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How Will Governments Keep Up With Technology?
Andy Updegrove writes "Governments are beginning to realize that perhaps the Internet really has changed everything, at least for them, and that they are going to have to deal with new responsibilities in this area. How will they deal with financial and medical data breaches? What can they do to ensure that first responders will be able to communicate the next time that terrorists strike in the Homeland, and how will the refugees of the next Katrina be able to access their electronic medical records? And what must governments do to ensure that public records will be available in fifty years, if they no longer maintain paper archives? Whether government should incline towards leading, following or simply getting out of the way is a matter upon which there are likely to be strongly held differences of opinion. It's also likely, though, that government will not have the luxury of opting for the third choice in some of the areas just mentioned. How well government chooses among those roles, and how well it executes when it chooses to lead, will likely have a profound impact on our lives in the years ahead."
That's it...
sig.
Along with this explosion of information, I wonder how governments will be able to maintain their collective grips on society as a whole. Never before has access to anti-government information been so readily available. Maybe they will have to rely on ever more draconian measures to maintain the status quo - but I hope not.
Technology requires new levels of accountability from government. The words that every politician dreads to hear... Open Government.
It's no longer acceptable or possible to hide inconvenient facts and delete damning emails. And the same Big Brother surveillance machine that governments are so enthusiastically creating is going to be watching them too. We will know when they meet in smokey backroom dealings, when they visit their prostitutes, who *exactly* issued an order that resulted in the deaths of innocents.
Hopefully the burden of responsibility it puts on the shoulders of elected representatives will be so high that it weeds out those who are mere power hungry psychopaths.
Please, PLEASE stop using the word "Homeland" - I'm not a Nazi or a Stalinist, and I can't stand members of Government or just fellow citizens talking like same - with the Mother/Father/Home-land bullshit.
'Domestic' is a perfectly adequate adjective for describing things within the national boundaries of the United States. We're a young republic comprised of successive waves of immigrants - jingoistic vocab attached to the dirt, of all things, has no place here . . .
-Nate
Wouldn't it be better just to ensure that emergency cell towers were put in place? It seems like more responders have access to cell technology rather than amateur radio, and cutting out the middleman of having to relay messages through an operator would help things out.
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:
Design an emergency cell tower that will survive a hurricane/tornado/tsunami/etc and will get approved by the zoning board, city beautification commission, and the historical society.
Stuff breaks. When stuff is breaking on a large scale, you usually need emergency communications. Cell towers are not reliable.
MMmm vast topic.
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In the '90 governements were heavily involved in IT standardization though national comitees like ISO and so on. A big chunk of this disapeared although some standard comitees made significant contributions (ATM Forum, GSM by ETSI,
I agree with the author : we do need technical standards. But my own experience tend to make that standard making should be left to these tech commitees and I believe that a good government cannot lead but should keep looking into these matter with a certain conservatism, sane skepticism and an high level view and stick to the general guidelines like:
- are the various systems compatible with each other
- is the privacy properly protected
- are the performances and market price acceptables in regards with the service offered
- is the information accessible and storable.
and also:
- look at format issue only if it is in General public interest
- look at network protocol only for lower level layers
Then only when a stabdard is pretty stable, proven and sufficiently implemented can a goverment endorse it.
To me, the interoperability issue is really key and any governement should take action to make sure the industry take the necessary action to avoid standard fragmentation when the market is mature enough (not in the early stage). Namely bitching MS because its technology is not open enough is ridiculous. It would be far more interesting to force MS to support existing stable standards (MPEG4, HTML/CSS, ODF,
Properly meaning that those format and protocol should be used as easily as their proprieatary counterparts.
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Whenever you may find yourself asking "Maybe the government should be doing this?" the answer is almost ALWAYS "no."
It would be like giving a nine year old a company to run. He has no understanding of it, and is most likely totally incapable of learning about it, so instead will apply stupid rules when things go wrong.
The government is evil. Always.
