[Oracle Corp Chairman and CEO] Larry Ellison wants to sell databases, correct? So maybe now we can have everybody's fingerprints and retinal scans put into computers. And Big Brother can be efficient with Oracle software. Siebel [Systems] has purchased the world's largest American flag and attached it to the side of their building, supposedly to symbolize growth. Of course, that might imply their company's growth. That is, if you want to invest now, it's a good chance to get in at a low price. On the political side, you see Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and talking about God punishing us. The cretins are coming out of the woodwork, The "Office of Homeland Security" does sound a little over the top It sounds like a phrase out of Orwell's 1984. It's scary as hell. One of the things I don't think Bush gets is that the terrorists win if they take away our freedoms, directly or indirectly. Yesterdays Technology Tomorrowthe phrase has been thrown around the FBI for decades. It might be funny if it werent so true. The agents have encrypted radio; theyve got night vision; theyve got the surveillance stuff, says a former agent, one of several interviewed for this piece. They have top of the line everythingeverything except information technology. Not to dwell too much on Suns Scott McNealy, but he did popularize the phrase The network is the computer. This idea, which the Fortune 500 started grasping five years ago, is as anti-stovepipe as you can get. It sees individual computers as communication devices, whose ability to link up with the rest of the worlds computers is more important than the processing power they possess on their own. It sees the network as a platform on which knowledge can be shared, amplified and re-created in new innovative forms, the networked pieces adding up to far more than the sum of their parts. Victory in the information war depends on the ability to use that informationto understand it, to react to it quickly. September 11 was all based on controlling information, says Carver Mead, the CalTech physicist, one of the fathers of the microprocessor and a pioneer in neural networking, an approach to artificial intelligence based on replicating the connective miracles of the human brain. The fact is the hijackers controlled all the information. They had all the information on the first three planesthey were the only ones who knew what was going to happen. On the fourth plane, there was a tiny amount of information available to the passengers; they were able to use it to thwart the plan. We actually knew a lot about some of these people, says Mead. We actually did know a lot, but we didnt put it together. Putting it together requires acceptance of the idea that the network is the computerand that the bigger and broader it is, the better. a fit-for-the-1990s computer system will be in place at the agency by the end of 2003 I PROMIS you.The FBIs controversial Carnivore system, which can read e-mail and track suspects Web activity, reportedly has a data mining component called Coolmine to help it analyze the information. But for most of Uncle Sams security-related data, mining is something done by keyboard- and hunch-wielding humans, by hand.