GlobalPOV: What are your thoughts about the tradeoff between security and privacy/civil liberty rights? WC: I think that we have a lot to learn from our own history – the way we reacted in World War I and World War II and in their aftermath. We’ve learned an awful lot about the fragile balance between national security and individual rights. I think there’s been a lot of misinformation put out about the danger presented by what’s been proposed to date. I think it’s done for political purposes. If it was 2001 instead of 2002—and election year—I don’t think you’d be hearing a lot about this, to be honest with you. It’s nonsense.

I listened to a debate this morning between a former General and a professor from Yale. It was totally ridiculous. They were talking about people who were taken up on suspicion for being terrorists – and when their backgrounds were screened, turned out to be people for whom immigration warrants and criminal warrants were existing. What is the point? How is this a threat to our civil liberties? I used to be general counsel to the Immigration Service. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the notion that of all the violations of law, immigration is somehow in a special category, so if you get picked up for one thing, it’s improper for them to hold you because you also have violated the immigration laws. That’s absurd – that makes no sense to me at all.

There’s a lot of hysteria that’s being whipped up here that curiously didn’t find its voice until 90 days or so before the mid term elections. I’m a very cynical Washington hand – I’ve been here for 30 years – and it’s very hard for me to attribute this newfound concern to anything other than politics. Because frankly, I don’t know what it is that the average American has to fear about in terms of what’s actually been done. All this stuff was done within months of 9/11. Why is it suddenly now every day in the Washington Post and the New York Times? Because they don’t like the President. And they don’t like the administration. They can’t go after the President, so they’re going after John Ashcroft. People want to take issue with this, but this is over the top. All of these people were in custody last year – nobody said a word about it in 2001. No one said anything about it in the first part of 2002. And now that it’s September—before the November mid term elections, where the Democrats are desperate to keep the Senate and gain control of the House—it’s in the paper every day.

GlobalPOV: Do you think it’s possible that people just felt uncomfortable to question these actions – that some time has passed and people just feel more comfortable asking the questions now? WC: I think that’s always a possibility, but I think they probably would have felt comfortable in March. Why is it that now that we’re coming up on the first year anniversary is it suddenly a topic of conversation every day when nothing has changed – nothing. I’m a military guy. I’ve been in the Navy for 22 years – in the reserves and on active duty. We use the word “war” here—in the general population—as if it were some kind of abstraction. War means war. It does mean—on occasion—that there has to be a re-examination of business as usual. We can either take a serious approach to foreclosing events like 9/11, or we can take an academic approach to it that’s going to cost lives. I think the people who have lost their loved ones have a very low tolerance for hearing that ‘well, listen, we wanted to do more, but couldn’t because we couldn’t come to a consensus about an academic potential civil rights violation.’ There are only two people who are currently being held as enemy combatants who are US citizens – both of whom had virtually no contact with the United States after their birth. The other 1,500 are non-Americans … people who are foreign born who have come here and either violated the immigration laws or the criminal laws.

GlobalPOV: So this idea of a 1984 society… WC: I think it’s over-stated. It’s something that we always have to be vigilant about – that’s why we have the kind of democracy that we do. I don’t think the fact that people are asking questions or engaging in debate is bad. But what I do feel is inappropriate is the personification of it. If you look at this, this is not being discussed by the left in dispassionate terms. These arguments are being made in terms of the vilification of John Ashcroft – they don’t like him because he’s a conservative and he’s a Christian. I don’t happen to be a Christian – I’m Jewish – but I find offensive the fact that they’re making him the issue instead of examining the policies. Unfortunately, this gets us back full circle to your original point, which is: should technology tie itself to a process that’s slavishly tied itself to the politics of America. That’s why I say that if you want to solve the problem of true convergence – policy, business applications and the technologies – then the entrepreneurs need to get together with the people who are most likely to oppose them and work these solutions out before they come to Washington.

I’m a pretty radical guy. I’m not tied to the way things are done. I think we’ve gotten as far as we can get with business as usual. We need new solutions to problems we could never envision before. We’ve got 280 million people in this country. As the population grows, the demographic changes, there are all kinds of social issues that we have to deal with -- and all anybody wants to do is watch MTV, play golf, and go to the movies.

You want to have a more well-rounded debate, but people have to be more solution oriented. That means compromise. The rest of the world is either homogenous or dictatorships, and their ability to make instant decisions is far greater than ours. We’re the most heterogeneous society in the world, and if we don’t find some kind of commonality in our process for developing technology policy, if not the substance of our policy, we’re going to be left in the dust by those countries that can.

GlobalPOV: Do you feel like there is a uniform consensus of privacy among American citizens? WC: I think there are differing levels of concern. There’s the obvious aggravation with getting unsolicited emails and having to go through your email account every day and wean out the ones you’re not interested in. That’s an aggravation that’s certainly not going to kill us. On the other end of the extreme are the identity theft issues, and the integrity of our bank accounts and our private information. And that can effectively kill you financially, socially and legally. One of the things that the debate cries out for – but rarely gets these days – is some measure of perspective and reflection on what’s important and what’s not important. The problem with Washington – and one of the reasons that Washington has become moribund in its ability to quickly address these issues – is that in Washington, everything is important, and nothing is less relevant. When everything is important, nothing gets done.

GlobalPOV: So anti-spam legislation is getting the same degree of attention as more important issues? WC: Yes, the same amount of attention as identity theft and fraud. I’m not saying that spam isn’t a pain in the butt. But it takes about 10 seconds or 30 seconds of my time to get rid of those emails. To put that on the same level as perfecting the financial security of e-commerce transactions – that’s absurd. To put that on the same level as stealing people’s social security numbers is insulting. There has to be some perspective, some notion that we’ve over egalitarianized the making of policy in Washington. So I say again, when everything is important, nothing gets done.

