While DARPA’s best known for its research on technologies with national security applications, the agency has a strong track record of producing innovations with transformative civilian applications as well. From the Internet, to GPS, to driverless cars and robotic limbs, DARPA-initiated research has often made big if not revolutionary splashes in the marketplace. To quote Jackson, “we [at DARPA] are that genie in a bottle that will make the impossible inevitable.”

In the fields of synbio and bioengineering, scientists introduce new genetic information into microorganisms to coax them into producing useful products. These fields have already made significant strides in the production of some pretty incredible chemicals and materials with applications in agriculture, industry, pharmaceuticals, and more. Recent accomplishments include using microorganisms to produce the anti-malarial drug artemisinin, renewable petroleum, steel-strong spider silk, and even whole battery electrodes and solar cells.

Research agencies across the federal government have shown increasing interest in funding synthetic biology research in recent years, including $700 million from the Department of Energy between 2006 and 2010, $40 million from the National Science Foundation in 2010, and at least $48 million from the National Institutes of Health between 2005 and 2010. Even the Department of Agriculture has put $2.3 million into synthetic biology research in recent years. DARPA’s past work in synthetic biology includes modifying the genome of the tobacco plant to produce vaccines as well as a program to engineer immortal microorganisms with genetically-coded kill switches.

Despite increasing attention to synthetic biology in federal agencies and the research community, research is “…limited to producing only a small fraction of the vast number of possible chemicals, materials, and living systems that would be enabled by the ability to truly engineer biology,” says the Living Foundries funding announcement. The Living Foundries program hopes to set itself apart from traditional synbio research projects and transcend the “ad hoc, laborious, trial-and-error” efforts of the past by investing in platform research that can support a broad range of applications, bring down cost, and increase scale. This approach to research on the process of biomanufacturing itself rather than on the production of specific and siloed chemical outputs DARPA dubs “engineering biology.”

DARPA’s vision for engineering biology is ambitious. The Living Foundries project proceeds from the assumption that modular genetic parts can be “mixed and matched on demand” to create a broader array of chemicals and materials more efficiently. This is perhaps conceptually similar to the introduction of interchangeable parts that transformed manufacturing in the late 18^th century, except on a genetic level. Lena Groeger of Wired.com likens the rearrangement of “modular genetic parts” at the core of the Living Foundries’ research to the way that children play with Legos.

Potential grant recipients, including 170 businesses and a number of academic and government research teams, attended a daylong event on June 28 where DARPA advertised its vision and goals for the program. Having received proposals from academic and corporate research groups, DARPA is now taking the next step of determining winners. Once funding decisions are made, DARPA plans to have projects running over the next three years and to see tangible results by the end.

At a time of sluggish economic recovery and stiff international competition, DARPA’s decision to invest in research with broad potential applications in medicine, energy, agriculture, and consumer products as well seems wise. The initial stage has been set, and the next few years will show whether the program’s goals come to fruition. If so, American manufacturing may witness a new milestone.

Gaurav Dhiman is a former intern with the Science Progress team and a rising senior majoring in biology and political science at the University of Miami.

The recent turmoil in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and even the conflict in Libya should remind Americans that even under the most repressive, authoritarian regimes, the fundamental freedoms we have long treasured in this country are aspirations shared by all people. With political transitions underway in so many countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa—and others perhaps not too far behind—we have an important opportunity to strengthen our partnerships with local populations at the same time that we seek to rebuild our image by adjusting our approach to engaging these new governments.

Science diplomacy has the potential to act as a stabilizing force in the Middle East and North Africa, or MENA, by bolstering economic development and fostering friendly, cross-border collaboration. Science and technology can help address the region’s urgent food, water, and energy needs. To achieve any of these objectives, however, an overhaul of science and technology, or S&T, education in MENA is badly needed. Western governments can play a role in achieving this by expanding diplomatic efforts that promote international science capacity building and collaboration.

Egypt: A stark example of the need for science, technology, and education to strengthen economies

Egypt serves as a prime example of the sentiments felt in much of the Arab world. Given recent events, it is clear the young generation will no longer tolerate an economic and political environment that fosters an ongoing slip into poverty. This generation is ripe to harness creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship—all critical concepts which must be integrated into their educational curriculum.

Sixty years ago, Egypt’s revolution of 1952 was successful in establishing free university education for all. While this model remains in Egypt as well as other nations in the region, it has proven ineffective. These countries have grown in population rapidly but, without corresponding economic growth, education budgets have remained flat and employment options scarce. Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and others in MENA face similar challenges. Young people are graduating with university degrees but are not properly trained to compete for the small number of available jobs in the workforce.

According to a 2004 study by Cairo’s Gulf Centre for Strategic Studies, the Arab world accounts for about a third of the brain drain from developing countries. Arab countries lose half of all new medical doctors, 23 percent of engineers, and 15 percent of scientists. Some scientists of my generation migrated to the West but many who stayed in the region were “swallowed” by the inefficiency of state bureaucracy. While some researchers who remained were successful, the Egyptian government and others like it have undervalued their work and have been ineffective in creating an environment conducive to moving scientific research to markets.

According to recent International Monetary Fund data, Egypt’s overall unemployment is 8.9 percent. A quarter of those younger than 25 are unemployed and high school graduates account for 42 percent of the workforce, yet 80 percent of them are unemployed. It’s important to note that youths comprise 60 percent of the population in the MENA region. While unacceptable, these numbers are not surprising when you consider that Egypt spends only 0.2 percent to 0.3 percent of its GDP on research—a fraction of the developed world’s relative budgets. Political leaders in the Arab world do not recognize the economic value of education, especially S&T education.

For example, I participated in NASA’s Apollo Program. Upon its completion, I was invited by the Department of State to lecture on the scientific results of lunar exploration in the Arabian Gulf region. I met all the heads of state, and nearly all would ask me why we ought to spend money on space exploration while the funds could be spent on the poor. They didn’t understand the fundamental correlation between science, innovation, and economic development.

Contrast this with the United States where NASA tasked its Office of Technology Utilization with one sole purpose: to summarize and publish results of research for the benefit of all citizens and corporations. Thanks to these efforts, the NASA lunar program didn’t just put a man on the moon; it helped create and commercialize new technologies as diverse as solar panels, memory foam, fuel cell technology, and crucial imaging equipment used today in digital cameras, webcams, and cell phones. Over the years countless new industries, businesses, and jobs have grown up around these and other technologies originally developed for the space program.

NASA is just one example of how innovation and economic development can connect to improve people’s quality of life. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate for his research on innovation economics, and other economists have suggested that new technology is responsible for a large majority of economic growth in the United States and around the world. Cultivating this can help set transitional economies in MENA and around the world on a path toward increasing standards of living.

The impetus for science diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa

Since the publication of the State Department’s “Science and Foreign Relations” report in 1950, it has been clear that science has joined economics as a “practical factor” to be reckoned with in the international arena. Today, international science collaboration is a proven way to foster science education and innovation around the world. But while globally relevant, science diplomacy holds particular economic and diplomatic value in the MENA region, where its benefits could help alleviate economic stagnation, improve cultural ties, decrease anti-Americanism, and increase stability during this time of political turmoil.

Science collaboration in the Middle East and North Africa is a win-win for the United States and for host nations in the region. On the one hand, helping develop science education and technology innovation systems can help address pressing challenges and support long-term economic growth and job creation in host countries—trends that will further support awakening democracy movements. On the other hand, international science collaboration supports on-the-ground, people-to-people cultural exchange which is critical for the United States to repair its tainted image in the region.

Part of the power of scientific collaboration in MENA is its unique ability to transcend political barriers. As Cathy Campbell, CEO of CRDF Global, mentioned in “Send in the Scientists,” America’s science and technology leadership is the most respected aspect of its culture by citizens of Muslim-majority nations. Muslim and Arab scientists and political leaders see this cooperation with U.S. scientists as beneficial to themselves and their people. Even former President Mubarak himself pursued collaboration with U.S. scientists, technologists, and business leaders in 1994 during the Mubarak-Gore free trade talks, and since then, successive Egyptian ministers of higher education have requested formally that the United States initiate new opportunities for science cooperation. The United States should leverage this genuine desire for peaceful cooperation and capitalize on the diplomatic opportunity is represents.

Such science partnerships can give Arab researchers the expertise needed to solve their problems and help bolster educational systems. Many researchers are working with scientists and engineers of the developing world to help them build their economies and inspire their people. CRDF Global is one key organization seeking to promote peace and prosperity by facilitating this kind of international collaboration.

There are many noteworthy examples of international science collaboration between the countries of the West and countries in the Arab and Muslim worlds:

• The Pakistan-U.S. Bilateral Science and Technology Agreement has generated ongoing research to utilize the skills of both partners on a range of topics important to Pakistani development, including water, energy, agriculture, and human and animal health.
• The U.S. and Iranian national science academies have conducted workshops on earthquake hazards, efficient water use, health, and science ethics.
• The European Union (and secondarily, the United States) funds the Tempus projects to modernize higher education in many regions globally.
• The Egyptian government and some European countries created the Science and Technology Development Fund,which disburses the equivalent of $34 million annually in competitive grant proposals.
• Most recently, President Obama appointed six science envoys to Muslim-majority countries.

While these initiatives are promising, there is much more potential for science diplomacy between the United States and the Arab and Muslim worlds.

Science and technology attachés: Deepening ties with MENA nations

The appointment of science envoys to Muslim-majority countries is a big step forward but the initiative will require sustained support, which can best be provided by the addition of science and technology attachés in relevant U.S. embassies.

Many U.S. embassies had such attachés in the past. During my 10 years (starting in 1973) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the services of science attachés were a great advantage. In Moscow, an attaché assisted our U.S. government delegation throughout bilateral discussions about joint production of a lunar surface feature chart, as well as earth photography on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project of July 1975. In Egypt, a science attaché facilitated my team’s work in studying its vast deserts, including securing field permits and shipping samples to the United States. And in India, the science attaché paved the way for a U.S. team to conduct research on the origin of landform in the Rajasthan Desert.

Such U.S. embassy officials maintained contact with many researchers and institutions, leaving open the doors for future cooperative projects. Unfortunately, the science attaché position was abolished two decades ago due to budget cuts. Despite the serious fiscal constraints we are under again today, however, such appointments are needed more than ever as we work to rebuild our partnerships with governments and populations in the region.

In addition to helping partner countries develop science and technology capacity, increasing outreach to MENA countries through science attachés can help boost the United States’ reputation as well. Science attachés in U.S. embassies would underscore what many people all over the world greatly respect about America: its first-rate science research and technology innovation. Science attachés stationed in embassies in the Middle East could serve as a vital support system to the science envoy program by helping engage with local constituencies to ensure that projects truly address the real-world needs of host countries. Attachés and envoys working together could produce striking results, securing the longevity of a new science diplomacy strategy to the long-term benefit of the United States and its partners.

If science doesn’t help now, we have failed

Now is the time to reach out and deepen ties with the nations of the Middle East and North Africa through science diplomacy. I’ve referred to my contemporaries in Egypt as a “Generation of Failure.” Many of us were educated in great high schools and universities during the 1950s and 1960s but despite our dedication we failed to meet the expectations of our people. The main reason for this was that we elevated the institutions above the individuals. State institutions focused more on securing their own future than on carrying out the work of the people. Corruption spread and lip service was paid to imaginary achievements, which kept people disillusioned.

There was no chance of progress under such circumstances. My generation must acknowledge its mistakes so future generations may continue to follow new directions.

In the face of ongoing U.S. military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Libya, our leaders must send a clear message that we are ready to extend the open hand of cooperation, not only the closed fist of coercion. With many Western researchers available to collaborate and exchange skills, science diplomacy has great potential as a tool in international development and cultural exchange. Our leaders should seize this opportunity to help promote peace and cooperative diplomacy in the Middle East and around the world.

Dr. Farouk El-Baz is research professor and director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, Boston, MA, and adjunct professor of geology at the Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the Board of Directors of CRDF Global.

Biological production of chemicals

Three biologically mediated methods of chemical production are currently under development. The first is “biocatalysis,” or the use of purified enzymes to catalyze, or accelerate, chemical reactions. This approach offers several benefits: enzymes make precise changes to target molecules and yield only biologically active products; they function optimally at body temperature and thus require less energy than standard catalysts; and they are environmentally friendly because they employ renewable starting materials and produce fewer toxic byproducts.  Given these advantages, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries will make greater use of biocatalysis in the coming years. When this technology becomes widespread, however, enzymes called halogenases might be misused to produce highly toxic chemicals containing chlorine or fluorine, including known chemical warfare agents.

A second biologically mediated production method involves inserting clusters of animal or plant genes into bacteria in order to coax them into producing medically useful compounds. This technique, known as “metabolic engineering,” or “synthetic biology,” has the potential to mass-produce molecules that are difficult and costly to extract from their natural sources and are too complex to synthesize chemically on an industrial scale. The antimalarial drug artemisinin, for example, is currently extracted from the sweet wormwood plant. But researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have used the genes coding for the biosynthesis of a closely related compound to produce artemisinin in bacteria. Synthetic biology is also central to efforts to manufacture ethanol from cellulosic material such as cornstalks and to make diesel fuel from genetically modified algae.  Nevertheless, synthetic biology techniques might be misused to mass-produce highly poisonous natural products such as saxitoxin, which is made by a species of marine algae responsible for the toxic algal blooms called “red tides.” During the 1960s, the CIA sought a supply of saxitoxin to use in suicide pills for captured spies. In order to acquire the deadly poison, the agency secretly spent millions of dollars to harvest tons of clams contaminated by a red tide and process them to extract a few grams of pure saxitoxin. Using synthetic biology techniques, it might be possible to isolate the algal genes responsible for the biosynthesis of saxitoxin and transfer them to bacteria, which would then produce the toxin relatively cheaply. If this scenario were realized, saxitoxin might become a serious chemical warfare threat.

A third biologically mediated process, known as “biopharming,” involves the production of protein-based pharmaceuticals such as vaccines, microbicides, and therapeutic antibodies in transgenic plants and animals. Foreign genes coding for the therapeutic proteins are inserted into crops such as corn and tomatoes, which are then harvested and the desired proteins extracted. Biopharming has a potential dark side, however, because it might be used to mass-produce toxic proteins for hostile purposes.

Chemical production of biological molecules

In parallel with the use of biological processes to manufacture drugs and other chemicals, companies are using chemical methods to synthesize biological molecules such as DNA and proteins from scratch. The invention of advanced DNA synthesizers, for example, has made it possible to construct genes and even entire microbial genomes by stringing together the four chemical units of DNA in any desired sequence. Over the past decade, scientists have recreated several pathogenic viruses by chemical means, including poliovirus, a SARS-like virus, and the formerly extinct “Spanish” strain of influenza, which was responsible for a global pandemic in 1918-19 that killed as many as 50 million people worldwide.

