http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB10569205648909100,00.html The Wall Street Journal June 30, 2003 PORTALS By LEE GOMES Is Priceline Founder Walker's Plan To Police Sites Genius or Just Goofy? Jay Walker, who made a fortune with Priceline , the name-your-price airline ticket company, describes himself less as a businessman than an inventor, using the Internet to rethink how things work. Having helped remake the way the country buys plane tickets, Mr. Walker is now working on changing the way it fights terrorists. His USHomeGuard, a for-profit company that Mr. Walker and associates are now talking up in Washington and elsewhere, is one of those ideas that will either leave you applauding its cleverness and ambition, or cringing at its kookiness and opportunism. I think Mr. Walker is on to something, though not in quite the same way he probably imagines. As do most other terrorism entrepreneurs, Mr. Walker begins by noting that there are tens of thousands of pieces of "unprotected infrastructure" in the country: power plants, gas tanks, petroleum refineries and the like. USHomeGuard would point Webcams at all of them. Those photographs would then be distributed over the Internet to the home PCs of Americans who have signed up to earn money -- an estimated $10 an hour -- working as what Mr. Walker calls "citizen spotters." Most of us would just call them security guards. These spotters would be shown still pictures, one after another, selected randomly from somewhere around the country. If everything in the picture looks OK, they'd press the equivalent of an All Clear button. If something seems out of the ordinary -- a vehicle is parked where it isn't supposed to be -- they'd press a second button. Mr. Walker explains that since these are places no one is supposed to be, it would be easy to detect an interloper. When a spotter spots a potential problem, a central facility gets notified. USHomeGuard employees would then be able to talk with the intruder over a loudspeaker. If they weren't satisfied with his answers, they'd call the police. To make sure the citizen spotters were paying attention, every now and then, the system would send out a staged photo, purporting to show some sort of intrusion. Spotters would be required to recognize these as potential problems -- or else be briefly suspended from duty. It's easy to find flaws in all this. The bad guys in USHomeGuard's publicity material skulk around otherwise empty sites carrying satchels. In real life, they tend to drive trucks with bombs or board planes carrying box cutters. It's also unclear how someone not intimately familiar with a facility would know that the fellow in the truck parked next to a big gas tank, who can't hear the loudspeaker because of a passing rainstorm, isn't a terrorist, but rather Al, the maintenance guy, on his weekly rounds. Mr. Walker says he's come up with a highly effective way of preventing terrorism. It seems to me that he has come up with a minimally effective way of preventing a bunch of high-school kids from parking their van by the reservoir and getting stoned. And a likely side effect is an epidemic of false alarms, like the ones that happen with all those high-tech security systems in Beverly Hills. What I think Mr. Walker has done right, though, is the manner in which he has again recognized the transformational nature of the Internet, just as he did with Priceline. I can't imagine a remote monitoring system like USHomeGuard being used to protect anything truly critical. But for second-tier locales -- the infrastructure equivalents of the unsold airplane tickets that Priceline sells -- why not? Maybe one day soon, that reservoir will indeed be guarded by someone at a PC far away. But USHomeGuard isn't taking the economic and technical logic of the Internet to its logical conclusions. As Americans by the hundreds of thousands are learning, if a job can be done at a keyboard and monitor, chances are good it can be done anywhere in the world. In the publicity material for USHomeGuard, the citizen spotters look just like folks you see in a Charles Schwab brochure: earnest middle-class types wearing Lands' End sweaters, absorbed in their Dells. But there's no reason to pay citizen spotters even $10 an hour when the work can be done for a tenth or twentieth of that overseas. And I mean seriously overseas: the polite English-speaking programmers and help desk attendants of Bangalore, India, are vastly overqualified for this kind of work. You don't need English skills, or many skills at all, to know whether a truck is, or is not, in a TV picture. And they are no more or less handicapped at recognizing Al, the maintenance guy. Also, the safeguards used to prevent snoozing spotters in the U.S. would work equally well abroad. The real value of Mr. Walker's proposal is in the way it reminds us about the easy exportability of labor in the 21st century, if not for USHomeGuard, then eventually for someone else. How will we continue to pay for all the infrastructure Mr. Walker wants to guard when the earning power of Americans keeps heading overseas via the Internet? Now there's a problem I'd like to see an Internet entrepreneur try to crack. * Send your comments to lee.gomes@wsj.com 1, and check back on Friday for some selected letters at WSJ.com/Portals 2. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'