-Red
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
Governments catching up with technology? Seriously, there's a lot of people who believe technology only originates or is engineered in someones garage, in the openness of acadamia, universities and research labs of major corporations.
First, Research and Development is akin to flushing money down the toilet; because it's not like an assembly line where you can accurately project shipped product at the end of the day. With Research and Development, you can go for decades and still have NOTHING. Keep this in mind, because the reality is, even Microsoft can't even afford a sustained and honest Research and Development lab. The ONLY people that have the TECHNOLOGY, AUTHORITY and WEALTH to handle such research is the GOVERNMENT. IF a company, university or individual presents something from research, 99.9% of the time that person was heavily funded by a GOVERNMENT entity; via contract or most commonly a federal grant.
Governments DO have all the technology. Without fueling the conspiracy theorist, yes, governments tend to have applied technology or even awareness of algorithms, methods, theories even before acadamia has such benefit; tons of cryptography, physics and organic chemistry for example.
MOST if not ALL technology is developed with ONE interest in mind. Military, and if it can give us an advantage. Ironically, this always boils down to a more efficient way of killing another man. We don't like this part of life, but military often does have fun with technology long before anyone else.
I'm sorry if I'm getting a little over-zealous. It just kills me knowing that there are many people who think the government is the bane of technology while corporations are were it all comes from. Minus federal funding or incentive, corporations ever since the East Indian Trading Company probably can soley account to ONE invention... and we can probably think real hard for that and probably debate this invention... stocks. That's IT! A socio-path CEO to some Company didn't voluntarily give his entire fortune for the sake of good-will and to fund research in making adhesives, anethetics, plastic, space travel, computers, guns, aspirin, paper, jet engines... or even a damn fiber glass fishing pole!
Companies wait for the government to de-classify technology, and shift through it looking for something that they feel they can market to the general public. Who do you think was behind developing the optical mouse... or, more specifically, who do you think has been behind 100% of all LASER research and application?
When all else fails, amateur radio still works. Yeah, it's slow when running data (like Winlink e-mail). But power requirements are low. And there's no infrastructure to rely on - unless the attacking aliens ionize the atmosphere to such a degree that even radio won't work!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
While it is very easy to take cheap shots at what the government can and can't do, the National Archives and Records Administration (http://www.archives.gov/) is taking a very proactive approach towards dealing with the long-term electronic records problem. NARA employs some of the most dedicated and highly trained archivists in the country, and this is one area where the government will probably lead.
I think it will be interesting to see if the next city that gets f*cked by mother nature, gets the same sub-par treatment from the govt as NOLA did. 2 years past and the neighborhoods that were decimated, not by a hurricane, but, by the US govt.'s levee system's failure due to poor worksmanship, poor engineering and it appears now, downright criminal negligance.....they still look like a bomb went off, and we hear daily the the Corps of Engineers is still cutting corners and fscking up the rebuild of the pumps and levees.
...end rant
What about the Louisiana Corp of Engineers? What about the New Orleans Corp of Engineers? Doesn't a city get to a point where they realize after decades of inattention to those levees from the Feds, they have to step up to bat and deal with local problems on a local scale? Every big city has unique problems, and sitting and waiting for the cavalry to arrive after the fact isn't the most efficient way of actually getting things accomplished.
Boy are you ever wrong. Military systems are often decades behind commercial products. The complexity of getting anything from government labs to fielded systems is so poor that its a wonder you ever see any output. The reason you see new concepts moving from government labs to commercial exploitation is because that's easier than military exploitation.
The funding of short term research by commercial interests is many times that of the military domain. What used to be better was long term research, but that has essentially been killed off to fund the wars we've been having. Don't hold your breath for much of the long term nature coming out of government funding in future.
I say internet regulation is not governments job.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Government can hardly deliver my mail intact (USPS), competently educate my children (public schools), take care of my grandparent's health (Medicare), ensure my retirement (the ridiculous failure that is Social Security).
