because it cannot be easily solved. As American task force commander LTG Ken Keen put it, getting aid to Haiti is like “pushing a bowling ball through a soda straw.”
No one, not the United Nations nor even the United States, can erase the disadvantages accumulated in Haiti over time that complicate and indeed compromise the response there. A massive disaster requires a massive response. But it also requires understanding that this equation will remain unbalanced in proportion to the scope and scale of the catastrophe even as our compassion seems equal to the task at hand.
Quick, nimble, and precise responses, like those exemplified by teams from our allies Israel, Italy, and Germany will produce striking successes, but always on an isolated scale. Meeting lingering challenges requires logistical muscle and concerted coordination efforts.
And this is precisely where value-focused and battle-tested leadership is most important. In a disaster, when the normal order is so suddenly and completely disturbed and the senses of place and purpose become disrupted, command and control strategies may seem appropriate but they do little good when no one is in a fit condition to respond or lacks the capacity to do so.
Coordination requires a different set of skills. In military circles, we often talk of C4I: Command, Control, Communication, Cybersystems, and Intelligence (emphasizing analysis). These elements still have a role, but disaster response has a flip side that requires us to employ these resources differently. In disasters like Haiti, we need to think and act in terms of a different C4I paradigm: Clarification, Creativity, Collaboration, Commitment, and Intelligence (emphasizing synthesis).
Our values, not just the value we commit in terms of human, financial and material capital (which has been substantial, if not unprecedented), make the most difference in a disaster. When we resist the temptation to engage unproductive emotions by criticizing the efforts of others and instead take the opportunity to work with anyone else willing to lend a hand, we can achieve great things, if only on a small scale. Criticism requires no special skills, but neither does caring. If you can only do a little, make it sure counts.
On Wednesday, January 13, fourteen Senators wrote their chamber’s leaders calling for urgent action by the Congress to aid earthquake ravaged Haiti. Their letter stated that assistance to the people of Haiti was in the United States’ national security interest.
In the days following the earthquake, President Obama has repeatedly pledged urgent and ample assistance. Military assets, international aid supplies, and government rescue teams were deployed within hours, and have already had an impact in terms of establishing aviation and sea-based supply lines through Port-au-Prince’s ravaged airport and seaport.
Meanwhile, individual Americans have responded with unprecedented speed and generosity to calls for donations to the American Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, Doctors Without Borders, MercyCorps, Oxfam, Save the Children,UNICEF, United Way, World Vision, and a host of other relief agencies online and by SMS text message. Corporations have pledged in-kind support, and at least one major credit card company has waived processing fees on donation transactions (albeit after a media outcry).
Despite the overwhelming show of support for Haiti and its impoverished people, one might reasonably ask what the United State’s national security interest there is. The country has few strategic resources, poses no military threat, and its fervent religious culture does not seem to breed the sort of extremism that has fostered terrorism eslewhere. So what’s on the line here?
The answer seems to be simple: America cannot afford to ignore the plight of people so like those who suffered from the poor response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As the nation seeks to rebuild its image abroad, it is becoming clear that the moral authority of the United States and its people rests not upon our ability to project power but on our willingness to extend protection. Put another way: This is a question of compassion, not competition.
The earthquake only compounded the problems Haiti already faced. It exposed not only the inadequacies of existing arrangements to promote sustainable prosperity, but also the consequences of neglecting the important connections between social and economic development in our own hemisphere and political stability.
Distinctions between homeland security and national security, hard power and soft power blur and fade to insignificance in the face of such a catastrophe. At a time when we have become better known and even resented for our preoccupation with competition and our relentless consumption, this is a time for America and Americans to display the sort of uncommon and uncompromising compassion our unparalleled liberties afford us.
A story in Monday’s New York Times once again highlighted the growing problem facing the United States in its efforts to combat terrorism: We’re swimming in sensors and drowning in data. Terrorism and its extremist adherents have no better ally in their efforts to harm us than our innate tendency to mistake problems of beingfor problems of knowing, and in doing so to tie ourselves in knots.