GlobalPOV: Where does legislation fit into the picture? WC: My philosophy is pretty simple. First you have the technology. A couple years later, you have the business applications. And if you’re lucky, only a couple years later, you have the policy. That’s a terrible paradigm. As we saw with Napster, when technology leads policy by 4 or 5 years a lot of invested money will end up going down the drain when a court finally gets around to declaring the practice illegal – the investment community is no longer going to pump money into business applications spawned by technologies that are not underwritten by policy. Because if you do that, you could see your investment go right out the window.

Right now you’re hearing a lot of talk in Washington about convergence – the convergence of video, data and telephony in the communications industry. But I would suggest there’s another kind of convergence that we’ve really learned our lesson on, and that is the convergence between technology, business applications and public policy. It has to be collapsed—public policy has to be much more anticipatory and less reactive. What ends up happening is they spawn these entire industries and the technologies that follow…and then the civil libertarians say wait a minute, this encroaches on privacy rights…this encroaches on individual protections. You should have thought of that before you developed the business applications so we could have dealt with this before it became an issue of crisis for the industry.

And you see that all the time. For example, the ‘do not call’ records for telephone solicitations and spamming. The industry gets out in front of the policy, and then the policymakers always swing the pendulum too far the other way because they’re not catering to a climate of moderation. It’s always some exigent circumstance powered by some horrible, anecdotal example of abuse. And it all could have been avoided if the technologists and the business entrepreneurs had come to Washington first.

GlobalPOV: So policy lags behind tech innovation? WC: No doubt about it. The question becomes is one too fast and the other too slow? Those are legitimate questions. The current solution appears to be for them to just ignore each other, and for the roads to converge in court. That’s the worst place to be validating business models or making public policy. Business models should be validated in the marketplace, and the public policy should be made in Washington and in the state capitals around the country. Having a bunch of judges making both is probably a prescription for disaster.

I’m not saying that you have to stop all technological innovation until the public policy is in place. I’m just saying let’s not eschew policy or wait 5 years to get around to doing it when the system is broken. I don’t think the market is going to support that anymore. I don’t think the market will support investment into a heavily regulated industry anymore either. That’s been my mantra for the last few years, though I do have to admit that in the face of the what’s happened with the recent corporate scandals, there are a lot of companies out there thanking their lucky stars that they’re heavily regulated … it saved them in engaging a lot of the nonsense that took down many of the entrepreneurial companies.

GlobalPOV: A lot of the vendors – they talk about what the technology can do, but when they hand it off to the purchasers, they step back and point out that it’s not up to them to decide how it’s actually used…that’s up to the company. Who is responsible for drawing up the ethical boundaries for how a technology is used? WC: First of all, I’m reminded of the Gun industry saying the same thing – we only make them…we don’t use them. But I don’t think anybody within the gun industry would suggest that they shouldn’t be involved and that there shouldn’t be a public policy about how their products get used. So I think that there’s something disingenuous about anyone saying we don’t have a dog in that fight. We simply make them – it’s up to somebody else to figure out how to use them properly. There’s no ‘fire and forget’ mentality to technological development. Everybody has some part to play in the development of technology – whether they’re the equipment manufacturers or the software developers, or the suppliers, or the consumers or end users.

Sometimes new technologies are the foot on the neck of current business models and large public companies don’t want to change their business models, so they instead fight to keep the new technology out of the market place. But just because you are big and perhaps even an industry leader doesn’t mean you have the market cornered on outliving new technologies. 20 million years ago, the Dinosaurs ruled the earth. Now, they’re in our gas tanks. You either evolve, or you just become fuel for the next generation of business applications.

GlobalPOV: The government is consolidating a number of databases – dissatisfied with the previous system to give ample warning. Seems possible that they could converge other types of transactional databases. Not a whole lot of disclosure behind the scenes. WC: I think the problem that you have is what we in the Navy used to call ‘rice bowls.’ Everybody has their own, and nobody wants to share what’s in their bowl with anyone else, but there’s obviously a need to do that. The aggregation of the databases in the new homeland security agency is certainly a step in the right direction. However, that doesn’t include NSA, it doesn’t include CIA, it doesn’t include FBI, and it doesn’t include DEA. So when you talk about how much of the kind of intelligence that would have been necessary to anticipate, let alone stop 9/11 – you’re probably not going to have everything you need in the Department of Homeland Security. What you need instead is a technology that has the ability to provide decision makers—everybody from the President down to the clerk at the DMV to the passenger service agent at the airline to the attendant at the car rental service—with the ability to access information that they need to have and/or input information that law enforcement needs to have about people that have been identified as potential threats to national security, without invading the security of the individual databases or people’s privacy. We have a lot of smart computer engineers in this country. One of them needs to come up with an application which can interrogate all of those disparate databases simultaneously, extract the necessary information and deliver it to the appropriate level of decisionmaker, and yet protect the integrity of each of those databases and the information within them.

GlobalPOV: Will citizens demand more transparency with the government’s use of personal information? WC: Perhaps I’m a little bit thick in this regard. I understand what cookies are all about, and I understand all of the aggregation of information. The ultimate extension of that concern is that somehow if your interests are in the extreme, or in the margin – i.e. pornography, gambling or other unsavory activities – that somehow, that information might be aggregated and given to law enforcement. Maybe what we need to be restricting is law enforcement access to that information, and not necessarily the aggregation of that information for other legitimate purposes, such as marketing or demographic analysis.

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