As I See It: The Next Job Wave

by Victor Rozek

There are always jobs available to people who don't care how they earn their money or what kind of world they are laboring to fashion. Pimps do OK, so do sweat shop owners, so do arms dealers. Conscience alone is an unreliable brake on the economic engine. So when George Carlin says it's about what you'll do for a dollar, and what you'll do with a dollar, he means that we make economic choices and that those choices have consequences. For IT professionals unconcerned with consequences, job opportunities abound in the great American surveillance society.

The creeping surveillance state found its legs at the intersection of technology and tragedy. Data mining advances and the availability of cheap storage had, for some time, made it viable to capture and manipulate vast amounts of decentralized data. The attack on the Twin Towers provided the excuse to centralize it and unleashed an aggressive crusade to root out electronic secrets by knowing everything it was possible to know about everyone.

"Total Information Awareness" was the concept suggested by former admiral, national security advisor, and five-count felon John Poindexter, (conviction later overturned on a technicality). The idea was to fuse information resident in intelligence databases with the data from public and commercial databases. Add pattern recognition software, stir, and voila, everyone suddenly has an "information signature" that will supposedly allow astute analysts to differentiate the bad guys from the good. Well, apparently too many good guys objected to federal intrusion into their private business, so "Total Information Awareness" morphed into "Terrorist Information Awareness," and the project proceeded much as it had before.

The government, however, soon realized that even with its formidable spying capability, there was a great deal of information it did not possess, nor could it legally gather. Data-massing efforts were historically focused on foreign targets. Domestic surveillance was regulated by the courts and therefore required the annoying preamble of probable cause.

But no such restrictions existed in the private sector. Corporations could gather whatever information they wished about their clients or prospective clients. And those who didn't have the in-house capability to collect their own data could purchase it from firms whose sole function was trafficking in personal information. After 9/11, the government became another customer, trading in its court-sanctioned one-rod fishing expeditions for drift nets.

One of the companies the government turned to is ChoicePoint, an unauthorized collector of private information. It boasts a database of over 10 billion records and sells information to some 35 government agencies and about 400 of the nation's Fortune 1000. Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland called ChoicePoint "the world's largest private intelligence operation." Intelligence, in this instance, is a relative term since the company recently announced it was socially-engineered out of personal records belonging to 145,000 unsuspecting Americans.

But in terms of job opportunity, companies like ChoicePoint may be the future of the domestic IT industry. Presently, it has over 3,500 people who work in 52 locations in 26 states, so if you want a job collecting information on your fellow citizens, opportunities abound at ChoicePoint--providing your personal file checks out.

But the opportunities don't end there. The Government Accounting Office reports that there are nearly 200 data mining projects either planned or currently being implemented by a variety of federal agencies. Internet transmissions, credit card purchases, magazine subscriptions, academic records, bank account activity, medical records, prescriptions, airline travel, telephone records, and basically anything else that computers track or store is now just so much flotsam to be scooped up the fed's electronic trawlers.

IT professionals with data base management and data mining expertise, who can extract the threatening grain of sand from mountains of meaningless digital dunes, will be highly sought after and generously compensated.

Another career opportunity in the great American surveillance society is in the field of identification. The government is financing billions of dollars of private-sector research into a wide range of biometric technologies that will make anonymity all but impossible. Already, surveillance cameras are an accepted part of our lives. Traffic cameras, ATM cameras, and the rash of little black lenses that dot the ceilings of most offices and retail businesses. On any given day, just going about your normal business, your activities will be captured on film a dozen times or more.

But what if you're looking for one specific face among thousands? IT professionals are needed to create the algorithms, write the software, and construct the neural networks that will recognize one face out of many, identify people from afar by gait, and manage the retinal scans and electronic finger print identifications that will soon replace the picture ID everywhere IDs are required.

The government is also stimulating IT activity within the private sector by imposing new security and reporting requirements. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, for example, wants universities to update their computer networks so they can turn over data on foreign students in an encrypted format. Alas, some universities have resisted, apparently unmoved by the great job opportunities of which they are depriving their IT staffs. Likewise, airlines have been asked to share travel itineraries and, as we know, even libraries have been pressured to share the reading habits of their patrons. Software developers stand to profit from all of this activity since there is a big emphasis on commercial, off-the-shelf solutions in government security contracts and literally hundreds of companies are developing them.

What's next? Biometric passports and identification cards are a real possibility. As reported on NBC News, they were tested in Fallujah, where returning residents were forced to either be finger-printed or take a retinal scan and carry an ID card, or risk being shot. Can't happen here? Perhaps, but it's curious that ChoicePoint has its own DNA laboratory. Now why do you think a private company that collects personal identification data would need a DNA lab? No matter. Think of the opportunities manufacturing, selling, installing, and maintaining millions of biometric readers, all hooked to a network of computers that dutifully track our comings and goings and report them to private information brokers who will then pass them on to our government. Jobs, jobs, jobs.

In an interview with the Linux Journal, author Richard Thieme said: "The convergence of enabling technologies of intrusion, interception, and panoptic reach, combined with a sense of urgency about doing counter-terror . . . has created a dire but often invisible set of threatening conditions."

As the next job wave swells inevitably towards shore, IT professionals will have to decide whether or not they want to ride it. By the time the wave gets big enough to swallow everything and everyone on shore, it will be too late.

And should we awaken a generation from now, our precious freedoms eroded, and ask how the hell did this happen? The answer, as it always is, will be: One decision at a time.