The size and accuracy of the DNA molecules that be created with automated chemical synthesis is increasing and the cost is declining. Moreover, commercial suppliers around the world now produce custom DNA sequences to order. A customer simply enters the desired sequence on an Internet web site, provides a credit card number, and a few weeks later receives a vial in the mail containing the requested DNA molecules in a biologically usable form. The synthesized sequence can then be copied and used for various scientific or industrial purposes. In October 2010, the U.S. government, fearing that outlaw states or sophisticated terrorists might order DNA coding for dangerous viruses and protein toxins of bioterrorism concern, issued voluntary guidelines for the gene-synthesis industry that call for the screening of customers and DNA sequence orders.

Chemical methods are also being applied to produce biological molecules called  peptides: short protein chains made up of 20 possible amino-acid building blocks. Worldwide, pharmaceutical companies are marketing about 40 peptide-based drugs, including the anti-HIV therapeutic Fuzeon and the potent painkiller Prialt, and hundreds more are under development. The human body also produces myriad biologically active peptides called “bioregulators” that control temperature, blood pressure, sleep, immunity, and other vital physiological functions. Although at low concentrations bioregulators are essential for life, they can be toxic at higher levels or if their molecular structure is modified. For example, a bioactive peptide called Substance P, consisting of a chain of 11 amino acids, serves as a messenger chemical in the central and peripheral nervous systems. In 1999, scientists at the Swedish Defense Research Establishment administered low doses of Substance P to guinea pigs the form of an aerosol, an airborne suspension of microscopic particles that can be absorbed in the deep region of the lungs. Under these circumstances, the peptide was acutely toxic, leading the Swedish researchers to warn that Substance P was “a possible future warfare agent.”

Once a toxic peptide has been identified, it could be manufactured in large quantities by chemical means. Peptide synthesis is now a thriving commercial business involving some 80 companies worldwide. These firms produce peptides to order according to customer specifications and in quantities ranging from a few milligrams for research use to thousands of kilograms for the pharmaceutical industry. Although natural peptides are generally unstable in aerosol form and are rapidly broken down in the body, limiting their potential utility as lethal or incapacitating warfare agents, structural variants of these molecules might be developed that resist rapid degradation and can enter the brain from the bloodstream. In addition, engineered nanoparticles might be used to facilitate the delivery of bioactive peptides in aerosol form or to target specific body tissues or organs.

Gaps in the disarmament regime

In 1925, the League of Nations (the forerunner to the United Nations) negotiated the Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use in war of toxic chemicals and bacteriological agents, but not restricting their production and stockpiling. In 1971, seeking to extend the ban to cover development and production, the UN disarmament conference in Geneva agreed to separate biological from chemical weapons because the former had been used only rarely in warfare and were assessed to have little military utility, while the latter had been employed extensively in World War I and other conflicts. The culmination of this negotiating strategy was two separate treaties: the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) and, two decades later, the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

Although the two accords each prohibit the development, production, and possession of an entire category of arms, they have distinct provisions and sets of member states. The CWC, for example, has extensive verification measures, whereas the BWC has none. Because both treaties ban the acquisition for hostile purposes of toxic chemicals of biological origin, such as natural toxins and bioregulators, one would expect that the controls in this area would be particularly effective. In practice, however, the overlap has allowed the members of each treaty to deemphasize this category of agents, in the expectation that the other treaty will cover them. As a result, as the British analyst Julian Perry Robinson has pointed out, the overlap between the BWC and the CWC with respect to toxins and bioregulators “risks becoming a gulf into which things disappear.”

Today convergence is creating three gaps in the biological and chemical disarmament regime. The first concerns the biological production of toxic chemicals. At present, the CWC verification system does not cover facilities that make treaty-relevant chemicals by biologically mediated processes, such as biocatalysis or synthetic biology. Although the use of such methods for the large-scale production of chemical warfare agents is not economically viable, that situation could well change as the techniques become cheaper and more widespread.

The second gap in the arms control regime concerns the chemical synthesis of pathogenic viruses from scratch. Although the BWC prohibits the production of viruses for hostile purposes, the treaty does not have any formal mechanisms to verify compliance. Conversely, the CWC has extensive verification measures but does not ban the chemical synthesis of viruses because they do not cause harm through “toxic effects on living systems.” As a result, there is no verification in this area.

The third gap in the regime concerns the synthesis of bioactive peptides like Substance P. Such production is not subject to routine verification under the CWC because no peptides are listed in the treaty’s Schedules of Chemicals, which determine which production facilities must be declared and opened for inspection. At the same time, bioactive peptides are manufactured in quantities too small to be covered by a second CWC verification mechanism covering “other chemical production facilities” (OCPFs) that do not currently produce scheduled chemicals but have the potential to do so. The OCPF regime is based on quantitative production thresholds rather than on specific chemicals.

If nothing is done to close these three gaps, it may become possible for countries to exploit convergent technologies to break out of the BWC and the CWC without risk of detection. In sum, as biological and chemical production methods continue to converge, the traditional strategy of pursuing biological and chemical arms control on separate tracks has become obsolete, and the two treaties will have to become better integrated.

Policy recommendations

Finding concrete ways to prevent the misuse of convergent biological and chemical technologies for weapons purposes will require innovative thinking and political will on the part of the United States and other like-minded countries. The following three steps would help to address the problem of convergence:

1. The international implementing body for the CWC, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, in The Hague, should convene a panel of scientific and technical experts to assess the biologically mediated production of chemical warfare agents and their precursors, including its feasibility and likely timeframe, to help policymakers determine the level of attention this issue deserves.
2. The member states of the CWC should add a toxic peptide such as Substance P to the Schedules of Chemicals subject to routine verification, using the technical-change procedure provided in the treaty. At present, the CWC Schedules include only two toxins (ricin and saxitoxin) and no bioregulators. Because of its known toxicity, Substance P would be a good placeholder to represent the entire class of bioactive peptides.
3. To better coordinate the implementation of the two treaties in response to convergence, the member states of the CWC should establish a liaison position in the Verification Division of the OPCW for a representative from the BWC Implementation Support Unit, or ISU, in Geneva. Although the ISU currently has only three full-time staff members, the upcoming five-year review conference of the BWC in December 2011 is expected to expand the size of the unit, in which case it may be possible to send an ISU representative to The Hague.

In conclusion, the growing convergence of biological and chemical production methods is outstripping the ability of the CWC and the BWC to prevent the misuse of these technologies for hostile purposes. Although the risks have not yet fully materialized, the rapid pace of technological progress in the biological and chemical fields and the political hurdles facing efforts to strengthen the two treaties suggest that the time to begin is now.

Jonathan B. Tucker, Ph.D., is a policy analyst specializing in biological and chemical arms control and nonproliferation issues. He is the author of Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox and War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda, and the editor of Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons. For a more technical discussion of this issue, see: Jonathan B. Tucker, “The convergence of biology and chemistry: implications for arms control verification,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 66, no. 6 (November/December 2010), pp. 56-66.



More than 60 years later, George Annas, the distinguished professor of law, bioethics, and public health, finds himself revisiting a similar defence for torture, spying, and violations of basic American constitutional rights. The need to win the “war on terror” was a key rationale offered by members of the Bush—Cheney administration as they rode roughshod over basic civil and human rights in the grim shadow of the 9/11 slaughter. Annas persuasively argues in Worst Case Bioethics that basing policy on extreme nightmare possibilities leads to a distortion of fundamental ethical principles and legal protections.

Whether fighting declared enemies in war, terrorism, and drug cartels, or fighting such threats as a pandemic or cancer, governments and their leaders cannot let fear and paranoia set the moral tone for such battles. Annas offers two defences of his claim that worst case thinking has distorted military, public health, and clinical ethics. The first is that fundamental human rights cannot be compromised out of worries about remotely possible scenarios of utter destruction and death. The second is that the avoidance of death, and the corresponding need to save lives, does not justify throwing our moral compass out the window.

I find these arguments persuasive but only to a point. It is absolutely true that the USA’s concern with national security has led to pressures upon US medicine and psychology to become involved with torture, cruel prisoner interrogations, and forced feeding practices of incarcerated individuals that violate the fundamental ethical norms of these professions. War, as the Nuremberg judges rightly concluded, does not mean all ethical bets are off. Annas rightly condemns contemporary arguments that permit the cavalier disregard of fundamental values and rights. Yet, despite endless disputation since 9/11, we still do not have a carefully articulated set of moral algorithms to guide medical practice…

You can read the rest of this article at the Lancet.

Arthur Caplan, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and the Sidney D Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

The restoration of the program is an apt example of the scientific and intelligence communities working together. Not only can the tools for satellite reconnaissance support critical scientific Earth observations, officials recognize that climate change and national security are interrelated policy issues. As Dr. Christopher Tucker argued here at Science Progress, an effective Earth observation strategy is crucial to confronting issues in both arenas:

A comprehensive approach to developing, deploying, and utilizing our eyes in the sky can ensure more effective and efficient use of precious intellectual and financial resources as we struggle to address traditional national security challenges, the array of transnational threats that plague us, as well as the complex, looming menace posed by global climate change. But this will require significant attention paid to national security reform, the governance of Earth science, a fundamental rethinking of the programming and budgeting process, and—not least of all—leadership.

Reviving the Medea program is a low-cost step in the right direction, as it merely re-purposes images already gathered for intelligence purposes. The pictures are degraded before they are released in order to mask the capabilities of the satellites.

As the new Obama administration develops its innovation, economic development, and workforce policies, it should look to build and sustain regional and networked efforts, rather than only crafting broad national policies. The work of innovation can be inspired or stymied by the regulatory, operational, and funding mechanisms adopted by the federal government and Congress. What has limited prior administrations is the failure to leverage federal investments and initiatives conducted throughout the country—often based on the aspirations of local business, civic, academic, and entrepreneurial interests—and align them around a highest common denominator for transforming the economy and society. We live in a networked economy that is not reflected in federal grants and initiatives that are distributed across the country into silos of community needs, and therefore fail to leverage knowledge, experience, and accelerated sources of innovation.

This view of the primacy of federal-regional innovation partnerships stems from more than 20 years of work in assisting local, regional, state, and federal governments in building strong technology-driven economies. Over this period, there has been a shift in the thinking about the development and support of local industry clusters. As originally articulated by Harvard University’s Michael Porter in the late 1980s, traditional cluster theory argued that all assets, companies, and business- and financial-related value chains must be located in a contained regional area. In our observation, however, industry clusters no longer require the presence of all facets of research, operations, management, and distribution in order to contribute to the strength of a regional economy.

In today’s global and domestic hubs-and-nodes clusters, research and discovery is based on a specific institution or industry campus in one location, manufacturing in a second node, and distribution hubs in other places. Rather than focusing on specific physical assets, the most important element for successful regional, innovation-led economic development is the leveraging and networking of regional assets to best deploy the human talent—the “know-what and the know-how”—that is central to competitiveness and wealth creation. Our national economic strategy has been based for far too long on individualized responses to individualized communities, never considering the linkages of knowledge or competency in contributing expertise that must be networked to hasten competitiveness and innovation in and among “communities of practice.”

In the three case studies that follow, we highlight examples of the federal government catalyzing regional or networked innovation through the development of new models of collaboration. Some of these, such as the U.S. Department of Labor’s pioneering Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development, or WIRED, initiative, are focused on workforce strategies in specific regions across the United States. Others, such as the Central Intelligence Agency’s In-Q-Tel venture capital program and the National Cancer Institute’s advancement of cancer cure initiatives, are focused on addressing longstanding national security/intelligence and medical Grand Challenges.

All three initiatives, however, share the same goals of building innovative partnerships in order to effect a transformation in the delivery and impact of federal services. The Grand Challenges confronting America demand new frameworks for engagement—not from a command-and-control central system but through a networking of networks across the spectrum of U.S. ingenuity, creativeness and entrepreneurial spirit. In an uncertain economy undergoing sometimes agonizing restructuring of business and government operating models, these networked partnerships and frameworks should suggest best practices for the Obama administration, Congress, governors, and mayors—and above all for the citizens who will benefit from these transformative systems of collaboration, innovation, and delivery.

Central Intelligence Agency: In-Q-Tel

The Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1990s needed to develop innovative technologies to meet the demands and needs of the post Cold-War era but faced the challenge of how to do so in a rapidly changing marketplace. Ruth David, then head of the science and technology directorate, understood that commercial and consumer markets were so highly active in both discovery and the attraction of the best product development minds that the U.S. intelligence community could no longer rely on being the first-in-line for obtaining consistently innovative tools, nor recruiting the workforce and skills required to keep pace.

Tasked with identifying and accelerating a new framework—one that would be highly transparent and significantly more public than ever before—David determined the agency should effectively partner with the private sector, including research universities, angel and venture capital investors, and emerging technology companies. In this way, the CIA could leverage government, academic, entrepreneurial, and private sector resources toward novel products, services, and even skilled workforce development objectives.

Based on a request from the Science and Technology Directorate to “consider all options—even those that have not been on our list of models in the past so that we can signal our seriousness and commitment to attract innovators and their innovations,” a small expert team benchmarked all previous federal models, among them laboratories, federal-funded R&D centers, outsourced programs, and initiatives such as the Defense department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The team then assessed the return-on-investment as well as the risk-mitigation scenarios of each of these concepts.

The outcome: an operational plan for the Central Intelligence Agency’s In-Q-Tel project—a first-ever collaboration among the U.S. intelligence community, academic research, and the entrepreneurial community. The In-Q-Tel framework identified approaches for the selection of key technologies, risk management in an environment that sought to harness both the intelligence community’s culture of secrecy and the entrepreneurial focus on openness and transparency, along with the criteria for investing the $50 million per year in dual-use products and services.

In-Q-Tel now makes investments in technologies to create sustainable solutions for the national intelligence community. In-Q-Tel measures impact through the value of investments to deploy technologies, ability to strengthen nascent companies, and long-term financial returns on such partnerships versus attempting to only value in-house resources and capabilities.

The lesson for the Obama administration: Not all capital and research capacities rely solely on the lead by the federal government. If federal funds are harnessed toward a focused but characteristically venture capital-style investment model, then the results are new resources (talent, knowledge, dollars) deployed in strategies that mitigate conflicts of interest while accelerating solutions. These results are not just useful for the CIA’s spycraft needs, but also for alternative energy, information-based government services, and water-environmental challenges.

National Cancer Institute: Accelerating advancements in cancer cures

Since the 1960s’ endeavor to wage a “war on cancer,” NCI has dedicated significant resources to support an increasing number of Comprehensive Cancer Centers across the United States. There are now some 64 centers across the country that are designated on the depth of research and capacity to engage the public in education and training, with an annual budget of more than $4 billion distributed to these centers, other designated programs, and the research community.

In 2003, however, then-NCI Director Andrew von Eschenbach decided to try something different. He tasked the entire NCI community (public, private, philanthropic, entrepreneurial, and venture capital-based) to “eradicate cancer by 2012,” a moon-shot commitment for ending a disease costing Americans, employers, and the federal budget a minimum of $500 million per year in health insurance payments, treatments, and lost productivity, as well as the loss of lives that could be prevented through a number of new discoveries.

Despite significant successes over the 40-year history of the centers, von Eschenbach convened a roundtable in 2004 to examine the “scientific, societal, cultural and economic barriers to the success of fighting cancer in order to get a head start on his 2012 goal. This forum, titled “Leveraging Multi-Sector Technology Development Resources and Capabilities to Accelerate Progress Against Cancer,” brought together a wide variety of leaders from government, the academic-medical community, and the private sector, including representatives from biotechnology, pharmaceutical, information technology, and investment companies.

In addition, the forum included state and regional economic and innovation-based development entities and organizations, each bringing its perspective on networking relationships and teams for immediate results in applied-translational research and commercialization. There were four primary challenges that roundtable members were asked to address:

• Identify key barriers that stand in the way of optimizing the timely transfer, development, and commercialization of advanced biomedical technologies, including incremental and disruptive technologies, to accelerate progress against cancer
• Explore key regional, national, and other models whereby advanced biomedical technologies are successfully identified, transferred, and ultimately commercialized for broad patient benefit
• Brainstorm and evaluate novel concepts to facilitate the strategic alignment of resources and capabilities from all sectors to remove mission-critical barriers and design novel, innovative approaches to speed the development and delivery of new diagnostics, preventatives, and treatments for cancer
• Suggest actions that can be undertaken by the appropriate sectors in alignment and coordination through networked, shared knowledge system investments

After a series of panels outlining some of the challenges in matters such as drug development, funding gaps, effective multidisciplinary collaboration, regulatory requirements, technology, and other matters, the group identified four primary obstacles to developing effective and innovative cancer technologies: The need to build effective cross-disciplinary collaboration; the need to bridge the gap between late discovery and early development of diagnostics and therapeutics; the need to develop new data standards and information sharing; and the requirement to build effective cross-cutting technology platforms.

Just as the NCI Roundtable was driven by the need for new and effective public-private partnerships that could apply a focused and highly leveraged solution to a specific task, the suggested outcomes put a high priority on the need for a new governance structure that could effectively address funding, technology, and multi-use efforts across a wide geography. Two proposed solutions emerged from the NCI analysis and gathering.

First was the recommendation that the Department of Health and Human Services, NCI, the White House, and 10 major philanthropic and venture investment leaders combine resources to create a $3 billion Advancement Accelerator for Cancer Cures, which would work much like the In-Q-Tel model but focus on networking solutions in an open-source teaming setting. Second was the decision by General Electric Co. and IBM Corp. to act on that decision by committing to invest adjacent to several of the comprehensive cancer centers and regional innovation “eco-systems” in areas of bioinformatics, biomarkers, and bio-imaging. These three sub-technology challenges were declared critical not only to cancer, but also to research and discovery of other diseases.

Therefore, with a proposed $3 billion venture fund and new networks of collaborative commercialization, the opportunity to eradicate cancer by 2012 became perhaps more achievable than in prior strategies and initiatives. Although the venture fund was not approved by the Bush White House for further exploration, the venture and philanthropic communities began to link their interests and to drive new investments in market-ready solutions.

Lessons for the Obama administration: Bringing together all the interested parties to define the innovations necessary for addressing a core challenge or targeting a specific opportunity, and then in turn putting the correct level of resources and governance together for implementation, can enable the federal government to be a true catalyst for demonstrative transformation of a long-standing costly issue to American society and the economy. In turn, by first examining the value chain of the current delivery system, then tweaking or wholesale revamping the system through new technologies, partnerships and collaborations, federal intent and goals can meet with accelerated timelines and responses beyond the traditional yearly budget objectives or even four-year political cycles.

Department of Labor: The Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development program

Every year, the U.S. Department of Labor distributes nearly $18 billion through formula grants and contracts to train, retrain, and otherwise assist employees and employers in developing new skills to meet the demands of the marketplace, or worse, to respond to major dislocations, offshoring, and negative trade scenarios. And every year, through a program under the Workforce Investment Act, governors and, in turn, state employment and labor agencies acting in concert with local workforce investment boards allocate these federal funds intended to ensure the nation’s competitiveness and skills capabilities of all citizens.

Problem is, this established public workforce system is increasingly misaligned to the needs of industry, job creation, sustainable skills certification, and a host of other challenges confronting our nation’s economy, which is more attuned to new global business models than the traditional manufacturing, smokestack days when most of the federal programs were designed. Simply put, ensuring at one and the same time a safety net for those most vulnerable to the ill consequences of globalization and focusing on the transformative employment, career, and certification of competencies required a different set of tactics and mechanisms.

A new approach was required to build upon congressional mandates given to the Department of Labor. These included the Workforce Act of 1998, which required a role for the private sector in the operation of regional workforce efforts, and Community-Based Job Training Grants, which sought to create partnerships between community and technical colleges and the public workforce system.

Despite these recent efforts at labor market reform—supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations—there remained the clear recognition that the workforce system, broadly defined to include public- and private-sector and academic programs, was not sufficiently and quickly responsive to address the needs of both businesses, industry clusters and individual workers in the global economy. New partnerships had to be created to support, at the regional level, the successful development and deployment of human talent that would drive innovation and support the competitiveness of American companies.

In 2005, the Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration launched the WIRED initiative, which is designed to better align efforts in workforce and economic development with regional innovation capacity building. In addition, WIRED’s unique request for proposals suggested that regions should broaden their own workforce perspective to include high schools, four-year and graduate-degree universities, community colleges, philanthropic and faith-based organizations, and most important, the emerging technology and entrepreneurial sectors fostering and catalyzing innovations and new industries.

Over an 18-month period, 40 regions throughout the country have been awarded WIRED grants totaling $350 million, and a new national pilot project commenced to determine how best to realign and transform the structures, relationships, networks, and delivery systems for addressing global challenges and innovation-based opportunities. The new program at a stroke reframed how policymakers approached the public workforce system and renewed their commitment to seek transformations at both the regional and the federal levels of government.

For too long there has been a disconnect between federal workforce training efforts, led by the Employment and Training Administration, and federal economic development efforts, led by agencies such as the Economic Development Administration and the Department of Commerce’s National Institutes of Standards and Technology programs, as well as other federal interests at the departments of Energy, Defense, Transportation, and the Small Business Administration. WIRED sought to address this challenge by creating replicable structures and incentives that rewarded joint funding by multiple local, state and federal agencies, thereby breaking down traditional barriers of separate financial mechanisms and evolving the partnerships between federal and regional delivery systems for improved, real-time solution identification and response.

Other relevant efforts at building innovative local and regional workforce and economic development partnerships included several WIRED institutes, which have been held throughout the country. In April 2007, for example, the Institute on Alternative Energies, held at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., brought together 100 regional stakeholders from industry, academia, and government, with federal officials from the departments of Energy, Labor, Defense, Agriculture, and Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to discuss best practices and new developments in renewable fuels—the science, technology, commercialization, business development, and ultimately the human capital and skills. The impact from the two-day WIRED Institute was the formation of a multi-agency response on Green Technologies, Green Jobs, and the enhancement of some 68 agencies focused on enterprise and entrepreneurial development forming a more coordinated response in WIRED regions as a further test-bed for collaboration on resource allocation and performance.

Finally, WIRED sparked the need for increased access to real-time data and knowledge sharing, opportunities to network the best minds across the country within and beyond WIRED communities and institutions, and to inspire new innovations in economic-workforce products and services. Through two tools—the Workforce and Innovation Technical Solution Toolkit and the Innovating Nation Internet-based social collaborative network—the WIRED regions and some 1,500 individuals now have access to more robust data and information on the economy, demographics, economic and innovation investments—a whole host of resources never assembled in this manner to assist decision-making, cooperation, and allocation of time and money toward achieving the mission of WIRED nationally and the aspirations and performance metrics locally.

Lessons for the Obama administration: When given the platform, rules of engagement, metrics, and the latitude to “own their destiny,” Americans will identify the collaborations and pathways needed to resolve Grand Challenges and day-to-day operational issues plaguing governance by a Beltway mindset. These new innovative frameworks for coordination and partnerships at the local and regional level often are not measured as quickly in Washington as in states and communities, especially in areas of job creation, employment, and business decision-making, which means these WIRED programs are likely to boost U.S. economic competitiveness more creatively and more decisively than the plethora of outdated 20th-century workforce development programs.

Further, by coordinating workforce and economic development at the federal level, governors and mayors can be free to explore and implement new operational plans within their respective geographic domains. Indeed, precisely because WIRED encourages crossing boundaries—including several state lines—the program allows policymakers to explore the demand-side of the equation over the supply-oriented mechanisms that historically have been limited by Washington federalism. In short, WIRED increases collaboration among elected and appointed officials and their common constituencies of employees and employers, enhancing the forces of economic growth by sharing a common accessibility to talent, skills, and know-how.

Conclusion and Recommendations

In this period of economic meltdown and uncertainty, it is imperative that the government create a framework to unleash the competitiveness and entrepreneurial spirit of community and regional ideas and solutions. This calls for new federal-regional Innovation Collaboratories—intermediaries that connect the reach and depth of the federal mission with the goals and opportunities of local institutions, organizations, and individuals inclined to work as a team in new ways and on new outcomes measured by whether we resolved problems better and faster and less by whether the money was spent according to the demands of the bureaucracy.

The Obama administration, in partnership with the Office of Management and Budget, key congressional committees and staff, federal agencies, and state and local governments, should review all rules, regulations, and barriers that limit the ability to construct new frameworks for action and implementation as well as to create these federal-regional Innovation Collaboratories. This will enable the leveraging of government resources and co-investment opportunities with academia and the private sector.

To focus this transformation, we suggest choosing two or three Grand Challenges—competitive skills, alternative energy, water and the environment, or health care—to target the best private sector/academic/entrepreneurial/philanthropic localized expertise and creative thinking in partnership with White House policymakers, federal department leadership and program staff. All three of our case studies suggest that no matter the setting, there is a willingness among government policymakers at all levels to engage in out-of-the-box design and implementation of structures and governance in order to address 21st-century challenges that no longer can be effectively resolved without new paradigms.

This leads us to our final recommendation: The Obama administration should swiftly embrace an open-source innovation model for innovation-based economic development that establishes pathways for any person, in any institution or garage, with the interest of the country and its future, to become a member of a national and regional team set to expedite and accelerate these new Collaboratories around Grand Challenges. In tandem with new investments in ubiquitous broadband, new emerging wireless communications technologies and collaborative online tools for research and innovation, a national Open Source Innovation Initiative should become the platform for testing ideas with pilot resources.

The Obama administration will have a unique opportunity to break from the stale research, development, and commercialization model of long-term planning and tardy approvals by responding to a crying need to “launch a new moon shot.” Our nation has neither the time nor the full financial capital to rely on the traditional ways of encouraging innovation, as is so clearly evident today in national security, health care, and workforce development.

Fortunately, we have at hand new, 21st-century pathways to leverage and exploit—based on existing success through proof of previous pilots. If we are to both manage ourselves through an economic crisis and at the same time leap forward to help the current and next generation of Americans thrive and prosper, then it is time to unleash innovation in the public sector from within federal agencies already prone to be more innovative if not for constraints placed on them by old models and old metrics.

Richard Seline is chief executive and principal at New Economy Strategies LLC. Steven Miller is a consultant for New Economy Strategies.

Across the nation, in hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices both military and civilian, health care providers are facing unprecedented challenges in dealing with these weapons’ results. Among the most puzzling is a set of injuries widely considered a medical “signature” of this conflict, and one that raises clinical and scientific questions thus far unanswered.

This is the combination of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. TBI is a force to the head that damages the brain and impairs its function, with the extent and kind of harm depending on the exact location and scope of the injury. PTSD is a terrifying and often disabling anxiety disorder caused by the experience of violent trauma.

Any blast powerful enough to cause TBI is also powerful enough to cause PTSD, so a high—though unknown—percentage of the many exposed to blasts suffer from both. The scientific literature finds that “anywhere form 20% to 60%” of blast victims have PTSD, says Maxine Krengel, PhD, clinical neuropsychologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs Poly Trauma Network Site in Boston. “It’s huge.” The circumstances of the “event itself” indicate TBI, Krengel says. For example, “did the somebody have a loss of consciousness? If so, for how long?” At least mild TBI is therefore also very common.

Many Questions

A major clinical challenge is that the symptoms of the two conditions overlap—although the conditions are very different in their natures—making diagnosis often “very, very tricky,” Krengel says. TBI causes physiological damage to brain tissue that can result in cognitive deficits and reduced emotional control, among many other problems. PTSD is a learned connection between a traumatic event and a set of responses, which can include nightmares, flashbacks, and constant anxiety and can lead sufferers to alcohol, drugs, and even suicide. But the two conditions share many markers, including sleep disruption, irritability, personality changes, difficulty concentrating and remembering, depression, and more.

To add to the complication, the presence of one condition can interfere with the treatment of the other. And to make things even more uncertain, the type and extent of the brain damage caused by the compression wave of a blast appears to differ considerably from the injuries that form the basis of current scientific understanding of TBI.

“Most of the TBI research has been done in survivors of either motor vehicle accidents or sports injuries—a quarterback [who] gets knocked unconscious” or a driver who hits his head against the steering wheel, says Matthew Friedman, MD, PhD, Executive Director of the National Center on PTSD and professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth medical school. “But the real question that a lot of people are raising is, given the tremendous impact of an explosion, can it really compare to the impact of even a 350 pound defensive end knocking you to the ground? Even though that’s pretty bad, is it anything to compare to a bomb blowing up your Humvee and killing the person sitting beside you?”

Beyond a difference in strength of the impact, Krengel adds, the percussive wave of an explosion acts differently on tissue than an ordinary blow. “The blast impacts the air-filled cavities in the body, every air-filled cavity,” she says. “It’s different in different areas and also depending on how close you are to the blast.”

What is known about the impact of blasts on the brain essentially comes from animal models. “But in the animal literature there is a difference in what the connectivity looks like”—in other words, how the brain’s parts work together—“in blast injury versus traumatic brain injury, that we are typically used to seeing,” Krengel says.

“And then the second piece is that so many of these people have had more than one blast injury,” Friedman continues. So the crucial but as yet unresolved scientific question, he says, is “How generalizable is the sports injury or motor vehicle accident to what is coming into Walter Reed or VA hospitals these days?”