As inconceivable as the motivations and actions of terrorists may seem to us, their behavior does not pose an unimaginable much less unknowable threat. Although we may not know when, where, or how they intend to strike, we can be pretty sure they will.
Our inability to wrap our heads around the “why” of terrorism leads us to oversimplifications and misapprehensions about the nature of the terrorist threat on one hand and a tendency to over-reach in our efforts to know who they are and what they are up to on the other. This leads us to frame the problem of terrorism primarily as an effort to identify and interdict unknown enemies.
Our preoccupation with finding out whom we should target leads us to collect more information than we need, and, consequently, far more than we can intelligently manage. As such, it becomes not only increasingly difficult, but also increasingly impractical to assemble a coherent picture of the threats facing us.
With the possible combinations so numerous, we see few options besides throwing everything we have at the problem of sifting and sorting the data every way we can. But that’s the problem: We cannot sort or sift fast enough. Picking up the pace does no good. No matter how fast we work, we still make little or no progress.
Thankfully, looking for answers does not always require us to look for evidence. Sometimes all the evidence we need is already available, and all we really need to ask ourselves is “what does it all mean.”
Fortunately, this situation often arises when the stakes are high, making it a familiar setting for any experienced homeland security professional. Thos with experience know that gathering more information will not change the nature of a high-stakes problem nor will it make the solution any clearer. Indeed, just the opposite may be the case.
The popular Ron Howard movie Apollo 13 recounts the successful effort to save the crew of the crippled spacecraft after an unexpected explosion compromised the life support system aborting the original mission. In the movie (but apparently not in real-life), as the stakes became clear, flight director Gene Kranz played by actor Ed Harris, tells the engineers assembled to work out a strategy for saving the ship and its crew. “Failure is not an option.”
These words echo the sentiments expressed by President Obama during his scathing critiques of what he characterized as the intelligence failures that allowed the Nigerian Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab, who is accused of attempting to destroy Northwest Airlines flight 253, to board the Detroit-bound aircraft in Amsterdam despite apparent foreknowledge of his links to extremists. As the President noted, intelligence agencies had the information, but they did not know what it meant and did not act on what they did know before Abdulmutallab boarded the flight.
In a scene from Apollo 13, a group of engineers assembles in a meeting room and a box of assorted items representing the materials available to the astronauts aboard the crippled spacecraft is emptied before them. Their charge was to figure out how to combine these resources in a new way to achieve the goal of keeping the crew alive and returning them to earth safely.
This sort of situation as it applies to terrorism has confronted the west before. Other countries confront this reality today. Few can afford to act as the United States has in imposing new regulations and technical security requirements on its people and its trading partners. Instead, they adapted their behavior to the reality of the threat confronting them.
When IRA bombers threatened riders on London’s Underground, the operators of the system relocated vendors to improve sight lines and removed rubbish bins to make it harder to conceal an incendiary or explosive device. Passengers too became an integral part of the security arrangements.
Whether we can afford to invest in better technology or not, we should ask ourselves whether what we have to invest will prove worth the cost when we look back at the value obtained. If NW 253 teaches us anything, it is that the investments we have already made in airport security and intelligence gathering and analysis have not made the target that much harder.
Looking at the security landscape before us, we might discover that we are far better off than we realize. The same things that prevented the terrorists aboard United Airlines flight 93 from succeeding on 9/11 saved lives again on Christmas Day. When everything is said and done, relying on the resourcefulness and courage of average Americans is not such a bad thing to do when failure is not an option.
Monday’s New York Times featured an article by William J. Broad on renewed collaboration between U.S. intelligence agencies and climate change scientists. Efforts to exchange arctic surveillance photos and other data for improved understanding of the national security impacts of climate change seem eminently sensible. (See also the CIA press release on the opening of the Center for Climate Change and National Security.)
