Rock climbing and the world of information: technologist Carl Ledbetter to headline SLA's Annual Conference in Nashville - Ledbetter Interview; Special Libraries Association - Interview

Information Outlook, Feb, 2004 by Suzi Hayes

Suzi Hayes: It's very nice to meet you. We're really looking forward to having you as our keynote speaker.

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Carl Ledbetter: It's good to meet you also. I'm really looking forward to the talk. I'm sure it will be a lot of fun; it's a great audience for this theme.

SH: We have quite a variety of people, from the new people to the very experienced, and people who work in the arts as well as people who work in technology, so it's a wide-ranging audience. I have a couple of questions I wanted to ask, and we'll see where that leads the conversation.

I recently read an article on leadership lessons of a rock climber. I know that you recently did a presentation where you arrived by rappelling down a rock wall, and I was wondering whether you did that just to get people's attention or if there were some message as part of that?

CL: It is a way to get people's attention. I am a climber, and a U.S. Mountain Guides certified lead climber. But there is an aspect of climbing that has sort of a tangential touch on what I talk about in technology. I'm a technologist at heart, and there's a lot of technology and technique in rock climbing, as there is in some of the other things that I do in my professional life. But what is important about those subjects, both rock climbing and the technology topics we're going to talk about during my speech, is what is interesting to a far larger audience of people than those who are expert in the technology components of either. Rappelling down a rock wall is a dramatic way to capture attention at the beginning in order to segue over to discussing the technology that allows it to happen safely.

SH: Would you elaborate on that a little bit?

CL: Well, certainly, with respect to what I was hoping to talk about in front of the SLA. There are a lot of people who think the issues that surround the Internet, or more generally networks beyond even the Internet, and the security and privacy issues that are associated with networks are extremely difficult technically. The complexities of networking involve all kinds of stuff down to very, very delicate issues having to do even with physics at the optical layer of the network, and continuing up into very abstruse mathematical theorems on things such as encryption technologies and the problems that swirl around security and privacy.

But as a technologist, what I'm always at pains to tell people is that although technology is important in making things work, it's almost never the thing that drives us toward what we're doing. And it's almost never the answer--or at least not the complete answer--to the question of how we control the technologies that we're creating.

By that I mean that the issues that surround security and privacy on networks, although they do have technical components, are essentially public policy problems. We have to decide what we want the technology to do in order to make the things that we do with that technology acceptable to us sociologically, politically, legally, and in a lot of other ways. And on those other grounds, there are a large number of people besides technologists who ought to be involved in the discussion. In fact, probably in most instances, it's those other groups who should lead the discussion and control the outcome.

The problem we face here is due to what C. P. Snow called the two cultures, where technologists, on the one hand, and people who are not in technology, on the other, have a hard time talking effectively to each other about these issues. One of the things that I try very hard to do is to make sure that I bridge that gap. So whether it's doing a Rubik's Cube on stage or rappelling down a rock wall, what I'm attempting to do is illustrate that these technology issues are things that you can touch, even if you don't understand the specific science that underlies them.

SH: That's interesting, because those of us who are in the library and information profession also feel that it's our job to bridge the gap.

CL: You bet. In fact, that's why I'm so interested to be able to do this talk in front of your group. I think library professionals are literally at the forefront of where all of these issues come together.

SH: We think so too. Getting the attention of all of the powers that be is the hard part.

CL: Yes, absolutely. And by the way, that "getting the attention of the powers that be" will be part of what I talk about during my speech. For instance, I have a sort of funny and dramatic but also a difficult and cautionary story to tell about testifying in front of the joint House-Senate Committee on Science and Technology back in the early 1990s. Al Gore was the chairman of the committee at the time, so it was before he became Vice President in '93.

I testified to them about existing U.S. laws that prohibited, for instance, the export by the U.S. computer industry of certain mathematical algorithms in software, what are called strong encryption technologies. The U.S. at the time actually classified the export of those strong encryption technologies in the same law and by the same mechanism that it controlled the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And yet, from a conference room on the Hill in the capital of the United States, I downloaded, imported, software that would have been illegal for anyone in the U.S. to export, from the website of a high school kid from Czechoslovakia (and it was still Czechoslovakia at the time). What I was pointing out to them is that it was trivially easy for me--or anyone else anywhere in the world--to get this technology over the Net from an 18-year-old in Eastern Europe, and yet it would be illegal--in fact, it would be a serious felony--for me to export it from the United States, even to mail it back to where it had come from, which was a pretty absurd situation.