Figuring Out How to Help

The point is not just to study the problems with more science, but to find the best ways of helping suffering human beings, Friedman and Krengel emphasize. “We have two fabulous treatments for PTSD,” says Friedman. “These are evidence-based treatments and…vigorous review recently by the Institute of Medicine has verified their effectiveness.” One treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy, uses systematic, Socratic challenges to thinking about the traumatic experience to help patients restructure their thinking. The other, exposure therapy, breaks the Pavlovian connection between the event and the response with guided confrontation with the troubling memories. Beyond that, several medications help control the symptoms, though they do not resolve the basic issues. If medication is used alone, the symptoms return when treatment ends. Successful psychotherapy, however, permanently frees people from the terrors of PTSD. Which type of psychotherapy works better in a given case depends on the individual, but, Friedman says, in tests of otherwise normal individuals, both overall “perform extremely well and equally well.”

There are no drugs approved for TBI, although some appear to provide some benefit. They are not, however, the same drugs useful for PTSD.

But blast victims very often also have some degree of TBI, and depending where and how it damaged the brain, TBI can reduce the effectiveness of either or both of the two best PTSD treatments. Cognitive damage can impair the intellectual resources needed for cognitive behavioral therapy. The loss of emotional inhibition caused by brain injury can make a person unable to tolerate the emotional stress involved in exposure therapy. Mild TBI very often resolves over time, potentially allowing psychotherapy to work, but clinicians do not consider waiting a sound option because, as Friedman says, “six months is a long time to suffer.”

An additional potential complication is that a damaged brain may not tolerate medications very well. There are no drugs approved for TBI, although some appear to provide some benefit. They are not, however, the same drugs useful for PTSD.

A number of studies and proposals are underway, many of them sponsored by the VA or the Department of Defense, Krengel says, noting that, “The VA system is developing treatment modules or manuals to treat the pain issues, the PTSD, the depression.” Whether sufficient resources have been devoted to studying these conditions is a matter of opinion. But, Friedman notes, “It’s probably going to be a few years until we have definitive data. What I can tell you is that we understand the challenge and research is ongoing.”

Until the big questions get answered, “the challenge is to figure out what to do for these folks. We have some good stuff on PTSD, other [work] on TBI. The question is how applicable, how useful is it going to be for this more complicated situation. Can we utilize what works in the less-complicated cases and how much are we going to have to improvise?” At present, clinicians are improvising ad hoc modifications to treatments to make them more usable by individuals with impairments, while waiting for research to provide more answers.

Is It Enough?

Beyond these questions of basic knowledge and treatment are large issues of access to appropriate care. Although the VA maintains a number of specialized polytrauma centers in various parts of the country for dealing with complicated cases, for an unknown but undoubtedly large number of veterans distances can be large and waiting times long. People with mild TBI and PTSD can be “quite ambulatory and they’re going to walk into primary care clinics, psychiatric clinics” throughout the nation, Friedman says. They often show up with vague symptoms such as headaches or sleep disturbances. Many providers lack even the understanding of the conditions found in more specialized facilities. That’s why, he says, primary care doctors and mental health providers across the country need to be educated about these conditions and told that “anyone who has been in uniform should be asked about the different kinds of exposures they’ve had.”

For now, though, untold numbers of service members and veterans who have experienced blasts are suffering, often without knowing why. And PTSD can strike months or years after a traumatic experience. “You might be in a blast and you have to immediately go back to your job,” Krengel says. “You can sort of keep it together while you’re busy, busy, busy, but after you’re home for a while, people say, ‘Wait, I’m not functioning the way I should be.’”

The experience of a blast may therefore be a time bomb that goes off long after the traumatic event. Unless and until researchers and clinicians answer the crucial questions and effective care is readily available from military, veteran, and civilian providers, it should surprise no one that many who served in today’s wars continue to feel their effects long after the conflicts end.

Washington, D.C. science journalist Beryl Lieff Benderly contributes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column on labor force and early career issues to the website of Science magazine and articles to other major magazines and websites.

In July 2008 a committee of the United States Senate revealed that, beginning in 2002, Guantanamo Bay interrogators had based their methods partly on a chart that appeared in a 1957 paper prepared by an Air Force social scientist. The chart represented a summary of the types of coercive measures used by Chinese Communist interrogators against American P.O.W.’s during the Korean War, causing them to make a number of false confessions of U.S. war crimes. These measures fell under headings that included “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.” At the time, consternation about the effectiveness of the Chinese methods led to vague but deep-seated fears of “brain washing.”

The irony that information gleaned from circumstances involving the torture of American soldiers over 50 years ago could be used against detainees in the war on terror was not lost on opponents of the Bush administration’s policies. Yet this incident is but the tip of the iceberg of a much larger set of questions for 21^st century neural and behavioral science and their role in national intelligence operations, and for an increasingly globalized scientific community.

The American intelligence establishment’s infamous Cold War forays into various experiments with hallucinogens and other mind-altering processes can be attributed in part to worries that Eastern bloc Communist governments were both ahead of the intelligence game and less likely to respect ethical constraints than the West. One scenario was that an American nuclear physicist with a high security clearance attending a conference abroad could be invited to an apparently innocent meal and made “indiscreet” with LSD. The CIA’s MKUltra and other top-secret experimental programs were among the excesses that were revealed by government investigations in the mid-1970s.

Some believe that the United States continues to pay the price for these excesses—or, perhaps, for their revelation—even to the extent of blaming intelligence failures prior to the 9/11 attacks on the resultant weakening of the CIA’s covert operations capacity. What does seem indisputable is that the American intelligence community’s internal expertise on matters of the brain and behavior is not what it was in the 1950s. Some of the world’s top scientists were then deeply engaged advisors to military and civilian intelligence agencies, including Harvard University psychologist Henry Murray and Harvard/Massachusetts General Hospital’s Henry Beecher, continuing relationships that began during World War II. Whether or not that expertise actually improved performance of national security activities or not is another question.

Upgrading anthropology capacity

Nevertheless, there are some indications that American security officials are concerned that U.S. intelligence capacity has been somewhat degraded in recent years by a failure to integrate the best and most up-to-date academic work in fields like anthropology and cognitive science. Cultural insensitivity is often cited as one of the reasons for the early failure of the occupation of Iraq. Soldiers have often had to learn the nuances of communication with locals themselves. Sometimes failures to make intentions clear, as for example in passing through checkpoints, may have had tragic consequences due to cultural variations in the meaning of seemingly simple hand gestures for “proceed” and “halt.”

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, formerly president of Texas A&M University who has served as deputy director of the CIA, recently announced a new initiative called the Minerva Consortium. Minerva is intended to provide a group of universities with funding to assist the Department of Defense in areas such as Chinese military and technology studies, perspectives on terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere, religious and ideological studies, and “new disciplines” including history, anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary psychology. In an April 14, 2008 speech the secretary also elaborated at length on the history of complicated relationships between the defense establishment and academic anthropology. With candor that surprised some, Gates noted that, “Understanding the traditions, motivations, and languages of other parts of the world has not always been a strong suit of the United States. It was a problem during the Cold War, and remains a problem.” He associated these difficulties with a tension that has persisted between the American military and academia since the Vietnam War era.

As the American military establishment reaches out anew to the university system, what will be the reaction? Although Gates urged rapprochement and cited several institutions that have created special programs for injured veterans who might not otherwise qualify for admission, this is a far cry from the kinds of close relationships that characterized the World War II and post-war era. In an era in which federal funding for medical science has in real terms diminished, American academic research leaders have more motivation than patriotism alone to take an interest in a lucrative new government funding source for the generally under-supported “soft” social sciences.

Neuroscience and National Intelligence

Neuroscientists cite evidence that cultural differences may extend even to the way that members of different groups process information, and that these differences are measurable. If it is true that scientific understanding of culture and group dynamics has deepened in the past half century, necessitating renewed interest on the part of security officials, how much more must that be the case for the scientific study of the brain and its functions. Neuroscience conferences now rival the world’s largest medical meetings, bringing together a wide range of disciplines, from psycholinguists to electron microscopists. Even taking into account the hyperbole that seems to accompany much modern science, it’s a good bet that our basic understanding of the brain and its functions is on an impressive growth path.

Smart defense planners are well aware of the buzz about the brain. During the summer of 2008 a U.S. National Research Council committee of which I was a member issued a report on “Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies.” The bland title belies the fact that this was, I believe, the first time that the American intelligence community sought systematic and rather public advice on the future of brain research from a group of scientists and academics. Just before being named to this committee I published a book that included a reconstructed history of national security interest in the brain (Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, 2006), so I found this turn of events particularly intriguing.

I cannot speak for my colleagues on the committee, but I think we all found the charge compelling, which was in part to “review the current state of today’s work in neurophysiology and cognitive/neural science, select the manners in which this work could be of interest to security professionals, and trends for future warfighting applications that may warrant continued analysis and tracking by the intelligence community.” We were to have special sensitivity to work that might be done in selected other countries.

Over about a year and a half, the committee’s deliberations congealed around several themes reflected in the final report. In each case the national intelligence implications were paramount: Could new devices overcome challenges to the detection of psychological states and intentions, so that deliberate deception could be identified far more reliably than with traditional “lie detectors”? In what directions might neurologically active drugs take us, perhaps as tools for cognitive enhancement that exceeds normalcy? What if computational biology leads to intelligent machines, or aids in creating human-machine systems that combine and leverage the abilities of both? What are the prospects for acquiring intelligence on cognitive neuroscience developments that might be accomplished by our competitors and adversaries? How will culture and ethics influence both the hypotheses that other countries might find of interest and their willingness to engage in human experiments? Readers should of course consult the report itself for details; none of it is classified. Predictions of specific technical breakthroughs are kept to a minimum, and where disagreements arose among committee members, as for example over the genuine prospects for advances in lie detection, they are duly recorded.

As important as any of the report’s particular findings or recommendations is the fact that it lays a predicate for a series of critical social questions that we must face even if the more extravagant expectations for emerging neuroscience are not realized. For some we may rely on familiar territory, like risk-benefit assessments for clinical research involving implants or more powerful magnets. As advances in imaging and computing establish more reliable correlations between neural activity and behavior, privacy limits may stretch. Governments may have to amend international conventions to establish whether interrogations of prisoners may include investigation of psychological states through real-time measurements of neural function and spatial localization. As the report notes, unethical applications of neuroscience should be at the forefront of our concern.

Professional and Political Ethics

The environment of modern science is far more public and transparent than ever before. Simultaneously, the role of applied science in the manner and methods of political violence (for non-state as well as state actors), seems to be accelerating. Scientists are therefore under far more pressure to assess what “professional ethics” means as they participate in addressing great societal and political challenges. Perhaps only nuclear physicists have previously faced such scrutiny, though biologists, too, have in the past several years been drawn into relatively novel problems like those involving publications concerning biological weapons.

Moreover, in the 21^st century the community of science is less localized than ever. Modern communications and publication technologies make data sharing vastly more efficient. Obstacles to international collegial exchange have largely fallen, with the significant exceptions of government control of web access or the granting of visas. In an abstract sense the culture of science has always resisted political boundaries, a cosmopolitanism that has long earned the suspicion of jealous dictators like Hitler and Stalin. But now a globalized scientific community is a functional reality. Inevitably, that community will be obliged to assess its cultural role and political responsibilities in a far more focused fashion than has previously been the case.

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics and Professor of Medical Ethics and of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Editor in Chief of Science Progress.

The servers are obviously having a tough time handling the traffic load (I’ve gotten a few errors throughout the day), but President-elect Obama’s transition project has already hit the ground running with a box of tools to organize the next administration at change.gov.

In his article on the many uses for social software in the transition (“The Oval Office Facebook Group“), Mark Drapeau wrote that the team “can expect…about 40,000 applications in the first few weeks and eventually…70,000 interested persons,” hence the job application form.

But today is also the day that Obama and his national security staff began their daily intelligence briefings, and as Drapeau pointed out, the intelligence community already wields some powerful IT tools for collaborating and sharing information. Making the most of that technology to get the new government up to speed will be a critical component of this massive project.

The process itself is extremely complex and will happen very quickly. There will be about 800 people on the transition team, which will spend roughly $9 million. Given that this team will have about 11 weeks to form a new government as the country skids through an economic crisis, it will not be an easy job. The handover of power will involve an unprecedented amount of information and will require fast, effective communication. Briefing books, face-to-face meetings, and phone calls will be insufficient. The transition team must make the most of modern information and communications technology to shape, coordinate, and run the process of moving the next president into office. Here are some suggestions on how that can work.

Previous administrations—and ultimately the American people—have suffered from poor communication and coordination during transition periods.

One of the first priorities of the president-elect must be issues that could affect national security and other vital interests. Ordinarily, this information gets passed around in the form of briefing books and PowerPoint slides. But now, information and communications technology allows experts to conduct briefings remotely using videoteleconferencing, present information via secure webpages and internal wikis, and conduct real-time discussions and make document modifications using collaborative software and chat tools.

Previous administrations—and ultimately the American people—have suffered from poor communication and coordination during transition periods. For example, the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident occurred in Somalia at the time of the Bush 41-to-Clinton transition, and the “Bay of Pigs” occurred during the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition. Ultimately, these crises, and numerous others, boil down to lack of communication, coordination, and collaboration.

But the U.S. Intelligence Community has already cleared a lot of the technical hurdles in this area. Their recent advances with INTELINK and its cousin A-Space are essentially mashups of the functionality civilians are familiar with through Facebook, LinkedIn, GoogleDocs, and Google Reader—all rolled into an addictive work environment. These social networks allow status updates, subscriptions to real-time news feeds, activity streams, content management, a community tag cloud, drag and drop, discussion threads, a “scrapbook,” and widgets. This system is better than anything I know about in the private sector and the whole government should now make good use of it.

Using INTELINK to coordinate the intelligence and national security teams of the incoming administration is but one important example of how social networking software and Web 2.0 tools can facilitate the presidential transition, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What is the transition team?

Broadly defined, the presidential transition includes the entire campaign season, the election cycle, and a number of months after inauguration when the Senate confirms appointees and leaders are stepping into decision-making roles. The team that coordinates this process exists in two critical and intertwined worlds.

The first is in the Executive Office of the President, where transition staff are concerned about staffing the White House, vetting potential cabinet members, developing advisory councils, recruiting lower-level personnel, coordinating with the outgoing administration, communicating with key outside advisors and leaders in government and the private sector, and drafting an initial presidential agenda.

The second world is executive branch departments and agencies, where team members have three main responsibilities: analyzing the overall organization and function of parts of the executive branch, reassessing key senior personnel positions and responsibilities, and looking at pressing and long-term issues in subject-matter areas.

Department-specific teams are especially important during a change in which the incoming president is from a different political party from that of the outgoing administration. In the event that Sen. Barack Obama wins, those transition teams within departments and agencies are likely to be larger than what was normal in the past.

