I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 18 through 20 focus on how society, regulators and analysts need to also evolve in a world of the “technology elite”. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.
During the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu blogged, “My job has been to oversee the federal science team—a group of top scientists from the Department of Energy’s national labs, the federal government, and academia, along with outside industry experts. . . .”1
Around the same time, as the U.S. Department of Transportation was investigating multiple occurrences of sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles, it announced it had brought in NASA engineers to help. The NASA charter was to determine “if there are design and implementation vulnerabilities in the Toyota Electronic Throttle Control System Intelligent (ETCS-i) that could cause UAs (unintended accelerations) and whether those vulnerabilities, if substantiated, could realistically occur in consumers’ use of these vehicles.”
Rocket scientists helping on auto investigations, nuclear physicists helping on ocean-based investigations, and a multitude of other specialists helping with rocket science. We saw glimpses of government efficiency and innovation in earlier chapters with the examples of the country of Estonia, the Hillsborough County Tax Collectors Office, and Roosevelt Island. Overall, though, it is becoming clear that technology is stretching the capabilities of regulators. The range of technical skills we need in our regulators becomes very apparent when you look at the 3M Periodic Table we present in the case study with its 46 “technology platforms” from Biotechnology to Optical Communications,
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The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has acknowledged that he would like to see his agency more involved in damage control from any future nuclear disaster. These were comments prompted by criticism of the IAEA’s role in the Fukushima accident after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in early 2011. “The IAEA itself will acknowledge privately that it did not cover itself in glory,” says James Acton, who studies nuclear policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC.8
The Air France 447 crash off the Brazilian coast in 2009 raised a number of regulatory issues. The icing of Thales AA pitot tubes, which help calculate airspeed, had been shown to be a regular problem and yet “Regulators simply asked Airbus to watch the problem and report back in a year.” In our days of streaming TV and music, why do planes still store critical data on old technology called black boxes? In the case of the Air France flight, it took over two years to recover the black box from the bottom of the ocean. As a New York Times article suggested, we should be aiming for at least partial data streaming directly from the plane during events like failure of the autopilot.9
In July 2011, a report by the UK Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) of the UK House of Commons said, “The Government’s over-reliance on large contractors for its IT needs combined with a lack of in-house skills is a ‘recipe for rip-offs.’ The committee found that as a result IT procurement too often resulted in late, over-budget IT systems that are not fit for purpose.”10
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Robert Hoffman has more than two decades of policymaking experience in Washington, including 11 years as a legislative aide and director in the U.S. Senate. He also has more than a decade of experience as a public policy manager and advocate for Oracle Corporation and Cognizant Technology Solutions.
He summarizes trends in technology oversight in Washington:
The U.S. federal government has long struggled with regulating information technology. U.S. state governments and the European Union have become comfortable playing the role of IT consumer advocate, and strictly defining the responsibilities and requirements of IT developers, vendors, and users on how sensitive personal information is stored. For nearly two decades, Washington has hesitated diving so confidently into the IT regulatory pool.
Even when the horror of 9/11 brought even more compelling arguments for tighter government regulation of crypto-products and IT systems, Washington again hesitated. It wasn’t just the threat of a mass exodus of high-technology and high-paying jobs that prompted Washington to hesitate. Legislators and regulators did not have a firm grasp of the technology landscape itself. Sending emails or surfing websites constituted the extent of a legislator’s or regulator’s exposure to technology. Indeed, the most tech-savvy people on Capitol Hill in the 1990s were overwhelmingly the young twentysomethings that wired-up the fledgling client-server operations and programmed the first mobile phones in each congressional office. If there were dominant regulatory arenas that the IT industry had to confront in Washington over the past two decades, they were antitrust and export controls. After all, policymakers may not fully understand technology itself, but they could easily conclude that too much of something in the hands of one or a few, whether that something was soft drinks or software, can’t be good for the U.S. economy. Similarly, they understood state-of-the-art technology may be good for financial institutions, but not foreign terrorists.
Hoffman continues with a focus on today:
So, fast-forward to 2011, and let’s review the key policy and regulatory issues that are on the IT policy agenda: cyber-security, data privacy, data breach reporting requirements, standards for critical infrastructure protection, and Internet neutrality. Today, there is no one federal department or agency that has singular regulatory authority over IT, and those that could assert such authority won’t do so without clear congressional authorization…I don’t see that lasting for much longer. For the next two to three years, regulators and policymakers are likely to achieve more regulatory authority and policy certainty over the IT industry than ever before. True, given the past track record, that won’t be hard, but several fundamental factors are working to create an environment where legislators and regulators will look at IT policy with greater creativity and confidence.
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