How to win the new war

[Howie Goodell]

Hi --

I just submitted the ff. article to my local newspaper.  I
suggest lots of you do something similar.  Our best chance
to keep crypto free is to present it loudly and clearly as
the way for our countries to *achieve* security, not an
irresponsible demand that they forgo it.  

BTW I wrote _Scientific American_ to ask that they re-post
David Chaum's 1992 article, "Achieving Electronic Privacy"
that makes this point so well.  It's easily Googled if they
don't, though.

Howie Goodell
-- 
Howie Goodell  hgoodell at cs.uml.edu  Pr SW Eng, WearLogic
Sc.D. Cand  HCI Res Grp  CS Dept  U Massachussets Lowell
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/goodell/howie
Dying is soooo 20th-century!   http://www.cryonics.org


======================  How to Win the New War 
======================

The U.S. and its citizens have just suffered the Pearl
Harbor of post-national conflicts.  We are in a different
kind of war, and we must fight it in many different ways. 
Here are four of the many hats we need to wear:
 
·	Cop
·	M.A.D.D.
·	Safety Engineer
·	Judge Wapner

                          Global cop

America is frequently accused of being a global policeman;
now is the time to do it well.  Investigate and hunt down
not just a few leaders, but every member of the terrorist
groups that participated in these attacks.  Where
governments cooperate, we can try these vicious criminals
individually.  Where this is impossible, we may go back to
our pre-Kennedy Cold War rules and assassinate them.


              M.A.D.D. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving)

Beyond finding the specific perpetrators of this attack,
lead a crusade (jihad) against terrorism worldwide.  This is
easy to say now, but it will need to be carried out for
decades, with serious money and smart people and determined
politics.  

This jihad also needs single-mindedness.  We are after
terrorism, not ethnicity; we will cooperate with all
governments and groups who can help us, and spare none who
oppose us in this.  The stakes are too high to play
favorites.


                         Safety Engineer

Despite our best efforts to eradicate terrorism, it will be
a factor in all our lives from now on.  A lot of engineering
designs in the industrialized world didn't take terrorism
into account, but that world changed September 11.  Security
must be a major design goal of many features of our
society:  airplanes and airports, subways, stadiums, water
supplies, product packaging, personal identification
.  The
vulnerabilities of existing systems need painstaking
analysis.  Some upgrades will be expensive, in many ways. 
Creative engineering and thorough debate of the options are
essential to keep the costs bearable and our brave new
terrorist-resistant world livable.

One example:  the IDs for airplane crews, and eventually
everyone who travels or goes near an airliner, could be
"smart cards" containing their owners' biometric identifiers
-- like fingerprints, voice, picture, and retinal scan --
cryptographically signed by the agency that collected them. 
(That agency or foreign government should be required to
back its credential with a huge insurance policy to ensure
they take it seriously.)  This would make it almost
impossible to get an unauthorized person through security,
but it could be verified in seconds, without consulting a
central database of everyone's data.  In fact the scanners
could be designed without removable storage or
communications links:  after a few days they would erase
their records unless they were read out after a hijacking.

This last point is crucial.  Most of the debate about
personal identification assumes there is a fundamental
trade-off between being insecure and becoming a police
state; therefore democracies have to settle for some
compromise that is only halfway secure and only halfway
free.  This is not true today.  Electronic and cryptographic
technology like David Chaum's "blind signature" and
"personal representative" lets us design systems with both
strong security and strong protection of privacy and
individual freedom.  (See his August, 1992 _Scientific
American_ article, "Achieving Electronic Privacy".)


                  Judge Wapner ("The People's Court")

Nobody of any ethnicity sacrifices his life without a
cause.  In the long run, the best solutions to terrorism
probably include making a few of those causes go away. 
Before courts and law enforcement reached some regions of
our country, there were deadly feuds there, too.  Now
instead of the Hatfields and the McCoys shooting it out for
decades, a judge looks at their case, hands down a decision,
and it gets enforced.  
Maybe after this horror we should take the cause that
undoubtedly drove these suicide bombers and make it
disappear:  we should lose our patience with that little
piss-ant real estate disagreement in the Middle East.  Give
the Israelis and Palestinians a month to agree on a map, or
we'll do it for them.  Then we add a 10-mile-wide corridor
in the middle, let the Army Corps of Engineers give it a
year of loving care, and announce we will blow away anything
that moves in it for the next few decades.  Note the glassy
pellets strewn along the middle:  their radioactivity is
intense but short-lived.  30 years from now you might
survive a crossing.  Jerusalem belongs to the U.N. now.  All
rise!