I'm as down as the next guy about the state of health care coverage in the U.S., the problems both public and private pension systems are facing, and I probably have a better understanding than most about the problems of education having actually been in the classroom as a teacher. Every one of these institutions could use significant improvement.
But first off -- c'mon, USPS? How often *does* the gubmint lose or mangle your mail? I've had more negative encounters on that front with the private shippers (UPS and FedEx, I'm looking at you), and the number of things I've sent or received by US Mail is orders of magnitude larger.
And second of all, I think the standard "Government Can't Do Nothin' Right" rant is actually one of the most dangerous ideas floating around our society today. It is, plain and simple, completely corrosive to the ability to build effective public institutions. Somehow, we the people have gotten to the point where we *accept* the argument that it's OK for the Feds to turn in a D- performance when it comes to disaster relief -- because hey, government's never effective, so it's never their job. And we readily elect people who loudly vocalize the idea that there's no such thing as an effective public solution.
Why are we surprised that we don't have them? We're hiring vegetarian butchers to package and deliver the meat, folks.
You don't have to accept the idea that public institutions are the answer to everything. Markets are great tools, if you understand them rather than treating them as a panacea. Private non-profits can do a significant amount of good. Churches do too. And in general, healthy social communities just make everything better.
But everything in its place. Sometimes the right tool for the job is, in fact, a public institution. Sometimes, if you actually want to stablish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty, what you're looking for is a government.
We need to stop assuming government can't do anything. We need to start asking how it can do better -- what can make public institutions run effectively.
Tweet, tweet.
This is generally true of big equipment. There aren't a whole lot of economies that can support development of a competitive fighter jet and then build it in quantity, along with all of the other support industries a project like that needs.
For technologies that are closer to commodities the US military doesn't do so well. Currently they seem to be compensating by relaxing the rules on non-issue gear. When I was an active duty Marine (discharged in 1996) you could maybe get away with wearing non-issue clothing, a knife, small stuff like that. I remember my father being amazed when I asked him to send me sunglasses because had he been caught wearing a pair of civilian sunglasses (in the 60s) someone would have made him eat them. But I was recently in Afghanistan with a private defense contractor and I saw a US Army soldier with a TA01NSN sight on his rifle. When I asked him when they started issuing those he told me he ordered it from the states. Had I modified my rifle, even as recently as I was in, I'd have had my ass kicked up into a hat.
Having worked for a couple of different private defense contractors I can tell you that getting miscellaneous stuff you need is a hell of a lot more streamlined than in the military. UPS next day is much faster than procurement.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
If govt's are now, in 2007, just beginning to realize that they should try to keep up with technology, they're about twenty years too late. I say that's a good thing.
Governments have always had their caches of data, dossiers on various people, classified documents. They've had systems (whether they be electronic or not) to manage that data. The citizenry, historically, has not had the ability to collect, distribute, or parse data on the scale that governments have.
Yes, governments can control populations with brute force, but it's much more effective to control populations with information - through misrepresentation, repetition, omission, incorrect weighting, and selective release. Populations have not been able to organize well against these kinds of propaganda strategies. Until now.
The world-girdling information network is maturing to the point where regular people have access to information that they would otherwise not have. Sources are becoming known as being more or less trustworthy. Some individuals are finding a space on the national and world stage, even if that space is in their niche area.
I pray that governments continue to stay behind the technology curve. Take away my Second Amendment rights all you want; you'll have to pry the internet from my cold dead hands.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Arpanet succeeded because of the involvement of universities, which most government technology projects don't have the benefit of. Perhaps I should have mentioned that option as a possible fix: governments and universities collaborating on multi-hundred-million-dollar technology projects, what could go wrong?
Easy for you to say in the comfort of your well-policed neighborhood, where everyone has a somewhat safe job and no one dies from smallpox, over the internet, with a bank account that won't vanish overnight. Or do you live in Somalia?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD