Moving forward

By Scott Kirsner

I have been trying to puzzle out what last week's terrorist attack means for the business and technology communities in Boston.

First, and most important: We will miss the vibrant presence and the creative contributions of the people who, in the normal course of conducting business, boarded planes last Tuesday morning and didn't return. Colleagues can be nearly as close as family, and employees who can look across their offices today and see empty desks won't forget the people who once occupied them.

It's tempting to look to new technologies as a way to prevent similar crimes from being committed in the future -- systems that scan and sniff baggage, or match passengers' faces or fingerprints to databases of wanted criminals. But technology won't be a panacea. Better trained, better paid humans will be required for airport security, and they'll need more latitude to interview passengers.

"High-tech solutions may be part of the answer," says Jessica Stern, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who teaches a course on terrorism, but ideally they'll be systems that "minimize infringements of civil liberties."

Richard M. Smith, chief technology officer of the Privacy Foundation, is concerned that people might be too eager to cede their civil liberties in the aftermath of last week's events, and he worries about a terrorist's ability to work around even the most expensive high-tech systems. We have X-ray machines for carry-ons and checked baggage, Smith observes, and that only causes terrorists to use knives in their plots, instead of more easily detectable guns.

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But Smith, one of the tech world's most zealous protectors of individual privacy, says he "wouldn't be surprised" to see systems implemented that might scan a passenger's driver's license upon check-in and compare the information and photo to a central database. "It would disturb me," he says, "but . . . I want safe transportation, too."

Jerry Brady, chief technology officer of the Waltham data security company Guardent, is thinking along similar lines as Smith. He points out that credit card companies have gotten very good at analyzing large volumes of information and applying sophisticated models to determine when it's likely that someone has stolen your Amex card and is on a spending spree in Paris.

"I've got to believe that eventually you'll start seeing airlines applying some of the same models the financial community uses to find anomalies," Brady says. "You'll see more extensive analysis -- taking all the data you have and analyzing it -- to find out when something shady is going on."

Our enemies in this new war are dispersed and distributed, making them extremely hard to strike back at. People like Simson Garfinkel, a Cambridge-based entrepreneur and author, wonders why our infrastructure isn't similarly distributed.

"Centralization of activity leaves us open to these sorts of attacks," Garfinkel says. "Government shouldn't be centered in Washington, D.C. There shouldn't be a single world headquarters there for the Pentagon, or in New York for [private] companies. We can use technology to support decentralization."

Garfinkel and others I spoke with said that one danger in responding to last week's attack is to focus too much on guarding against terrorists who might use similar weapons and strategies in the future. They point out that all sorts of destructive technologies are becoming democratized -- including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, as well as techniques to execute cyber-attacks -- and that once we've beefed up security in our airports, terrorists will simply resort to other approaches.

"We've just seen an attack that required considerable technological skill," says Jerry Brady, referring to the terrorists who apparently learned to fly large airliners. "It would not be a great leap for these people to learn a bit about networks, a bit about security . . . [and their] next attack could be altering FAA systems to make planes crash into each other, or altering control systems for nuclear power plants. There are plenty of other targets that you can get at [in a cyber-attack] without having to risk people going across borders or hijacking planes -- and maybe leave less evidence."

Chris Wysopal, the director of research and development at @stake, a Cambridge data security firm, underscores the possibility of information warfare being used to achieve a different kind of destruction. "It's clear that the next attack isn't going to be exactly the same," Wysopal says.

He observes that while companies in the energy, transportation, financial services, and telecommunications field have become more alert to the threat of hackers and computer viruses over the past five years, they are still not cognizant enough of the dangers of cyber-terrorism. "These are for-profit businesses that have their own interests," Wysopal says. "They worry about teenage hackers, but not cyber-terrorism. It's off the chart."

But others say that it's unlikely that terrorists will resort to information warfare any time soon. They accuse data security companies of using scare tactics to generate business, and say it's unrealistic to talk about terrorists using remote terminals to switch off the lights in major cities.

"When I hear all these scenarios, I think they're trading on people's ignorance," says Smith. "I don't think that most computers that control important systems are . . . connected to the Internet. You could shut down 911 pretty easily [by deluging it with incoming calls], but I don't worry about power systems and ATMs and the FAA. It's just not plausible."

Then there are the more personal after-effects of last week's attack.

Doug Levin, the chief operating officer of MessageMachines, a Boston software company, was on board an American Airlines plane destined for San Francisco at 9 a.m. Tuesday. It could've easily been one of the planes the terrorists chose. The plane didn't take off, though; when Levin returned to the gate, he called his wife on his cellphone and learned what had happened in New York and Washington.

"I'm past the age where I could pick up a gun [and join the armed forces], although I'd love to," Levin says. "I'm angry, and there's only one way I can direct my anger, and that is to work my ass off, to support my employees and protect my family, to try to build a company and do something of value." Levin says he was very moved last week when he began to receive e-mails with American flags appended to the bottom of the message.

A local group of angel investors -- CommonAngels -- was conducting its monthly meeting at the Four Seasons last Tuesday morning. The investors were listening to presentations from companies seeking investment. When news started trickling in about the attacks, James Geshwiler, the managing director of CommonAngels, weighed whether he should stop the meeting or not. He opted not to.

"If we stop, that's giving in to the people who have done this, and part of their goal is to disrupt American business and our normal activities," Geshwiler says, explaining his thinking at the time. Later, the group learned that Peter Hanson, the vice president of sales at TimeTrade, a Waltham company that CommonAngels had invested in earlier, had died on United's flight 175, along with his wife and 2-year-old daughter.

The events of last week shifted the collective consciousness of the business and technology worlds away from their own trials -- raising money, cutting costs, signing new customers. The focus, for the moment at least, is on the nation, on the humanity of the people we work with every day, on the connections between us.

"Before, people used to be thinking `what's in it for me' all the time," Geshwiler says. Last week, that changed. "I got e-mails from all our other [portfolio] companies asking, `Is there anything we can do to help TimeTrade or Peter Hanson's family?' " Geshwiler says.

An essay that Forrester Research founder George Colony posted last week to the Forrester Web site surprised me. Usually, Colony offers his views on technological changes. This time, though, it was a rumination on grieving. Colony's in-laws died in the 1999 Egypt Air crash; the president of his company, Bill Bluestein, fell victim to a fatal heart attack over the Labor Day weekend; and Danny Lewin, a cofounder of Akamai Technologies who died last week on American Flight 11, worked just next door to Forrester.

"Reach out," Colony advised. "Holding hands or putting an arm over someone's shoulder can be highly cathartic in the right context." There is, thankfully, a lot of that going around right now.

This region may well produce technologies that help make travel more secure, detect chemical or biological agents before they spread, and protect our critical infrastructures from cyber-terrorists. Defense contractors like Raytheon (which lost four employees last week) may supply systems that aid our armed forces in exacting retribution.

By moving forward with our businesses and our lives, we can all exact a little retribution of our own, proving that our abilities to create and innovate are much more powerful than the destructive abilities of a gang of lawless lunatics.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.