NYT: Techies Now Respect Government

[Ken Brown]

Tim May wrote:
> 
> On Sunday, May 26, 2002, at 10:07  AM, John Young wrote:
> 
> > Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today:
> >
> For example, in another place:
> 
> "The question `How can this technology be used against me?' is now a
> real R-and-D issue for companies, where in the past it wasn't really
> even being asked," said Jim Hornthal, a former vice chairman of
> Travelocity.com. "People here always thought the enemy was Microsoft,
> not Mohamed Atta.""
> 
> No, the reason companies deployed crypto was not because they feared
> Microsoft would read their mail, but because they feared hackers,
> terrorists, thieves would read their mail.

> As for worrying about terrorism, many corporate headquarters have
> anti-truckbomb measures in place. In front of the Noyce Building in
> Santa Clara, Intel's high-rise  headquarters building, there are
> extensive barriers and other measures to prevent a truck bomb from being
> driven into the main lobby and detonated. These have been there for most
> of the past decade; security was not an afterthought resulting from 9/11.

Exactly

I can't imagine that any large US company that operated abroad - which
is effectively all of big ones - didn't think about the same sort of
thing.  My ex-employers did business in a number of African and
middle-eastern countries, some of them in a state of civil war, and had
planned responses to kidnapping or murder of employees or their
families, and to armed attack on company buildings, so physical security
had always been on the agenda. 

If any of them were complacent about security in the USA itself, they
would surely have been shaken out of it in the 1960s if not before.
(Hey, didn't you guys use to have bank robbers? And what about the days
when payrolls really were rolls of paper money?). Anyway, after abortion
clinic bombings in the 1990s, and the Atlanta Olympic & Oklahoma
bombings and Seattle protests surely no corporation  the USA could have
been naive enough to think that they were immune to politcal violence? 

The US company I used to work for in London had it's buildings within
the blast radius of IRA bombs in 1983 and 1991 (and nearby in 1982 and
1995).  The main thing that worried them in London was being occupied by
demonstrators against the company's policies in other countries, or by
"anti-Globalisation" protestors. We had  discussions with police and
others about corporate response to attacks or demonstrations. I
participated in them at one point to  discuss IT security.  It was that
sort of discussion that persuaded people to pay for firewalls and proxy
servers. I don't think the idea that whole areas of the net woudl be
wiped out by stupid Microsoft word macros occured to many of the non-IT
managers, but they certainly didn't want to be hacked by Greens, who
some of them had an exaggerated fear of. One of the reasons I knew it
was time to leave was when I found myself talking to men in suits about
defending ourselves against demonstrations that friends of mine might
have been taking part in.