Why then do some overseers in Congress, like Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso object to the idea? Well, for starters, they got their way on this question for the past eight years while President George W. Bush and former Wyoming Congressman, Halliburton CEO, and Vice President Dick Cheney were in office. The recently restarted program known as Medea – Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis – was suspended on their watch.
Economic, social, and political instability in oil-rich Muslim nations is among the biggest potential national security challenges presented by global climate change. At the same time, growing concern about the impacts of ice melt and habitat loss on northern climes and their fragile ecosystems has influenced the debate on drilling and exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other remote regions.
The circumstances attending such instability strike most of us as particularly bad news. But that is not the case for those with a vested interest in America’s energy addiction. Enabling instability suits them just fine. Driving up the price of energy makes exploration in previously unthinkable places more attractive and indeed competitive. Defense contractors benefit from our sense of insecurity and our desire to arm our enemies’ enemies.
The U.S. government, on the other hand, gains very little from these exchanges. We face a world in which the effects of climate change drive up the costs of combating terrorism while fueling the cause of extremists seeking to recruit and convert new radicals.
But as Broad’s article makes clear, not all of the consequences of climate change, at least in the arctic region, should strike opponents of this renewed collaboration as negative. Barring international agreements or other new regulations, melting sea ice will facilitate navigation and open access to previously untapped fish stocks and mineral reserves.
According to sources quoted in the article, the fiscal impacts of this program are negligible. U.S. spy agencies maintain extensive sensor networks that produce a very detailed picture of conditions in the arctic region where the effects of climate change have already become quite apparent. The scientists with whom intelligence agencies work receive degraded imagery and must hold appropriate security clearances. In exchange, they aid the country in achieving a better understanding of the world in which we and our children will live.
For once, by bringing our spies in from the cold, it seems we might just be fighting the next war instead of the last one. The next question we must ask ourselves is what we will do with the new information produced by this partnership and the insights it yields.
More information on national security and climate change is available from these sources:
Last week, a freak snowstorm paralyzed Portland, Oregon. The city that copes so well with rain, and lots of it, could not cope with snow. A parlous commute on snow-clogged streets blocked by wrecked, stuck, and abandoned cars and buses frayed nerves and called into question the city’s (and especially the city government’s) capacity to cope with adversity.
As the snow piled up and queries started rolling in, no less than the mayor himself sprung into action. The new weapon of choice in the war against snow-spawned chaos: Twitter. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but does an iPhone and a Twitter client trump snowplows?
As it happens, the answer seems to depend on what you expect. In a political age when people want politicians to show they “get it,” tweeting has certain advantages. For starters, when deployed by the pol-in-person, they add an aire of immediacy and intimacy often lacking in official communications. But with access comes higher expectations. It’s not enough to know about something, you have to do something with what you know.
Criticism of other city officials has been coming hot-and-heavy, not only for their response or its perceived shortcomings, but also for their lack of communication with the public. Not so, the mayor who has gotten consistently high marks for retweeting message-after-message from angry and dismayed snowbound citizens.
So, what does this say? Well, the lesson seems clear enough. If you can’t do much about a situation, at least make it clear you know what’s happening and you care about its impact on people.
This raises another important question though. What kind of information makes people feel better? City officials who have the routine responsibility for communicating with the public in such situations wondered what, if anything, meaningful could be said about the situation. It was snowing, no one knew how hard or for how long it would last, and Portlanders, in typical fashion, were dealing with it rather poorly.
But that, it seems, is just the point. People wanted to know it wasn’t just them that didn’t seem to know what was happening. They wanted confirmation that the situation was unknowable. That knowledge may not have made anyone happier, but it would have put their frustration with not knowing what was happening in the category of the unknowable.
When it comes to public messaging during disasters and emergencies, public officials have always had to balance three competing priorities: speed, accuracy, and clarity. In the age of Twitter and text messaging, clarity and brevity seem to go hand-in-hand.
