Is Priceline Founder Walker's Plan To Police Sites Genius or Just Goofy?

[R. A. Hettinga]

<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 at wsj.com 1, and check back on Friday for some selected
letters at WSJ.com/Portals 2.
 



-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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'