Technology in the transition

During the Clinton-Bush transition to the 43^rd presidency, the United States was just past the Y2K confusion and at the peak of the dot-com bubble; Time-Warner purchased AOL; Microsoft released Windows 2000 and was in the middle of an antitrust case; Netscape launched its open-source Navigator 6.0 browser; Wikipedia did not yet exist; and the first short film to be widely distributed on the Internet, “405: The Movie,” had just appeared.

But now the presidential campaigns are longer, more expensive, and more stressful, and the government is larger. Since that last transition, there is a new department in the executive branch for Homeland Security, as well as significant new coordinating offices like that of the Director of National Intelligence. As such, transition organization will be more difficult than ever.

In this process, personal connections are imperative, and new social software lends itself to precisely these situations. A new administration in transition, just off a grueling campaign, cannot reasonably be expected to comb through mountains of data which are not necessarily well-organized, in agreement, or even fully available due to classification issues. Social technologies, inherently designed to bring people and ideas together, can improve the transition process.

The transparent transition

Eight years after the last hand over of the presidency, collaboration tools have emerged and evolved, and the complexity of projects like managing an 800-person government transition, organizing what might be the largest White House ever, and analyzing a myriad of government agencies, employees, contractors, and policies, could be easier and more effective by drawing some lessons from Wikipedia and even the familiar Facebook.

Immediately post-election but pre-transition, there is a huge need to understand the institutional memory of the White House and of the cabinet agencies. Eight years ago, briefing books—big thick binders of information— were still in vogue. But now, social tools like websites, wikis, and collaborative software can help by making information more widely available, searchable, and discoverable, and it can also promote and aid discussions between relevant transition personnel with areas of overlap.

The White House must also coordinate a recruitment effort to seek out individuals with required expertise to staff the incoming administration. This involves not only the creation of a website for this purpose, but management of the resume information—which they can expect will be about 40,000 applications in the first few weeks and eventually total 70,000 interested persons, according to an article written by Clay Johnson III, the current deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and previously the executive director of the Bush 43 transition team. Social software will also facilitate the associated research for vetting job candidates. Information management tools, collaborative software, advanced Internet search algorithms, and knowledge of online social networks would greatly facilitate a good deal of this important task. In addition, current career government employees could staff some of these thousands of open positions. The transition team is in a unique position to reach out to and recruit those people—even if just temporarily—using social tools. This approach would leverage existing bureaucratic knowledge without risking administrative gaps in the critical first months of the presidency.

Next, the incoming administration will be immediately and constantly overwhelmed with “advice” (some wanted, some unwanted) from think tanks, previous administrations, “experts,” interest groups, lobbyists, governors, legislators, and donors. And this information will come from a variety of sources using diverse media—print, email, video, and audio. Points of contact for these people and groups need to be organized and coordinated; information must be organized and shared; and staffers must meet and sometimes partner with groups, all in the effort to craft the short and long-term agenda of the critical first 100 days (and beyond) of the new administration. New social websites and software allow coordination of formal debates so as to allow actionable conclusions from what might at first seem like the chaos of many opinions. And the new administration might consider using social networks to reach out to stakeholders as well.

Within departments, small teams from the incoming administration will be interacting with existing personnel in order to prepare for the cabinet and sub-cabinet heads, tee up important upcoming issues, and reorganize resources and personnel. Social tools would enable teams interacting with different departments to share information and advice while they perhaps struggle to obtain information or solve problems. Social software can also help coordinate informal social networks and organize advisory groups of outside-subject-matter experts to advise the transition team members, keep track of discussions, and include people who cannot attend in person.

Risks during the transition

Once the president takes office, there is a very real chance of a crisis that will test the new administration. Both World Trade Center incidents occurred in the first year of a new presidency. If this happened in 2009, would formal and informal networks and communication be in place? Social media can reduce these risks by getting the right information to the right people before they need it. Prior to September 11, 2001, groups within the intelligence-gathering community did not share information. Tools like INTELINK, discussed above, have solved many of those information-sharing problems in principle, but the transition team must plug the right people into the system right away—and they have to use it.

Within the Executive Office of the President, every administration’s staff is organized differently according to the president’s desires. But this organization has consequences for communication and effectiveness. For example, staff with insufficient titles cannot go to certain parts of the White House, including the Mess. Where else might important, informal, evolving staff interactions (say, between speechwriters and policy advisors) come from? Social media can help create more of these interactions. One potentially useful idea from corporate America is that every morning each person must enter one sentence into a collaborative system, answering the question, “What are you working on?” These data—available to anyone on the system—are simple, searchable, discoverable, and archivable.

In addition, now in office, the president must focus not only on the voters he needed to get elected, but on the public sentiment of the entire nation. Governing is very different from campaigning. Social software can help with this too. Websites like Twitter offer real-time information on public discussions people are having on the Internet. Quantifying public sentiment using these and other tools, both open and proprietary, will be very important for reaching out, listening, and engaging the citizens post-election, and henceforth for influencing new policies and programs.

Last but certainly not least, the people of America should be engaged in knowing about what is happening during the presidential transition process, and what increased risks (if any) there are during that period. Historical incidents, like the World Trade Center bombings, tell us that there are increased risks. In an increasingly fragmented media and information society, that level of engagement requires more than a press release on the White House website and stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post. It means full multimedia engagement in a myriad of locations and times using a blizzard of tools including blogging, speeches, informal gatherings, mobile technologies, podcasts, online video, and widgets. In addition, the outreach should use social tools that allow not just message “push” but rather bidirectional conversation—increasing citizen participation and interest in government.

Dr. Mark Drapeau (mark.d.drapeau@ugov.gov) is an Associate Research Fellow directing the Social Software for Security (S3) project at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

CNN reports: “Within the concrete of the new bridge are embedded 323 sensors that will generate a record of how it handles the stresses and strains of traffic and Minnesota’s harsh climate. The data will help engineers maintain the bridge and advance the art of bridge design.”

Reece Rushing covered the promise of monitoring technology earlier this year on Science Progress in a piece on “Catching Crumbling Infrastructure.” He warned:

Before it collapsed, the Minneapolis bridge was one of more than 70,000 bridges nationwide declared by the Department of Transportation to be structurally deficient. One in three urban bridges fall into this category.

Replicating the design and monitoring elements that now protect the I-35W bridge will pave the way to a safer infrastructure for the entire country.

Among other things, Stebbins recommends an independent and Internet-based reporting system which supplements dual-use awareness programs and allows researchers to report suspicious activity. He points out that if scientists are going to learn about the misuse of dangerous agents, then they need an outlet to report potential problems. In his suggested system, scientists would be able to report their concerns and receive advice and recommendations on the steps that they should or should not take.

The scientific community also has to improve its oversight over who has access to lethal substances. Following the 2001 attacks, there was a huge rise in biodefense research. Current estimations reveal that around 14,000 people at over 400 laboratories have access to chemicals that that can be used in the construction of bioweapons. The current federal oversight procedures are not expansive enough to ensure that all of these users are following security rules and reporting events—including the suspicious activity of co-workers—which could threaten fellow workers or the public.

On the other hand, our country is now more prepared to handle bioterrorist attacks. Research has led to vaccines which could potentially treat smallpox or the Ebola virus, and has also increased stockpiles of antibiotics that treat infectious agents.

Ellen Laipson, President and CEO of the Henry L Stimson Center, opened by laying out the current state of affairs in international security. Asian countries, especially China and India, are rising powers on the global stage. Nuclear technology leakage to non-state actors, chemical and biological threats, climate change, failing or weak states, and environmental disasters are just a few of the current and future global threats. Addressing them will take an integrative and inclusive approach, she told the audience, calling experts from health, environmental, and security fields to join forces in developing new paradigms for security issues.

Dr. Sagarin then explained how biological evolution on a uncertain and dangerous planet has operated as a 3.6-billion-year test period for security and defense mechanisms that both do and don’t work. Looking at the “solutions” provided by nature could teach humans how to deal with their own security issues, he argues. He suggests events such as the 9/11 attacks where not the effect of a “failure of imagination,”as the 9/11 Commission Report found, but are rather a “failure of adaptation.”

What are examples of natural security? Sagarin notes how the Cold War arms race between superpowers Russia and the U.S. was similar to male fiddler crabs waving large and relatively useless claws while competing with other male crabs for female attention. None of the male crabs actually use the claw in battle with competitors, and analogously, superpowers working with similar assumptions and resources nonetheless continued their competitive escalation.

He then explained that male peacocks use a great deal of energy and resources to grow beautiful manes of feathers which serve no purpose other than for wooing females. According to Sagarin, when male peacocks fully extend these feathers, they expose themselves to danger; a behavior that could have only developed in predator-free habitats. Recent news reports have found lax security at sensitive chemical plants because companies, he argues, behave much like peacocks, spending resources in research and development rather than on security because they developed during a period of relaxed security concerns.

Sagarin believes that studying evolutionary adaptations like the immune system and biomimicry, as well as evolutionary models in network science, could yield novel and effective security approaches. He sees four broad but interlocking themes in nature-inspired security:

• Structures that are highly centralized do not respond efficiently to the environment. For this, he cited the Department of Homeland Security and its failure to responded quickly to Hurricane Katrina.
• Most organisms increase uncertainty for adversaries while reducing uncertainties for themselves. Announcing security protocols at the airport runs counter to this principle, as it makes it easier for individuals with criminal intent to know what behaviors to avoid, he pointed out.
• Organisms live in a world of inherent risk. Instead of trying to eliminate all risk, he suggested, it is better to understand the nature of risk and apply resources accordingly.
• Natural systems are always changing, so security situations should be constantly reevaluated. Understanding what stage a system is in allows an administer to allocate the right tools appropriately.

Sagarin emphasized that security requires collaboration across a variety of disciplines and must involve both experts and non-experts to help develop new paradigms and perspectives to solve the problems of the future. To further this collaboration, he has started a website for individuals to offer their own perspectives and ideas.

Hill Heat glosses the past few tumultuous weeks for EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson, who was hit with a tidal wave of criticism for denying California’s Clean Air Act waiver request and is now failing to cooperate with congressional investigations into the matter.

Ed Silverman at Pharmalot asks if publicly financed clinical trials would better protect the public and lower the cost of new drug testing.

Defense Tech reports that U.S. military officials are concerned about the national security threat of adversaries tapping into online mapping services like Google Maps to obtain vital intelligence.

Liz Borkowski at The Pump Handle offers a nuanced assessment of this week’s news about testing that revealed trace amounts of pharmaceuticals in drinking-water supplies and the rationales for disclosing and not disclosing the information.

Respectful Insolence responds to the recent “Broken Pipeline” report on NIH funding problems by arguing that universities share a part of the blame for the troubles of young scientists.

We ought to have universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007. And then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter consumers have plenty of choices.

—President George W. Bush, March 2004 [1]

The United States will not meet President Bush’s goal of universal broadband by the end of 2007—not by a long shot. The number of subscribers to Internet services is growing faster than the adoption of “dial-up,” yet for the most part these subscribers are not connected to the broadband technology Congress described in 1996 as a two-way communications service capable of high-speed delivery of data, voice, and video.

Download this report in .pdf format.

Listen to a press call on broadband and national security with Mark Lloyd and P.J. Crowley (download .mp3):

This failure to connect over half the country to advanced telecommunications service is not a technological failure. It is a 21st century public policy failure. In the 1990s, policies established by the Clinton administration to encourage public/private telecommunications partnerships, to connect schools and libraries to the World Wide Web, and to allow competitive service providers onto the networks of the local telephone monopolies all sped up the deployment of broadband around most of the nation. These policies were either deliberately abandoned or hampered by the Bush administration.

The increasing noise from Washington about the lack of a U.S. broadband policy obscures the fact that a policy choice was made by the Bush administration to rely entirely on “market forces” to determine how and where advanced telecommunications services would be deployed. That policy has failed.

The goal of federal investment in broadband should be first and foremost to ensure our ability to respond to threats to our homeland security and to natural disasters.

The result of administration neglect, industry intransigence, and the incompetence of a Federal Communications Commission apparently “captured” by the industry it is supposed to regulate has left the American people and most policymakers with no clear idea where broadband services are deployed in the United States. There is no credible dispute that the United States has fallen behind Canada and France and Japan and a dozen other industrial countries in broadband deployment.[2]

Americans are not more adverse to new technology compared to our neighbors to the north or our friends overseas. The difference is that these countries have moved ahead of the United States after having adopted one version or another of U.S. telecommunications policies established in the mid-1990s.[3] In addition to leaving America less competitive in a global economy, this failure has left the nation vulnerable and ill-prepared for real threats to our national security—the rationale behind the initial U.S. government investment in the development of the Internet.

The American invention of the Internet, of course, was preceded by hefty scientific investments beginning with the Eisenhower administration for military purposes. In fact, the Internet developed despite “market forces” dominated by the not-so-invisible hand of the Bell telephone monopoly. While the development of the Internet has certainly benefited from global market forces, the “free market” blinders that prevent present-day U.S. policymakers from seeing beyond the interests of corporations must be removed. While Reagan-era Republicans seem to don their blinders with greater pride, this is not a partisan issue. It was, after all, Vice President Al Gore who insisted that the “information superhighway” would not be built the way the U.S. highway system was built, but would instead be financed by private enterprise.[4]

If the United States is to catch up with other developed and developing nations, however, we must look beyond even the abandoned policies of the Clinton era and begin to move with greater urgency and resolve to address pressing disaster response and defense needs. After all, the attacks of 9/11 and body blow of Hurricane Katrina highlight for all but the most doctrinaire advocates of free markets that there is an exceedingly strong case for direct government investment in the deployment of advanced telecommunications services to build a safe, strong, and resilient America.

The goal of federal investment in broadband should be first and foremost to ensure our ability to respond to threats to our homeland security and to natural disasters. Directly connected to this goal is the availability of advanced telecommunications services in our health care and educational systems—the modernization of which is key to our nation’s ability to respond to threats to our national security and public safety immediately and over the coming decades. Without ubiquitous broadband our first responders could be crippled by the lack of effective communications in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. Similarly, our educational institutions need to be able to communicate quickly and effectively in case of a pandemic, as well as conduct research and development on all of the technologies needed to maintain our nation’s national defense and public safety.

In meeting these goals, federal investment should make certain that the U.S. communications infrastructure is continually upgraded, robust, redundant, and able to withstand multiple threats and uses. The public should not be left to rely on any one technology, but rather on multiple technologies—each able to operate with the other, and each able to serve important needs if the other technologies are destroyed or compromised. Market forces will not guarantee this result.

Infrastructure for a Strong and Safe America

Together, the united forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear—United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Special Message to the Congress Regarding a National Highway Program, February 22, 1955.

In small rural towns, in the crowded barrios and ghettos of urban U.S. cities, in those places where financial institutions are not yet convinced they can get an adequate return on investment, Americans do not have access to the communications networks they will need to keep them safe in the future.[5] It is no coincidence that these same places hold our nation’s toxic waste dumps, our chemical plants, and our seaports and airports, yet we do not have the ability to communicate most effectively where we are most vulnerable.