It seems, however, that these three things do not function well as fellow travelers. Communicators seem more or less doomed to deliver only two at a time. You can have speed and accuracy, but that comes at the expense of brevity. You can have brevity and have it quickly, but often accuracy suffers if only through the loss of context. Even when you get the short, fast message right the loss of context often leads to misinterpretation or misapprehension about its true meaning.
Getting it right and keeping it short takes time. As I recall (I can’t find the quotation at the moment), Gen. George S. Patton once famously responded to a request to speak by saying: “How long do I have to prepare?” Never at a loss for words, Patton made the point that he he could speak for two hours on virtually any topic if they wanted him to begin immediately. Even when you’re bigger than life, apparently, it takes effort to be direct, concise, and memorable. In disasters and emergencies, though, time is always of the essence.
This leads us to one final question. How important is it that we get the message right? What’s right for one group may not be relevant much less important to another.
Getting short messages out quickly has become the new currency of the realm in emergency management. Quantity has become more important than quality. Those who manage to act or at least tweet quickly, may not be forgiven their mistakes but neither will their silence be overlooked much less forgotten.
It looks like I spoke too soon by posting my Top 10 for 2009 last week. Just when you think it’s safe to get back in the skies somebody tries to blow up an airplane with an underwear bomb. (I will avoid the small but obvious temptation to employ sophomoric, prepubescent potty humor here.)
In an effort to underscore the seriousness with which the threat is taken, President Obama yesterday cited “human and systemic failures,” which he termed “totally unacceptable” for allowing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. His failed attempt to initiate an explosive device as the flight approached its destination occurred despite apparent warnings that al Qaeda radicals in Yemen were preparing a Nigerian operative for an attack and a nearly simultaneous warning from the young man’s father that his devout son had fallen off the grid and might be a risk to the United States.
The revelation that the United States government, possibly even two stations in the same intelligence service, had in its possession the information with which to identify and interdict a terrorist target before he could act has been taken as the intelligence equivalent to the binary explosive device that Mr. Abdulmutallab sought unsuccessfully to detonate. Like the alleged terrorist, the intelligence community’s technology failed to operate as intended.
Neither event should come as much of a surprise. Perpetrating a terrorist attack on an airliner remains a very complex undertaking, which has no doubt become more complicated due to the measures taken by the United States and its allies since 9/11. Assembling and actuating an improvised explosive device remains a complex and risky undertaking for those handling it, especially when it must be designed and deployed in a fashion that renders it both difficult to detect and under the deliberate control of an operative. A device of the type employed in this instance is difficult, if not impractical to test beforehand.
Soon after the attack, we learned that Mr. Abdulmutallab had come to the attention of officials at the U.S. embassy in Lagos, Nigeria after his father expressed concern his son had been radicalized. This understandably rare approach from a distressed parent raised appropriate alarm bells, but was not in and of itself sufficient cause to consider Mr. Abdulmutallab a full-fledged terrorist.
This morning we learned more about the information that might have led President Obama to characterize intelligence failures in such stark terms. News reports indicate that intelligence services monitoring communications in Yemen intercepted an exchange in November indicating that an unidentified Nigerian operative was prepared for deployment. In hindsight, it seems clear that these two pieces of information are related. But combining them, like actuating the explosives Mr. Abdulmutallab carried, is harder to do than it seems.
In addition to the President’s statement yesterday, we learned a bit more about the alleged bomber himself from what appear to be his own posts to an Islamic chat room on the internet. While these musings help paint a picture of a lonely, troubled young man struggling with his identity, purpose, and relationships, these writings do not suggest anything more serious than the sorts of emotional difficulties that face many young men as they reach adulthood. Taken in the context of his activities at the time, rather than our knowledge of the present circumstances, they seem rather constructive even reasonable attempts to seek stability and direction.
