Industry View

Technologists vs. Terrorists

Technology is not a magic bullet that will render impotent all threats. But the nascent security tech revolution will make us safer, and soon.

By Mark P. Mills

October 10, 2006 — CSO —

So, where are the high-tech solutions in this conflict with terrorists, plotters and evildoers? Surely a nation that can produce iPods, cell phones, gigabit data streams, server farms and laser-guided bombs can sniff out some bad stuff without banning every water bottle and toothpaste tube from air travelers. Our soldiers are struggling mightily with a similar problem, trying to detect improvised explosive devices. Putting policy implications and opportunities for political mischief aside, why donâ¬"t we have high-tech sensors and snifferselectronic moats and virtual wallsto protect citizens and soldiers from bad guys and bad stuff?

That weâ¬"re on the half-decade anniversary of 9/11 with so little apparent progress is as much a technology challenge as a budget or policy one. In the initial paroxysm to do anything post-9/11, we added protection using what we already knew how to domostly more guards, guns and gates. Obvious to all: We need much better and much more, and in far more places. Less obvious is the near-revolutionary technology progress that has occurred and is about to be deployed. There is a remarkable new generation of solutions coming.

Over the past five years Iâ¬"ve visited and talked with hundreds of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs in the new multibillion-dollar high-tech security enterprise, from Boston to Austin, and San Diego to St Louis. And Silicon Valley toothough in this tech revolution, there is yet to emerge a â¬SValley⬝ epicenter. While the venerable defense giants dominate big deployments like airports, ports and borders, the lionâ¬"s share of revolutionary intellectual property and new technologies is emerging from universities, laboratories and small startups. Indeed, the archetype for high-tech security, the X-ray machines offered by GE and L3 for explosives detection in airplane check-baggage, originated in small entrepreneurial companies.

Before 9/11 there were only several dozen security tech companies, and no serious focus from the military-industrial giants. Today, every big player from Honeywell and Boeing to Northrop and Lockheed has a security tech operation. More importantly, there are more than 30,000 small companies in this new 21st-century security enterprise.

As with earlier conflicts, the forces of American capitalism have spooled up. The legion of scientists and engineers that Iâ¬"ve met talk passionately about solving the difficult technical problems that detecting so many threats presents. And they do so not just with entrepreneurial enthusiasm, but with genuine patriotism and concern to mitigate threats to fellow citizens.

But there are daunting technological barriers to seeing and sniffing out physical threatschallenges well beyond those faced in creating the hardware and software of the digital information economy. Information bits are just electrons, and their quantum cousins, photonstiny, orderly, simple by comparison to the monstrously larger, more complex and disordered world of atoms and molecules that make up all the bad stuff we want to find and identify. And unlike well-organized electrons in info systems, the atoms and molecules of TNT, acetone or anthrax are not only inconveniently randomly distributed, but also masked by other atoms and molecules and hidden by the complexities of the physical world, not to mention malicious schemes.

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