The Department of Defense has long been provided almost all the communication resources it needed to protect American interests overseas. What has been too often forgotten is the importance of equipping all Americans with the ability to participate effectively in the national defense effort at home. Americans take pride in assisting when their communities are under attack or threatened by a natural disaster. A concerted effort must be made to equip all Americans so they are able to communicate effectively when confronted by catastrophe.

President Eisenhower understood the value of a robust transportation system at home to sustain national unity and to promote defense needs. In announcing the new interstate highway system, Eisenhower called the effort “the National Defense Highway System.” In addition to some direct experience with a problem-laden military convoy from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco he took in 1919, Eisenhower was also impressed with the German autobahn. “The old convoy,” Eisenhower said, “had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.”

Despite the squabbles of some local government and business leaders who fought against a federal highway system, Eisenhower was convinced that America could do better. As Richard Weingoff reports in his excellent history of the interstate system, when Vice President Richard M. Nixon delivered an address before a 1954 conference of state governors at Lake George, NY, reading from Eisenhower’s detailed notes, he declared that the U.S. “highway network is inadequate locally, and obsolete as a national system.”

Nixon then recounted Eisenhower’s convoy and then cited five “penalties” of the nation’s obsolete highway network: the annual death and injury toll, the waste of billions of dollars in detours and traffic jams, the clogging of the nation’s courts with highway-related suits, the inefficiency in the transportation of goods, and “the appalling inadequacies to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come.”[6]

If America is to be ready “to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense,” all Americans need access to advanced telecommunications services in the 21st century, just as they needed access to an advanced highway system in the 20th century. But as the 9/11 Commission noted in its report, the United States is not ready for a national emergency. And as every comprehensive analysis of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina revealed, we are not prepared to handle a major natural disaster. Both of these experiences highlight the importance and the multiple failures of U.S. communications services as warning systems or as systems to allow for the coordination of first responders.[7]

Command and Control vs. National Leadership

A standard complaint of conservative defenders of the current telecommunications regulatory system regarding communications policy focuses on the supposed “command and control regulatory policies” of the federal government.[8] They argue that the heavy hand of regulation stymies the roll out of advanced telecommunications networks across the nation when in fact the tendency of the federal government historically is to exercise this “command and control” on behalf of the communications industry itself.

The result of this regulatory protection of different bits of the telecommunications industry leaves the United States with balkanized communications capabilities. If the prevention or response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11—when New York City police, fire, and rescue workers could not communicate with each other amid the chaos and carnage of that awful day—or the prevention or response to the failed levees overwhelmed by hurricane Katrina demonstrated anything, they demonstrated the need for better command and control.[9]

The determination of how our country’s critical communications infrastructure is upgraded and deployed is entirely determined by private industry.

Indeed, in the debate over communications policy, the term “command and control” is little more than a right-wing slogan. Outside of military operations this phrase has never accurately described either the policymaking process or the execution of policy in the United States. Even the federal highway system so important to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower for military purposes, was the product of a contentious federal-state partnership.

Still, there is no question about the importance of federal vision and leadership and funding.[10] The importance of strong federal engagement in the development of the national highway system is beyond dispute. The same can be said of the importance of federal leadership in the U.S. space program, which led to the U.S. satellite industry, as well as federal leadership in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spurred the research behind the Internet.

Perhaps the most direct corollary to the national highway system in the U.S. telecommunications arena is the National Communications System. The NCS began after the Cuban missile crisis. Communications problems between and among the United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations helped to create the crisis. President Kennedy ordered an investigation of national security communications, and the National Security Council recommended forming a single unified communications system to connect and extend the communications network serving federal agencies, with a focus on interconnectivity and survivability.

The NCS oversees wireline (Government Emergency Telecommunications Service) and cellular service (Wireless Priority Service).[11] The NCS is now part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Preparedness Directorate, and despite the increased attention to the communication needs of first responders on September 11, 2001, NCS failures and inadequacies were made obvious after Katrina.[12] In New Orleans, police officers were forced to use a single frequency on their patrol radios, which “posed some problems with people talking over each other,” explained Deputy Policy Chief Warren Riley at the time. “We probably have 20 agencies on one channel right now.” And with little power to recharge batteries, some of those radios were soon useless.

In southern Mississippi, the National Guard couldn’t even count on radios. “We’ve got runners running from commander to commander,” said Maj. Gen. Harold Cross of the Mississippi National Guard. “In other words, we’re going to the sound of gunfire, as we used to say during the Revolutionary War.”[13] As Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) said: “This is a further demonstration of our inadequate response to the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations and other warnings about the failures in our first responders’ communications systems.”[14]

How can these obvious communications failures still leave the United States groping for an adequate response? One of the biggest challenges we face is the tendency to see national defense and emergency needs regarding communications as separate and unrelated to the communications needs of the American public. The NCS has established an elaborate set of protocols that make government communications a priority over what is called the public switched network. Federal, state, and local governments pay substantial fees to use this communications network. But the determination over how that network is upgraded and deployed is entirely determined by private industry.

Katrina and 9/11 remind us that access to advanced telecommunications service is a public need. Above, President Bush surveys New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by helicopter. SOURCE: AP.

We cannot have a robust, survivable, interoperable communications system that protects the public if the public is treated merely as a mass of consumers and not as an integral part of national defense and emergency response. The U.S. public remains vulnerable because our communications infrastructure is too often viewed only as a private business. Katrina and 9/11 remind us that access to advanced telecommunications service is a public need. We need national leadership to remind us of this, and insist on policies that address public needs.

Advanced Telecommunications Capability in the 21st Century

In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Congress indicated that advanced information and communication technology, or ICT for short, should provide the ability to send and receive data, voice, and video. Today, advanced ICT means the ability to send and receive high-definition video in real time, something that requires massive telecommunications power if the goal is for everyone to be able to do so. Further complicating this goal is that in emergency situations communications systems become easily overloaded as people rush to their phones to check on loved ones.

In the case of an emergency or national disaster we need a capacity far greater than the market would support for even heavy shopping days. A starting point would be symmetrical speeds (both download and upload capability) of 10 gigabytes per second. Today, speeds of that magnitude are available only at the most important point-to-point interchanges of the Internet backbone or between dedicated military, financial, educational or scientific institutions. Both fiber and robust wireless services have the potential to deliver these speeds in both directions.

In fact, redundancy is so essential to public safety and national security that where private industry refuses to create these alternatives government must do so.

But the construction of one or even two robust communications pipelines into police stations or military posts would still leave the United States vulnerable. The sole reliance on only one or two sources of communications creates an inviting target and, at the very least, creates the potential for deadly communications bottlenecks. Telecommunications businesses won’t help us solve this problem. At their best, they work to create greater efficiency by eliminating redundancy. At their worst, they work to eliminate any and all competition so that even efficiency doesn’t matter.

When reliability is essential, redundancy is highly valued. When lives are at stake, establishing alternative systems that can do as good a job as any designated primary system is routine. And while our policymakers speak of competition—sometimes even embracing competitive communications infrastructures that might lead to alternative “consumer” choice—policymakers rarely seem to understand that alternatives are essential to national defense and emergency preparedness.

In fact, redundancy is so essential to public safety and national security that where private industry refuses to create these alternatives government must do so. Safety engineers consider redundancy a critical ingredient of creating a system with a high probability of safety. In the commercial aircraft industry, for example, pilots and passengers are assured of safety in part because redundant equipment, including engines and sensors, are required by government regulation.

Or consider the redundancy standards that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will require to keep our astronauts safe if there ever is a manned flight to Mars. NASA has developed a graph that shows the relationship between the survivability of an astronaut crew and the amount of redundant equipment in the space vehicle (see table, below). Surely our communications systems require equally robust redundancy given the very real threats to our nation posed by terrorism and natural disasters.

NASA graph demonstrating the relationship between the survivability of an astronaut crew and the amount of redundant equipment in the space vehicle.

In addition to redundancy, it is vital that the different systems and the equipment operating over these communications systems be interoperable. One unfortunate result of relying on private competition is the tendency of competitors to develop systems which do not permit interoperability. A key failing of emergency response after 9/11 and Katrina was the lack of interoperable communications equipment.[15]

Many of the problems of interoperability are the result of turf wars and not equipment limitations. Federal policies to override local turf wars are essential. The Department of Homeland Security has made it a priority to solve the range of problems related to interoperability.[16] But again, interoperability must not be limited to operation over one infrastructure, but must cross all relevant communications platforms. Phones and computers must operate over wireline and wireless infrastructure, including competing wireline and wireless networks. Interoperability is a vital component of emergency service and a modern communications network. Closed “private” broadband networks stifle not only innovation and service competition, they also limit the ability of all Americans to participate effectively in response to natural disaster and terrorist attack. If the United States is to compete effectively in a global economy and defend itself against global terrorist threats, then it must take advantage of the unique opportunities only possible with an open network.

Federal law should require that all broadband networks are open to the attachment of any equipment the user chooses—so long as it does not harm the technical operation of the broadband network. In addition, federal law should require broadband networks to be open to other information service providers and accessible to other networks, except for restrictions related to vital law enforcement or for network management.

Investing in Multiple Technologies

Our nation’s wireline infrastructure is inadequate to meet 21st century needs. The old telephone network is simply incapable of delivering the bandwidth to meet the emergency needs of today and the future. While efforts have been made to upgrade the relatively more modern cable infrastructure, there are too many rural communities where the cable system has not upgraded to provide digital service. Even in our major metropolitan areas, gross deficiencies are self-evident.

The strain on the existing telecommunications infrastructure was obvious as call after call was blocked during 9/11. But this strain is obvious to anyone who regularly uses either the Internet or regular cell phone service in a major metropolitan area in the United States. The concerns that the Internet as presently constructed simply will not bear the amount of use projected over the next five years are longstanding. While more sophisticated filtering and better emergency protocols may address this problem in the short-term, the strain on the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure will only increase as the call for greater bandwidth for video over the Internet increases.

If meeting the communications needs of first responders or panicked parents were simply a matter of “market forces,” then one would be tempted to applaud the telephone and cable companies for squeezing as much profit as possible out of old technologies. But the challenge of communicating in an emergency should not be held hostage to even legitimate profit-seeking demands of private investors.

In brief, the nation should be investing in the deployment of fiber, powerline, wireless, and satellite communications technologies. The combination of these technologies would ensure robust and ready communications services in case of a national emergency. What’s more, these technologies are readily available for roll out, as we will detail below.

Optical fiber

The most promising single technology that could deliver advanced telecommunications connectivity to homes and offices everywhere is optical fiber, a thin glass or plastic line designed to distribute light. Optical fiber is distinct from the electricity that distributes communications through copper telephone wires or coaxial cable. The light in optical fiber permits transmission of digital data over longer distances and at higher rates than other forms of communications.

The emphasis on market priorities, forward thinking or not, does not serve the goal of protecting Americans with the best communications service available in case of an emergency.

Fiber optic products have been used for several decades in a variety of defense technologies designed for air, sea, ground, and space applications. During the high technology boom of the 1990s many privately held companies and public corporations built out vast fiber optic networks even as telecommunications companies beginning in the early 1990s began to upgrade their networks to incorporate fiber technology. Yet only one large U.S company, Verizon, has extended optical fiber to the home.

The immediate reaction from Wall Street to Verizon’s plans was pessimistic. Verizon’s stock value in 2006 dropped and investors pressured the company to scale back deployment or abandon the investment in fiber to the home altogether. The reason: investors saw little reason to back Verizon’s expensive proposition, which the company estimated would cost $23 billion.[17]

Never mind that over time Verizon’s emphasis on delivering video entertainment alongside other telecommunications services so the company could compete with cable is now increasingly viewed as smart forward-thinking investment strategy. Unfortunately, Verizon’s service areas are largely densely populated urban areas, and Verizon’s rural customers are not likely to get fiber anytime soon. Other telecommunications companies, including AT&T and smaller, regional players, have no plans to provide their customers with fiber optic service to the home.[18] Again, the emphasis on market priorities, forward thinking or not, does not serve the goal of protecting Americans with the best communications service available in case of an emergency.

There are municipalities, however, that have deployed optical fiber networks with the expressed intent of improving the communications capability of emergency workers. One example is Arlington County, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Arlington firefighters were the first to respond on September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon was attacked by terrorists. Beginning with its 10 fire stations in January 2002, by June 2002 all 40 county sites were connected to a fiber network. In 2005, Arlington extended the network to the nearby city of Alexandria, to facilitate interagency collaboration.[19]

These are the kind of public investments that federal, state, and local governments all need to make in tandem with the private sector to ensure that households and offices are all connected to the most readily available form of high speed telecommunications. Ubiquitous broadband via fiber optics is the best first step that could be made by such a public/private partnership.

Powerline communication

Broadband over power lines, known as BPL by industry insiders, is a promising technology that would make use of the extensive electrical power grid infrastructure to communicate digital signals. BPL, however, still has some kinks to be worked out. Both the electric grid and the home create what engineers call a “noisy” environment. Every time a device turns on or off, a pop or click is introduced into the line.

With only a few technology hurdles to clear, and with FCC regulatory clearance already evident, BPL through a public/private partnership could become available swiftly.

Indeed, BPL has developed faster in Europe than in the United States due to differences in power system design philosophies. Large power grids transmit power at high voltages to reduce transmission losses, and transformers that are near the customer reduce the voltage. Because BPL signals cannot pass through transformers, repeaters must be attached to each transformer. In the United States, a small transformer typically services a single house or a small number of houses. In Europe, it is more common for a larger transformer to service up to 100 houses. Delivering BPL over the power grid of a typical U.S. city will require many more repeaters as compared to a typical European city.

Despite these challenges, BPL in the United States is on the rise, with about 6,000 BPL subscribers nationwide as of 2006.[20] According to the United Power Line Council, commercial deployments are up slightly, from six in 2005 to nine in 2007. Trial rates, however, have fallen from 35 in 2005 to 25 in 2007.[21]

An indication of a possible increase in BLP penetration, however, came in 2007 when DirecTV announced that it was getting in on the BPL market. In a deal with Current Group, DirecTV plans to provide BPL service in the Dallas-Fort Worth and Cincinnati areas with a potential for much broader rollout. Not to be out done, Oncor, a subsidiary of Dallas power company Energy Future Holdings Corporation—formerly TXU Corporation—has started to deliver BPL service and it recently passed 108,000 customer deployments, less than five percent of its goal.[22]

The rise in BPL deployment can also be traced to steps the FCC took in 2006 to support the technology by reaffirming an earlier decision that BPL providers have the right to provide data access using power transmission lines so long as they do not interfere with existing radio service. Still, opponents of BPL, including the aviation industry and the amateur radio community, have continued to voice the strongest concerns over the issue of possible interference with radio communication,[23] though there is some dispute among experts over the degree to which electricity over BPL actually “leaks” and thus interferes with an electromagnetic wireless signal.