That Mr. Abdulmutallab found stability and purpose, despite education and advantage, in associating with terrorists understandably troubles us. But it also suggests we should not look for easy answers lest we fall prey to the same sort of misfortune Mr. Abdulmutallab himself now faces (or would have, for that matter, had he succeeded in his designs).
By definition, a systemic failure occurs when multiple, independent structural deficiencies conspire to permit the occurrence of an unwanted or unintended consequence, which would otherwise have been avoided had any single deficiency not existed. While we examine the multiple missed opportunities that allowed Mr. Abdulmutallab to come so close to bringing down Northwest flight 253, we should not overlook the fact that his attempt ultimately failed.
In our efforts to outdo ourselves and improve the performance of the aviation security and intelligence processes associated with this incident, we must remain mindful that success has its own perils. Like Mr. Abdulmutallab we may either become entangled in our own plot or have to destroy ourselves to succeed in any meaningful way.
I am sure you have noticed a decided departure from the usual gloom and doom in this week’s contributions to HLSwatch.com. Even when they seem otherwise inappropriate in the circumstances, laughter and humor serve as powerful analgesics. If only they could inoculate us from pain altogether!
As we prepare to close the books on a spectacularly dour year, it’s worth noting that plenty of things have happened, which in retrospect, should have made us laugh if only to keep us from crying. Here’s my Top 10 list, with apologies to David Letterman:
10. Tareq and Michaele Salahi tested the White House policy of openness by inviting themselves to a state dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which once again proved it’s not what you know that’s important, it’s how desperate you are to get your own reality television show.
9. In a spectacular demonstration of democracy-in-action, the Afghan people held an election the likes of which made people inChicago and Florida proud of our country’s efforts there. Meanwhile, in a display of grassroots activism reminiscent of Tiananmen Square, the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran displayed the kind of technological savvy usually reserved for voting for American Idol finalists or regaling friends with news about what you’re having for dinner to muster a succession of impressive flashmobs that displayed their general displeasure with the outcome of the election that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power there.
8. Delegates from more than 190 nations met in Copenhagen to forge a global agreement curbing human activities that contribute to climate change; in the end, their success was marked by a communiqué outlining their commitments to offset the carbon emissions from their lengthy discussions by producing a succinct and largely unimpressive agreement the printing of which will produce virtually no impact on the world’s forests.
7. In an act of irony (absent the taint of cynicism, but nevertheless displaying a deep sense of humility), the likes of which would have made Gen. Curtis “Peace Is Our Profession” LeMay either immensely proud or insanely jealous, Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway just days after committing tens of thousands more American troops to the war in Afghanistan.
6. American forces, largely through the successful deployment of Predator and Reaper drones, managed to kill several top al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban operatives despite a startling security deficiency that broadcast unencrypted footage of their surveillance and targeting activities along with hundreds of Three’s Company, Baywatch, and Knight Rider reruns to anyone on the ground with aYouTube or Hulu account.
5. Amidst speculation about a potential succession crisis and rising tensions surrounding his hermitic country’s nuclear ambitions, North Korea’s Dear Leader Kim Jong-il dispelled any lingering concern that poor health would keep him from rattling nuclear sabers and unsettling western nerves for another year by engaging in frenetic whirlwind of activity that led some observers to wonder aloud whether be maneuvering to replace Paula Abdul as the third judge on American Idol.
4. As the world looked on with a mixture of apprehension and apathy, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of H1N1 influenza first detected in Mexico in March a worldwide pandemic; as millions fell ill and thousands died, the United Nations demonstrated once again its profound ability to reflect a sense of urgency by drawing attention to a problem without really solving it, which called to mind both its past efforts to stop the spread of other deadly illnesses such as malaria and polio and seemed to indicate the sort of success its sister UN agencies would produce during the Copenhagen climate summit.
