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

What struck me as I was going through all of that is what motivates me now to be interested in helping to translate between the public policy and technical worlds: The people in that conference room that day, mostly congressmen and senators and their staffs, were very bright, highly motivated people who were just trying to do the right thing. But they didn't understand what the issues were. They were baffled by this stuff because they didn't understand the technology components well enough to make good public policy decisions.

And, of course, people coming to present their case on this or any other complicated issue with a technical component, no matter which side of the debate they're on, will be making their arguments for reasons having to do with their own interests--and that's not necessarily bad--but whether it is economic interest or whatever else, these advocates will present to decisionmakers diametrically opposite views on what to do, even what is possible technically. It is very hard for the responsible decisionmakers to sort out the technical issues in a way that makes sense to them so that they can come to reasonable conclusions. As long as technology is so inaccessible to such decisionmakers, we as a society are vulnerable to having decisions made that are adverse to our long-term interest. And that's why it is so important to find a way to bridge the gap between the two cultures, to help well-motivated people understand the implications of technology choices for public policy.

Of course, I have positions on most of these issues, some of them pretty strongly held. But I think what is more worrisome to me than the fact that the "powers that be" would institute things that are against the positions I hold--what really scares me--is the fact that they might do so without even understanding what those positions are, or the opposite of them, for that matter. It is so terribly dangerous that people, now that the Net reaches just about everywhere, are still worried about the wrong things technically. For instance, when people talk about computer security, they all too frequently mean something like that they're afraid somebody is going to steal their credit when they make a purchase over the World Wide Web. Well, you're far more likely to have the 19-year-old kid who dropped out of high school two years ago who took your credit card last night at the restaurant steal your identity than you are to have your credit card number stolen on an SSI link over the network. You ought to be worried about some other things if you're using the Internet, things people almost never think about, but which are much more worrisome. Getting people to understand and focus on what the real threats are is important.

It's also very important for people to understand that, although technology can do a lot of things, we may not want to do some of them. Every time you make a choice about what technology should do to make something more secure or more private, or whatever it is, you will be making a trade-off associated with that decision. You simply cannot stop all of the bad stuff, even if you can decide what things are bad, a pretty hard problem in itself, without incurring a cost, in either dollars, effort, or inconvenience. Every time you make something harder to do because you're trying to prevent something bad from happening, you also make harder to do things that you want to have happen, and these choices are very complicated. It's not necessary to understand all about the complications, and particularly about the technologies underlying them, but it is important for the people who make these decisions to understand the consequences of the choices, and those consequences usually have deep technical roots.