the database race

the shuttle is on its way home. and that makes me very worried about the war on terrorism.

although the cold war was apparently very scary, it did precipitate some amazing advances in aeronautical technology, through the need to demonstrate that our forces were capable militarily to confront the adversary. and of course there was the "space race" where the only reason to strive for great advances was because it was worth doing and hey, we have to be better than those commies. like all revolutions, the things we knew and the things we knew how to do after 1969 were almost inconceivable when president Kennedy made his speeches in the early 60s.

so regardless of what name one gives to the "enemy" in the war on terror, the "others," in a very real sense it is not obvious how to judge who is an enemy and who is not, particularly when the distinction is "definitely not your friend, but not going to kill your civilians" vs. "going to kill your civilians."

thus the major weapons of the new war, the long war, are fundamentally informatics. and that is very scary. we never really needed to worry about what advances in rocket technology were going to mean for the average person. but whatever the revolutions in information management, extraction, surveillance, and analysis, those technologies, which are going to be an inevitable part of this war, we need to very, very vigilant that those technologies grow as little as necessary to accomplish a more peaceful and just world.

politicians, this means you. just because the Bush administration is dumb enough to rely on illegal acts to "combat" their enemies doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of bad things one can do that are nonetheless legal. we need strong oversight, vision, and the guts to make politically challenging laws to preserve our freedoms, even when we didn't even realize we had the freedoms in the first place.