3. The arrests of three people in Denver, Colorado and New York on charges of plotting attacks against targets in New York City; seven men in North Carolina said to have sought training at terrorist camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the unsealing of indictments against eight people in Minneapolis, Minnesota linked to the disappearances of Somali youth thought to have been recruited to fight in the civil war there and the attack at Fort Hood’s soldier readiness center attributed to Major Malik Nadal Hasan that left 13 soldiers dead stoked fears of homegrown terrorism. However, with the Obama Administration working feverishly to close the detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay naval station, it’s more likely that these budding reality show superstars will play feature roles in a new television drama just entering pre-production called Survivor: Thomson, Illinois (aka Guantanamo North).
2. President Obama with the help of Congress and the Federal Reserve mounted a seemingly successful last-ditch effort to stave off a Chernobyl-like meltdown of the world economy by pumping more $1.6 trillion dollars into the economy; the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 saved or added an estimated 600-700,000 jobs to the economy this year alone while leaving more than 15 million Americans unemployed, another 9 million underemployed, and upwards of 2 million marginally employed. As the official unemployment rate leveled off at 10 percent and the economy started growing again at a rate of 2.2 percent per annum, people opened their wallets and handed over what little cash or credit they had; what had in other years had been described as an orgy of spending ended up looking more like a sordid ménage à trois in some seedy motel that rents rooms by the hour.
1. In a test of our ability to look closely and deeply at ourselves, warts and all, the nation’s gaze remain firmly focused as the year came to a close on the actions of an infidel and his self-professed but as yet unconfirmed infidel-ities. In what some reports have described as an impressive use of long irons, Mr. Woods’ estranged wife Elin Nordegren made short work of Tiger as he beat a hasty retreat from the family home in a gated Florida community after being confronted about his alleged nocturnal wanderings while on tour. After witnessing her impressive use of both soft and (mostly) hard power, administration officials have started making discrete inquiries into whether Ms. Nordegren is available to advise special forces operators hunting Osama bin Laden and his compatriots in the lawless Af-Pak border region.
Here’s hoping 2010 gives us more to laugh at. If not, we have no one to blame but ourselves. While we’re waiting, please take a moment to share something that made you laugh this past year or tell us what would make you particularly happy in the year ahead.
Someone once said of the choice among quality, price, and timely delivery, “Pick any two.” In recent years, Americans have operated under the illusion that such tradeoffs do not apply to us, at least with respect to information. The pace of technological progress has fueled this illusion.
As individuals’ access to information has improved through the seemingly relentless convergence of information technologies, people have actually started wondering when, not if, a singularity will emerge. Until this happens, we have to cope with the tradeoffs and their effects on democracy and trust.
As this blog’s other distinguished contributors and discussants has demonstrated on many occasions, homeland security professionals wrestle continuously with information management and technology policy issues that call upon us to balance information integrity, validity, and security. Inevitably, these values find themselves expressed as tensions, and tradeoffs become inevitable as we seek to meet the expectations of politicians and citizens’ insatiable ‘needs to know.’
In addition to the need to know, we must now confront the ability to know. Information and knowledge are not the same thing. Turning information into knowledge is a complex, time-consuming, and often costly process. People in general have a poor capacity for interpreting large amounts of complex information and thus acquiring appreciable knowledge of risks, especially those far removed from their everyday experience.
This became abundantly clear to me recently, as the community where I work responded to a positive test for e. coli contamination in our drinking water supply. Initial tests, like the one conducted here the day before Thanksgiving, had produced positive results on more than a dozen prior occasions without resulting in confirmation during subsequent testing. This time was different though.
By the time the positive results were confirmed and the potential extent of contamination became clear, officials had to work out who needed to know what and then worried about the best way to communicate the information without provoking undue fear. After all, they reckoned, the boil water notice issued in response to the finding in compliance with federal drinking water regulations was not itself a risk-free proposition: In other communities, more people suffered burns preparing water for consumption than suffered illness from the such contamination itself.
As word of the required actions and the city’s response to it was released to the news media and the public, feedback came in hot and fast. Why had this notice not been issued sooner? Why had officials relied so heavily on traditional media to get the word out? Why had city officials not contacted water customers directly?