In a further boost, the FCC classified BPL-enabled Internet access as an information service, rather than a telecommunications service, in November, 2006. According to the FCC, “The order places BPL-enabled Internet access service on an equal regulatory footing with other broadband services, such as cable modem service and DSL Internet access service.”[24] According to Joe Marsilii, president and CEO of BPL equipment maker and integrator MainNet Powerline Inc., 70 percent to 80 percent of the nation’s electrical grid will be equipped with BPL in five to eight years.[25]

This kind of rollout of BPL services, however, will not occur without a coherent policy advanced by those federal agencies responsible for keeping America competitive and secure. BPL could easily become the second ubiquitous source of broadband to all houses and offices with a plug. With only a few technology hurdles to clear, and with FCC regulatory clearance already evident, BPL through a public/private partnership could become available swiftly.

Wireless Broadband

As anyone who has attempted to carry on cell phone conversations in New York or rural America will attest, reliance on the most prevalent wireless technology in America would be misplaced.[26] Cell phones are no less ubiquitous in big American cities than they are in London or Taipei or Toronto, but somehow cell phones seem much more reliable in other countries.

Coverage problems in the United States result from the lack of cell phone infrastructure—towers and repeaters—necessary to sustain a large number of users in the variety of locations. The infrastructure problems are directly tied to two factors. First, the costs to build that infrastructure at present outweigh the commercial benefit, which is the profit the telecommunications companies and their shareholders think they can realize. Second, because cell phone service is seen only as a commercial need, there is little public will to assist in supporting the cost of this infrastructure development by allowing, mandating, or helping to finance the build-out of towers and repeaters.

The focus, however, should not be on any one technology, but rather on the full funding of a public safety network that utilizes wired and wireless infrastructure.

Coverage problems also result from the limited propagation characteristics of the spectrum set aside for cellular service. In other words, if the characteristics of the spectrum were more robust, fewer towers and repeaters would be necessary. While analog cell phone service is being phased out in the United States (as of February 18, 2008, cellular phone companies will not be required to support analog service), most cell phone use in the United States is based on dated technology.[27] Advanced digital Internet protocols make possible voice, data, and video communications over mobile networks. Third-Generation or 3G broadband has been deployed effectively in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and other countries, but the United States lags behind.[28]

Policymakers are placing a great deal of hope that the planned FCC auction of the spectrum to be abandoned by analog television broadcasters will allow the United States to catch up in wireless broadband. The FCC will allocate 24 MHz of that spectrum to auction a license for a public safety network, and will allow the licensee to lease 12 MHz of that spectrum to commercial users—when it is not being used for public safety.

The goal of this policy is to allow a licensee to generate revenue to support the development of a national wireless broadband network. A variety of participants in the proceeding to determine the rules for the auction of this spectrum proposed coupling the commercial lease to a requirement of open access. The focus of these proposals is to encourage innovation, a worthy goal and while complementary, spurring innovation should be a secondary goal to public safety.

The danger is that an incumbent may win the license and bend to the very strong business reasons to recoup as much investment as possible from their existing network and outdated technologies and delay the investment in new advanced communications services, despite clear public safety needs. That cannot be allowed to happen.

The creation of a next generation wireless broadband network is an important public policy goal. The public safety benefits of reaching this goal justify significant federal funding to subsidize the development of such a network. One proposal is that the funding of a 3G public safety network could come by redirecting the billions of dollars designated to the federal government’s wireless network project—estimated between $5 billion to $10 billion—and which will only serve a limited number of federal agencies.[29]

The focus, however, should not be on any one technology, but rather on the full funding of a public safety network that utilizes wired and wireless infrastructure. The establishment of a public safety network can serve as a strong starting point for the development of a next generation network for commercial purposes. A public safety network, however, should not be held hostage to commercial interests.

Federal allocation of spectrum must be revised to allow for the deployment of advanced wireless technologies. Licenses for all current analog radio and television broadcasting must be revoked by 2008, after which at least 25 percent of this spectrum should be set aside for public safety purposes, and half of the “vacant” spectrum should be reserved for temporary experimental applications with a priority placed on those applications that serve public safety, health care, or educational institutions.

Wi-Fi and Wi-Max

Wi-Fi is a digital wireless communications technology. The brand is owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a consortium of companies that have agreed to a set of interoperable products based on a standard (802.11) set by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Though the Wi-Fi Alliance apparently originally intended the name to mean “Wireless Fidelity,” later statements from the consortium suggest the name is not an acronym or abbreviation.

Wi-Max is an acronym for “Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access.” This was adopted by the Wi-Max Forum in 2001. Wi-Max adheres to the so called IEEE 802.16 standard and allows for higher speed networking across much wider geographic distance than is currently possible with Wi-Fi. Both Wi-Fi and Wi-Max in the United States face the technical challenges of limited spectrum allocation, particularly when compared with Europe.

Preoccupation with these industry concerns largely obscures the needs of public safety and emergency response.

As of mid-2007 there were over 400 counties and municipalities with wireless networks. These networks are used for applications ranging from reading meters to managing traffic and providing Internet access. Most municipalities contract with private companies to build and operate the network, and understandably the private industry is primarily concerned about profit. Therefore, in addition to the technical challenges in the United States, there are substantial difficulties with the business model.

Because of both the technical and business challenges, large-scale municipal wireless projects are flopping in big cities all across the United States. The problems arising in Houston, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are for the most part very similar: the infrastructure (nodes and towers) was not in place, and when private companies were contracted to build the infrastructure, raising public money was difficult. Plans to migrate to public from private service were complicated by the fact that the slower and less reliable Wi-Fi connections are not able to compete effectively against incumbent wired (cable or DSL) Internet providers. As one reporter put it:

This summer was hard on urban Wi-Fi. Exhibit A: the extreme corporate shake-up at Earthlink, one of the biggest names in municipal wireless. In the same few days, the Atlanta-based Internet provider abandoned its much-heralded proposal to build San Francisco’s wireless network, faced a $5 million fine from Houston for missing a contractual deadline in rolling out that city’s network, and announced it would shed some 900 jobs—half of its staff—including the company’s head of municipal Wi-Fi. In St. Louis, a $12 million plan stalled out this summer when AT&T and the city couldn’t untangle an electricity snarl… That plan is on hold indefinitely. With these signs of the industry buckling, Chicago officials backed off their plans to install a city network after failing to reach an agreement with either of the competing wireless providers.[30]

The success stories of municipal Wi-Fi come from small towns. In St. Cloud, Florida, a truly citywide municipal Wi-Fi network exists at no cost to residents. Mountain View, California has a citywide wireless network owned by Google with free service to residents. Both these networks operate over relatively small geographic areas: Mountain View is 14 square miles; St. Cloud is 12 square miles. Of the 400-plus American cities and counties attempting municipal Wi-Fi, most cannot offer it for free. There are currently only 92 cities or towns with active municipal Wi-Fi networks.[31]

The telecommunications industry nonetheless argues that the involvement of municipalities creates unfair competition for private organizations because of their ability to use public assets. The industry also argues that municipal governments do not have the necessary expertise to operate or maintain the technology and anyway should not be “picking winners” in a competition among technological alternatives.[32]

Preoccupation with these industry concerns largely obscures the needs of public safety and emergency response. While neither Wi-Fi nor Wi-Max will address all the communication needs of local communities, the establishment of these systems can help fill in the deployment gaps and assist in providing the important redundancy demands of emergency communication. Fixed microwave wireless communication systems can also help fill in critical gaps.[33] The real problem is the tendency to look for easy answers rather than implement comprehensive solutions that should include Wi-Fi and Wi-Max. Federal leadership is needed to push forward a rationale for public investment that puts a priority on safety and emergency response.

Satellite Broadband

Satellites in geostationary orbit can relay Internet speeds of about 0.5 megabits per second to the user. But satellite broadband typically allows for only 80 kilobits per second from the user. In many rural areas this is a substantial increase over what is typically available. Although Direct TV and a few others have invested in making satellite broadband service a commercial competitor, it suffers from serious competitive disadvantages. Bad weather and sunspot activity can cause unreliable signals and drop-outs. Applications such as virtual private networks and voice over internet protocol, or Internet telephony, are discouraged or unsupported. And most satellite Internet providers abide by a Fair Access Policy, limiting a user’s activity, usually to around 200 megabits per day.

Perhaps the greatest commercial disadvantage, however, may be the delay that results from the 44,000 miles a signal would need to travel from the user to the satellite company. This delay results in a connection latency of 500 to 700 ms, as compared with a latency of 150-200 ms typical for terrestrial Internet service providers.

Still, new technology has decreased the weight and size of satellite antennae and receivers, which combined with computer tracking devices makes it easier to send and locate satellite signals. And perhaps the biggest advantage of satellite broadband, particularly for emergency use, is that it can be established very quickly on a mobile unit that can avoid an attack or be rushed to the scene of a natural disaster. Fixed towers and telecommunications conduits necessary for wired or terrestrial wireless services are much more vulnerable to attack or natural disasters.[34]

All these communications technologies—satellite broadband, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max, wireless broadband, power-line communications, and optical fiber networks—are available for local, state, and national government to warn and protect citizens. It is not a matter of choosing one or the other, but intelligently investing in all these technologies and engaging in research to develop more. Government protection of the U.S. telecommunications industry should take the form of ensuring that industry is protected in case of an attack or natural disaster, it should not take the form of protecting industry profit at the expense of national security. America needs a robust communications system for emergencies the nation will surely face in the future.

Where Advanced ICT Infrastructure Should Be Deployed

All government offices, health care centers, primary and secondary schools, military, police and fire, and emergency responders need access to advanced information and communications technology to prepare for and respond effectively to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Federal and state governments may bicker over their relative access to advanced ICT, but there is little disagreement over the need for access. Similarly, while there are disputes on the edges there is a general consensus that police, fire, and emergency responders need this access.

But there are other institutions in this country that require ubiquitous broadband access in order to help our citizens in times of crisis. The remainder of this paper will focus on the importance of providing broadband access to the two most critical sectors of our society—educational and health care institutions.

Health Care Centers

Health care centers face extraordinary burdens during and after emergencies. The victims of natural disasters or other catastrophes require medical attention, as do the emergency responders who risk their lives. The ability to diagnose and monitor patients, to access patient records, and to communicate with pharmacists is increasingly dependent upon reliable communications systems within and beyond the hospital.

The absence of robust and redundant communications systems in our community health care facilities puts at risk not only patients but those who risk their lives to keep the rest of us from having to enter the hospital. In addition, advanced telecommunications systems have proven to be effective in providing access to medical expertise even over great distances.

“Broadband Internet access to hospitals is becoming a critical tool in the delivery of medical services.”

A cardiac patient in a small military hospital in Guam, for example, was able to undergo a life-saving heart operation supervised by an expert doctor located 3,500 miles away at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. The surgery was relatively routine for Dr. Benjamin Berg, who was able to dictate the procedure to a less experienced colleague, monitoring every move and heartbeat with a high-resolution video camera and instant sensor gathering data from the catheter as it was slid carefully into the right chamber of the patient’s heart.

“The real-time information requires a continuous broadband connection,” Berg said. “The delay in the transmission of data about pressure inside the heart would be unacceptable.”[35] Imagine doctors being able to help patients remotely as the health care centers in New York and the Gulf Coast were inundated.[36]

The example cited above of the surgeon in Honolulu supervising an operation in Guam is but one of the remote care practices engaged in by the Veterans Administration system. The VA also works with the Alaska Federal Healthcare Access Network, which links nearly 250 sites including military installations, Alaska Native health facilities, regional hospitals, small village clinics, and state of Alaska public health nursing stations to provide various healthcare services using high-speed broadband services including satellite broadband.

A VA study of a remote monitoring program demonstrated a 40 percent cut in emergency room visits and a 63 percent reduction in hospital admissions. A separate Penn State University study estimated that remote home health monitoring for diabetes patients cut costs for hospital care by 69 percent. According to Jon Linkous of the American Telemedicine Association, “Broadband Internet access to hospitals is becoming a critical tool in the delivery of medical services.”[37]

In addition to providing the communications infrastructure to local health care facilities, it is vital to increase support for both the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control. NIH has long demonstrated its importance in emergency and disaster readiness. One notable program is the University of California, San Diego and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology’s $4 million WIISARD (Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters) project, which is funded by NIH’s National Library of Medicine.

The WIISARD project allowed the San Diego Metropolitan Medical Strike Team to bring together scientists and engineers from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology with local and state police, SWAT, fire, HazMat, and other first responders. In a simulation in 2005, the team was able to test the prototype of a video system that allows medical personnel to view a 3D virtual environment generated by a live video stream.

In another new technology demonstration by the WIISARD project, first responders were provided wireless personal digital assistants, or PDAs, outfitted with software to help them keep track of victims’ locations and triage status, capturing important medical data at the point of triage and transmitted that immediately back to hospitals and a command center using a Wi-Fi network. According to Jacobs School of Engineering computer science and engineering professor Bill Griswold, San Diego’s Metropolitan Medical Strike Team “has realized that law enforcement is an integral part of medical disaster response, and to better coordinate that, they anticipate that technologies like this can be useful in communicating from law enforcement to medical responders without distracting law enforcement from their duties.”

Griswold adds that “we’ve also had some interest from SWAT officials because these technologies would allow SWAT teams to communicate information silently back to their commanders. Currently they have to use hand signals or radios, both of which put them at risk from exposing their positions.” Continued NIH funding to support this work is critical in keeping the nation safe and prepared for emergencies. [38]

Similarly, but on a national scale, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is an essential health care institution in emergencies, particularly in an age of biological weapons and biohazards that spread as a result of natural disasters. Whether it is containing the threat of anthrax or limiting the spread of waterborne human disease, it is essential for the CDC to have effective communications capability in the first hours of an emergency.[39]

Educational Institutions

In 1957 America rested assured of its status as a singular world power, convinced of her superiority on every front after the victory of World War II, after the development and detonation of an atom bomb, and after the resurgence of the economy that followed the Great Depression and allowed the United States to contribute to the rebuilding of Europe. America could finally rest, and rest easy. And then, in October of that year, America’s rest was rudely interrupted by Sputnik.

The Soviet Union’s launch of an orbiting satellite haunted the American dreamscape with the sudden threat of communist missiles raining down from the skies, which sent school children under their desks to duck and cover. The Director of Development for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency at the time, German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, testified before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor:

Modern defense programs…are the most complex and costly, I suppose, in the history of man. Their development involves all the physical sciences, the most advanced technology, abstruse mathematics and new levels of industrial engineering and production. This…require[s] a new kind of soldier, who may one day be memorialized as the man with the slide rule…It is vital to the national interest that we increase the output of scientific and technical personnel.[40]

Sputnik’s wake-up call led directly to the establishment of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which is credited for inventing the Internet. It also led directly to the passage of the 1958 National Defense Education Act. The NDEA allocated approximately $1 billion in funds to supporting research and education in the sciences through 1962.[41] The connection between education and defense could not be clearer.

