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16 June 2007

Bits, Bullets, and the Modern State

Interesting op eds in today’s and yesterday’s New York Times, which together highlight that the defining characteristic of the state, the monopoly on the legitimate application of force (bullets), carries little weight in the absence of information as to how to apply that force (bits).

Yesterday’s op ed, "The Laptop is Mightier than the Sword," by Owen and Bing West, discussed the lack of use of information technology by US forces in the Iraq war. Some excerpts:

The war in Iraq would be over in a week if the insurgents wore uniforms. Instead, they hide in plain sight, and Iraqi and American soldiers have no means of checking the true identity and history of anyone they stop.

This is inexcusable. In Vietnam, the mobility of the Vietcong guerrilla forces was eventually crippled by a laborious hamlet-level census completed by hand in 1968. Biometric tracking and databases have since made extraordinary advances, yet our vaunted technical experts have failed at this elementary task in Iraq.

In short, we have been unable to track individuals in Iraq, and this is fundamentally handicapping efforts to control the population.

In the op ed today, there is a piece by the police commissioner of New York City, Raymond Kelly, Washington’s Secret Gun Files, examining the lack of use of information technology in US law enforcement. An excerpt:

When a gun is recovered from a crime scene, the police ask the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to trace the weapon’s provenance. Yet when our officers request the trace data for all gun crimes, the Tiahrt amendment [which Kelly opposes re-authorization of] stops us dead in our tracks — even though this aggregate information would tell us which individuals and dealers are most often involved in buying and selling guns that end up in the hands of criminals.

These two examples highlight the importance of the control and manipulation of information for the state. In fact, much of the impetus for the development of biometrics originally came from the desire of the modern state in the late 19th century to track the identities of individuals in an increasingly mobile society (see Simon Cole’s excellent book on the emergence of biometrics for further details).

The defining governance challenges of the 21st century will almost certainly revolve around bits and not bullets. The state figured out how to deliver overwhelming force vis a vis its citizens long ago; but where and how to apply that force is far more difficult. Within the state, a key part of the information architecture has to do with what in citizens see and report to authorities (see article in yesterday’s Boston Globe on a new text messaging system to get anonymous tips about crime). These mechanisms of social control by themselves have important limits in a mobile society, hence the increasing importance of information technology. Obviously, in a setting such as Iraq, both the social and technical infrastructures for control by the state are severely limited.

These informational challenges multiply in a world where problems often cross jurisdictional boundaries but information does not. One sees this even within the information architectures of the most modern of states (e.g., the US); however, within the global scene problems will hide where the informational architecture is nonexistent.

……………………

I will also take this posting to make a quick pitch for a forthcoming edited volume that Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and I have coming out this Summer that explores this and related issues, Information Technology and Governance: From Electronic Government to Information Government (MIT Press: 2007).

Posted by David Lazer at June 16, 2007 11:36 AM

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