This
is
another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and
my
time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts." (If you want to
read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the categories on the
right labeled "Excerpts from the book." I'm afraid I can't fix the bug
in TypePad that prevents me from putting them in the category in
reverse-chronological order.) Comments and factual quibbles
are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:
fact.check.baker@gmail.com. If you're dying to order the book, send
mail to the same address. I'm still looking for an agent and a
publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too.
--Stewart Baker
I am beginning to see the appeal of this
austere, cerebral memorial. I don’t know most of the victims, and neither will
others who come here. The memorial is not meant for memory but for connection.
It tells us nothing but the names and the birthdates of the victims, but I see
now that those are enough to build a web of connections. Just those facts drain
some of the anonymity from the dead. They are all that’s needed to pull us out
of airy sentiment and make us feel instead the concrete loss the victims and
their families suffered.
It’s not much, in fact it’s sadly
impersonal, but it’s more than most memorials can convey.
***
With Chertoff’s full support, I fought
back against the determined resistance of airlines, foreign governments, and
civil liberties groups; we put in place a coherent border inspection strategy
despite them. We hadn’t won every battle when I left, but we were winning, and
it looked as though the new Secretary and the new administration would keep up
the fight. That was satisfying.
But satisfaction was not what I was
feeling. I’ve never understood political
memoirs that are a long tale of successes. In my experience, government rarely
offers clear victories. The more ambitious your goals -- if you want to do more
than enjoy the limo rides, if you want to solve problems and reshape policies –
the more likely you are to fail. In ways
that hurt so bad you’ll never forget them.
Maybe other government memoirists are
better at putting their failures behind them. But I can’t, maybe because I fear
that my failures will end up costing the country as much as the failures that
led to 9/11.
That’s because the same exponential
changes that undercut border defenses are at work elsewhere. Moore’s Law, which
has predicted decades of exponential growth in computer capabilities, is
creating scary new vulnerabilities here at home; soon a host of criminal and
military organizations will be able to leave individuals bankrupt and countries
without power or a financial system. Similar exponential changes in
biotechnology will empower a generation of garage hackers who may or may not
end up curing cancer but who will certainly end up making smallpox at home.
Unlike jet travel, these technologies
have not yet been misused on the scale of 9/11. And without three thousand
dead, business, international, and civil liberties groups have been ferocious
in opposing any action that might head off disaster. I struggled to sound the
alarm, to prepare the country for network and biological attacks, but I failed
more often than I succeeded.
That’s over now. I’ve been relieved. The new administration has embraced civil
liberties rhetoric with enthusiasm. Some of them seemed convinced that they
have a mandate to roll back any security measure that reduced privacy or
inconvenienced the international community.
I don’t think that will happen with border security, but the new
administration’s deference to privacy groups and international opinion will
make it far harder to do anything about the new threats.
Maybe, I think, they’re right not to pick
those fights. Maybe Americans are tired of battle, tired of remembering 9/11,
tired of its lessons. Perhaps the fight
against the new threats will just have to wait until something bad happens.
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