Of course, educational institutions must have robust communications systems to warn and protect teachers and students. But to focus solely on American schools because they might be targets holding our children, our most valuable assets, would be to miss the lessons of the past. Our schools, whether at the elementary or at the graduate school level, must have the most advanced information technologies available if we are to develop the minds we will need to protect ourselves and find solutions to the various complex challenges in an increasingly complex world.

U.S. students and teachers must have ready access to the most advanced information technologies available. To deny this access because a government investment may challenge the interests of private corporations misses the larger point that not doing so will rob those corporations of the very minds they need to stay competitive. To deny access to this technology may rob the nation of the resources it needs to save itself.

The value of advanced broadband infrastructure is apparent in fields such as astronomy and genomics, but e-learning has barely scratched the surface of its potential.

The importance of making advanced communications technology available to schools and students has been the subject of hundreds of reports over the past 50 years. Information technology leaders in higher education were actively engaged in planning and deploying the networks that led to the formation of what many think of as the original Internet, the NSFnet of the late 1980s, along with successful effort to generate congressional support for scientific and academic networks, leading to the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, and the National LambdaRail effort to build an all-optical, facilities-based network for leading edge science and research.

The value of advanced broadband infrastructure is apparent in fields such as astronomy and genomics, but e-learning has barely scratched the surface of its potential.[42] Students, particularly those who are not living at school, continue to have difficulty accessing broadband service. Undeterred, conservatives in the telecommunications industry continue to attack the Universal Service Fund program established by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and have sought to undermine its effectiveness since its inception.

Yet the effectiveness of this program is undeniable. In 1998, at the beginning of the implementation of the USF program, only 14 percent of public school instructional classrooms were connected to the Internet; as of 2003, classroom Internet access was at 93 percent.

Nearly all public library outlets today are now able to offer some Internet access. Yet in each funding year since 1998, requests for E-Rate discounts vastly exceed the $2.25 billion made available. Despite the clear need and success of Universal Service, the Bush appointees at the FCC have threatened support for the fund by excluding cable companies providing advanced telecommunication services from the requirement of a universal service contribution.

What’s more, in 2004 the FCC suspended the E-Rate program for three months. The ostensible reason: The FCC determined that the Antideficiency Act, which bars federal agencies from obligating funds without adequate cash on hand to cover those obligations, applied to the E-Rate.

The Universal Service Fund subsidizes the schools and libraries, the poor (Lifeline and Link-Up), rural telecommunications services, or telemedicine applications. When the Bush administration limits contributions and stalls funding it is heading in exactly the wrong direction. All Americans should have access to advanced telecommunications services whether they are poor, living in high-cost rural or urban areas, or living on fixed incomes.

Citizens remain our first line of defense and response in a natural disaster. If Americans are not connected, deployment will make little difference. USF support for advanced telecommunications services are clearly needed if all Americans are to be connected. A renewed commitment and a national broadband policy that puts universal access at the top of the list are past due.

Conclusion

The United States needs to move forward in a coherent fashion to deploy advanced telecommunications infrastructure, but not because we want to be number one. We have vulnerabilities at home that need to be addressed with some urgency. The possibilities resulting from the synthesis of powerful networks, computers, and databases has been the subject of a variety of blue ribbon panels, most notably the U.S. National Science Foundation report on cyberinfrastructure in 2003.[43] Five years later another panel is in order, with recommendations ready for a new administration and a new Congress.

The first work of such a panel should be to get accurate information on the deployment and capability of the various communications networks now operating in the United States. This paper has discussed a range of basic principles to meet the ends of national security and response to natural disasters. Those principles include

• Robust networks capable of symmetrical speeds of 10 Gbps
• Redundancy
• Interoperability
• Network neutrality

We have a wide-range of technologies available to communicate effectively. We should not choose between satellite broadband, Wi-Fi and Wi-Max, wireless broadband, power-line communications, and optical fiber networks—all of these technologies should be invested in along with new developing technologies to protect our defense and emergency needs at home. In addition, because our citizens are our first line of defense or response, the nation needs to make a commitment to universal service regarding advanced telecommunications services for all Americans.

As President Eisenhower said in 1955, “Our nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods.” Our dependence on communications systems makes them more critical now than ever before. And as the nation pulled together and committed to the development of highways, satellites, and schools to win the Cold War, we must pull together now.

Mark Lloyd is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Notes

[1] “Promoting Innovation and Competitiveness, President Bush’s Technology Agenda,” available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/technology/economic_policy200404/chap4.html

[2] Mark Lloyd, “Raise the Bar on Broadband” (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2007),” available at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/07/broadband.html; and “Assessing Broadband in America: OECD and ITIF Broadband Rankings,” April 24, 2007, available at http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=57

[3] Leila Abboud, “How France Became A Leader in Offering Faster Broadband,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2006, available at http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114351413029509718-W1Q0hKioxsOdZ1Bs_6RCB7hQiBg_20070328.html; “Successful Broadband Program Completed Ahead of Schedule,” Bell Canada Enterprises, June 29, 2006, available at http://www.bce.ca/en/news/releases/aliant/2006/06/29/73706.html.

[4] CNN transcript of Vice President Al Gore’s remarks, Dec. 14, 1992, at the Little Rock Economic Summit, in a conversation with AT&T CEO Robert Allen; also cited in Charles Lewis, et al, The Buying of the President (New York: Avon Books, 1996), pp. 61-65.

[5] Testimony of Craig E. Moffett, Vice President and Senior Analyst- Sanford C. Bernstein and Co., LLC, Before the Subcommittee on Communications, United States Senate, March 14, 2006, available at http://commerce.senate.gov/pdf/moffett-031406.pdf (Craig Moffet of Bernstein Research writes “In 60% of the country, there are simply no new networks on the horizon, and the existing infrastructure from the telcos—DSL running at speeds of just 1.5Mbs or so—simply won’t be adequate to be considered “broadband” in five years or so.”)

[6] Richard F. Weingroff, “Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System,” U.S.Department of Transportation-Federal Highway Administration, Summer 1996, Vol. 60: No. 1, available at http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/summer96/p96su10.htm.

[7] The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “9-11 Commission Report,” July 22, 2004, “The inability to communicate was a critical element at the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Somerset County, Pennsylvania, crash sites, where multiple agencies and multiple jurisdictions responded. The occurrence of this problem at three very different sites is strong evidence that compatible and adequate communications among public safety organizations at the local, state, and federal levels remains an important problem,” available at http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch12.htm. See also “Recommendations of the Independent Panel Reviewing the Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Communications Networks,” June 8, 2007, available at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-07-107A1.doc; “U.S. not ‘well-prepared’ for terrorism,” CNN, December 5, 2005 at http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/04/911.commission/index.html9/11; Panel to issue report critical of federal security response: 9/11 Commission report card at http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2005/images/12/05/2005-12-05_report.pdf; Declan McCullagh, “Homeland Security flunks cybersecurity prep test,” CNET News.com, May 26, 2005, (http://news.com.com/Homeland+Security+flunks+cybersecurity+prep+test/2100-7348_3-5722227.html) (Agency’s lackluster efforts to guard against Internet attacks may leave the U.S. “unprepared” for emergencies, federal auditors say.); Eric Lipton, “Efforts by Coast Guard For Security Fall Short,” The New York Times, NYT, December 30, 2006, available at http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F40710FF3D540C738FDDAB0994DE404482 (“The communications, boat tracking and surveillance equipment rarely lives up to its promised capacity; for the largest systems, work is far behind schedule and over budget. Unlike the relatively unified command over the nation’s skies, control of the waterways and coasts is divided among at least 15 federal agencies, which sometimes act more like rivals than partners.”).

[8] Statement of Adam D. Thierer before Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, April 8, 2004 at http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-at040428.html.

[9] The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Ibid., at http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch12.htm (“The attacks on 9/11 demonstrated that even the most robust emergency response capabilities can be overwhelmed if an attack is large enough. Team-work, collaboration, and cooperation at an incident site are critical to a successful response. Key decision-makers who are represented at the incident command level help to ensure an effective response, the efficient use of resources, and responder safety. Regular joint training at all levels is, moreover, essential to ensuring close coordination during an actual incident. Recommendation: Emergency response agencies nationwide should adopt the Incident Command System (ICS).When multiple agencies or multiple jurisdictions are involved, they should adopt a unified command.”).

[10] National Cooperative Highway Research Program, “The Interstate and National Highway System–A Brief History and Lessons Learned,” June 13, 2006 at http://www.interstate50th.org/docs/techmemo1.pdf.

[11] National Communications System, “Background and History of the NCS,” at http://www.ncs.gov/about.html.

[12] David C. Walsh, “Inter-Agency Communications Systems Remain Uncoordinated,” National Defense, January 2006, at http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2006/jan/inter-agency.htm.

[13] Bruce Meyerson, “Katrina Rescuers Improvise Communications,” Associated Press, September 2, 2005 at http://www.iridium.com/about/press/pdf/1-16197134_Eprint.pdf.

[14] John Eggerton, “Katrina Spotlights Spectrum Issue,” Broadcasting & Cable, September 2, 2005, available at http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6253687?display=Breaking+News&referral=SUPP.

[15] See Timothy Roemer comments “Lessons of Katrina: Critical Infrastructure, Preparedness and Homeland Security” Center for American Progress conference at http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/katrina%20infra%20conference%20transcripts.pdf.

[16] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, “DHS Releases Nationwide Interoperable Communications Assessment,” January 3, 2007, available at http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1167843848098.shtm.

[17] Jessica Seid, “Too early to hang up on Verizon?,” CNN/Money Stock Spotlight, October 21, 2005 at http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/21/markets/spotlight/spotlight_vz/index.htm.
”The entire telecom industry has taken a hit this year but Baby Bell Verizon Communications has really taken it on the chin. Shares of the New York-based telecommunications giant have tumbled 28 percent this year, making Verizon (Research) the second worst performing stock in the Dow industrials. But investors are also worried about high capital spending as Verizon gets set to launch its own video service to better compete against cable.”

[18] Michael Morisy, “Can AT&T’s VDSL compete in a fiber world?,” Telecom.com, Oct. 9, 2007 at http://searchtelecom.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid103_gci1275983,00.html.

[19] Cisco Systems Incorporated, “County Government Capitalizes on Network to Improve Public Safety and Quality of Life,” at http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/gov/CS_ArlingtonCounty.pdf.

[20] Annie Lindstrom, “Is BPL Gaining Momentum- Again?” XChangeMag.com, December 27, 2006, at http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/501/6ch201042153728.html.

[21] UPLC Deployment Map, UPLC.org, Accessed September 27, 2007.

[22] BPL Today, “Oncor (TXU) BPL deployment passes 108,000 customers,” BPLToday.com, September 25, 2007, at http://www.bpltoday.com/members/1236.cfm.

[23] Wayne Rash, “FCC Supports Broadband Over Powerlines,” EWeek.com, August 3, 2006, available at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1998647,00.asp.

[24] FCC, “FCC Classifies Broadband Over Power Line-Enabled Internet Access as ‘Information Service.” news release, November 3, 2006, available at http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-268331A1.doc.

[25] Annie Lindstrom, “Is BPL Gaining Momentum- Again?” XChangeMag.com, December 27, 2006, available at http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/501/6ch201042153728.html.

[26] Li Yuan, “Why You Still Can’t Hear Me Now,” The Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2005 available at http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2005/06/13/sections/business/business/article_556623.php; Sarmad Ali, “The 10 Biggest Problems With Wireless and How to Fix Them,” The Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2006, available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116120231104396746.html.

[27] FCC Consumer Advisory, Analog-to-Digital Transition for Wireless Telephone Service at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/analogcellphone.html.

[28] Ben Charny, “U.S. carriers pick up the 3G pace,” ZDNet News, Mar 22, 2004, available at http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5176504.html.

[29] The CTIA-sponsored roundtable report, “Toward A Next Generation Network for Public Safety Communications,” available at http://www.silicon-flatirons.org/conferences/Hatfield_Weiser_PublicSafetyCommunications.pdf.

[30] Chris Gaylord, “Municipal Wi-Fi Thrives- On a Small Scale,” Christian Science Monitor, September 13, 2007, available at http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0913/p13s01-stct.html.

[31] Muniwireless, available at www.muniwireless.com

[32] Francois Bar and Namkee Park, “Municipal Wi-Fi Networks: The Goals, Practices, and Policy Implications of the U.S. Case,” Communications & Strategies, 61 (1) (2006): 107-125.

[33] “Milpitas, California, Deploys Metro-Scale Wi-Fi Public Safety Network from Tropos Networks,” Business Wire, June 8, 2004, available at http://www.govtech.com/whatsnext/assets/Brochure-Fixed%20Wireless%20for%20Public%20Safety.pdf.

[34] “SIA First Responder’s Guide to Satellite Communications,” Satellite Industry Association, available at http://www.sia.org/guide.pdf.

[35] John Borland and Jim Hu, “A life-saving technology,” CNET News.com, July 26, 2004, available at http://news.com.com/Broadband+A+life-saving+technology/2009-1034_3-5261361.html.

[36] Leonard A. Cole, “Asleep in the E.R,” The New York Times, June 10, 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/opinion/nyregionopinions/10NJcole.html?ex=1188619200&en=433c43e50935adc5&ei=5070; Robert Davis, “Hospitals learn from Katrina,” USA Today, January 23, 2006, available at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-23-katrina-hospitals_x.htm.

[37] “Advancing Healthcare Through Broadband: Opening Up a World of Possibilities,” Internet Innovation, Wednesday, October 24, 2007, available at http://www.internetinnovation.org/tabid/56/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/86/Default.aspx.

[38] “UCSD Researchers Test Wireless Technologies in Simulated Medical Disaster Response Drill,” May 16, 2005, available at http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=384 and http://www.bbwexchange.com/publications/newswires/page546-2252944.asp.

[39] Communicating in the First Hours, available at http://www.bt.cdc.gov/firsthours/overview.asp

[40] “Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor on H.R. 10381, H.R. 10278 (and Similar Bills) Relating to Educational Programs.” (Part 3) United States Government Printing Office: 1958, 1309.

[41] Roger Geiger, “Sputnik and the Academic Revolution” Conference paper from “Federal Support for University Research: Forty Years After the National Defense Education Act & the Establishment of NASA.” available at http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/ndea/geiger.html.

[42] “Broadband America—An Unrealized Vision,” EDUCAUSE, July 2004, available at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/word/NET0409.doc.

[43] NSF Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel, “Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the NSF Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure,” the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, NSF, January 2003, available at http://www.cise.nsf.gov/sci/reports/toc.cfm.