Those in the community asking these questions assumed they were the first to do so. Moreover, they assumed that the answers were influenced primarily by money, technology, and administrative inertia, if not apathy or incompetence. While cost, technical capability, and bureaucratic issues all play a role in delaying or preventing action, they are not the primary cause of officials’ concerns. Those responsible for deciding when and how to act, including when and how to notify the public, tend to be consumed with concern for getting it right. Herein lies the problem: A “right” response lies in the eyes of the beholder, and the public has taken a particularly jaundiced view of official actions to manage risks, especially those that involve an intersection between complex technologies and human health.
As I was digesting the very real implications of the dilemma occurring in my own community, I became aware of a report released at the beginning of October by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The report prepared by a commission of policy and technology experts co-chaired by former United States Solicitor General Theodore Olson and Google vice president Marisa Mayer was presented to federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski upon its release.
In short, the report warns of a growing information divide that threatens to undermine the foundations of American democracy. Addressing the divide, the report argues, will require coordinated effort on many fronts, and cannot be accomplished by either the government or the market acting alone.
Although improved access to technology, expanded transparency of government information, and increased commitment to engagement are all required, so too is increased literacy and numeracy – the capacity of people to appreciate information and turn it into useful knowledge.
So far, efforts to produce engagement even in some of the most creative, educated, and engaged communities through technology innovation have produced spotty results. Open data and application development contests intended to engage private sector partners to leverage insights from public data have produced applications that do little to advance the public good. In many cases, these applications simply make it easier for well-equipped citizens with smartphones to tell government officials they are doing a poor job responding to citizen concerns, while increasing the volume of complaints they have to deal with before they can on with the work needed to remedy the underlying causes of what might otherwise be legitimate problems.
In other cases, applications that improve the efficiency of individual competition for consumption of public goods like parking spaces pass for innovation. In still others, externalities clearly outweigh efficiencies by making undigested or unconfirmed information available in forms that further erode confidence in government.
In the early days of the republic, a learned man or woman of modest means could acquire a decent command of all available knowledge by applying him or herself with rigor and discipline. Indeed, the signers of our own Declaration of Independence distinguished themselves as knowledgeable in a diverse array of subjects ranging from philosophy to law to agriculture to military strategy to engineering to commerce to religion.
Today, not one of us has any hope of achieving comparable mastery of extant knowledge. The volume of information already in existence and the pace of new discoveries have simply become too vast, too specialized, too detailed, and too isolated from everyday experience for anyone to master regardless of mettle or means. This does not seem to have lowered public expectations though.
In a world where people share information in real-time with one another over distances of thousands of miles and have instant access to hundreds of television channels, dozens of radio stations, and zettabytes (one zettabyte equals one billion terabytes) of data how do we overcome the illusion that information access equals knowledge? With all of this information floating around us all the time, how do we decide what to tell people, when to tell them, and what method to use?
In the online discussion that emerged following the recent water contamination scare here, one participant in noted, “People do not trust institutions, they trust people.” For him, at least, it was important not so much that someone had the answers to his questions, as it was that someone took responsibility for responding to his concerns. In the absence of an official somebody, it seems anybody will do. He, and many others, argued that the absence of official pronouncements only encouraged others to fill the void.
Not long ago, we relied upon media to do this for us. That has changed, and media no longer have the capacity they once did to hold government accountable or to lower public expectations. To the extent that media play an influential role in public debates these days, they are more likely to reinforce our biases than clarify positions or encourage dialogue.
It remains unclear whether social media or other technologies will bridge the gap between knowledge haves and have-nots. If time is running out on our information illusions and our nation’s capacity to maintain trust in government and its democratic legitimacy are threatened by this growing divide, what will we make of the choice between integrity, validity, and security in the future and how will cost, quality, and timeliness influence our decisions?
