President's Message

What a difference a day makes. Among the casualties of the World Trade Center attack on September 11 was our concept of the role of technology in promoting growth and progress. New communication tools like the fax machine, cell phone, and particularly the Internet, were seen as emancipators, that like the printing press a half millennium before would help to disseminate ideas and information, spread democracy, expose deceit, and lay bare dictatorships to world opinion. It was an unstoppable force that could only do good. In 1991, it was a blizzard of faxes and e-mails that led to Boris Yeltsin’s defiant speech atop a Russian tank and the defeat of the Soviet counterrevolution. Existence of the Internet is also seen to have limited the ability of the Chinese government to control public information during the recent surveillance plane standoff with the United States. The Internet had become a new frontier ruled by a benevolent frontier justice, where normal laws and regulations were suspended and tolerance and self-restraint were the only rules.

There were, of course, some bumps along the information highway. Flimflam artists and porn mongers were giving the Internet an unsavory reputation, viruses and worms were a constant irritation, and the Y2K bug threatened to bring the revolution to a halt. But as the specter of a digital meltdown began to subside, there emerged a complacency that progress might slow but never stop.

Two-edged sword

Much has changed since September 11. We have found that communications technology can be used for evil as well as good. Terrorist messages can be encrypted and sent by wireless across the globe. Radio signals can be broken into segments and routed by different frequencies to foil detection. Communications are routinely embedded in Web sites and downloaded from afar. Misguided hackers--and sometimes governments--send vicious moles and viruses designed to wreak havoc in Internet commerce. Although of no consequence to human life, the NIMDA virus spread to computers worldwide in less than 48 hours, bypassing conventional IT defenses and using infected Web servers as a Trojan horse to infect files downloaded by unsuspecting users.

Global village

The growth of wireless and Internet communications have launched us into a global village envisioned by Marshal McLuhan in the 1960’s. Satellites beam an image around the world, providing instant access to information that makes everyone a spectator in events. For people around the world, the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were up close and personal. For the first time, cell phones allowed doomed passengers of hijacked planes to communicate with their loved ones and victims of the crashes to report on their status. The experience riveted a world that had too long been complacent about terrorism, and the image of the collapsing towers will remain burned into people’s minds for years to come.

But if the global village is a uniting force, it is also one that tears us apart. For many whose traditional way of life is threatened by knowledge and information, the Internet is a destabilizing force, one which they embrace only with an eye to destroying it.

Digital dependency

The Internet was created as a decentralized communications network that could continue to function, even if component segments were interrupted or destroyed. But as the Internet has become standard and universal, it has become a medium for instability. For many, the Web is the first place to go for information; yet that information is often inaccurate or distorted. The growth of Internet commerce has made us dependent on it for our economic livelihood, and we would suffer extreme consequences if it became unreliable or access were cut off.

As our nation and the world rise to the challenge of the war on terrorism, we will see many of our assumptions and beliefs on digital communication put to the test. This will be the first war waged in cyberspace, and the freedoms and privileges of the Web that we had come to take for granted will be measured and constrained. Yet we must not forget them, for when we emerge from the conflict, it will be essential that these freedoms all be restored. Despite our current conflicts, the technology revolution remains on the side of the good guys. In the long run, electronic communications favor those who would share their information, not hide it behind a wall of deceit.

--Allan Ostergren
dacsprez@aol.com