Homeland Security as the new Dot.Com
(written October 2005)
By Cliff Feldwick
As someone who refused to get sucked into the explosive world of the “dot-coms” (except for their unfortunate result on my retirement mutual funds – ouch), I felt a certain moral superiority when they imploded some years back. The unhappy result on the economy rippled out, but in most cases those who were not involved in the elaborate air-selling that preceded the crash figured that those caught hell probably deserved it. History has lots of these lessons, going back to the great tulip madness in Holland in the 1600’s. Often what happens is simply a collapse of expectations: enough people wake up and discover that the price of a tulip bulb, or a dot.com stock, has risen to the equivalent of a house on the finest canal in Amsterdam, and simply is not worth it. What really happened was that the mania for truly rare and valuable bulbs (or stocks in Internet firms) had filtered down to the just plain average bulb/stock and inflated its price past rationality. Someone wakes up, says the future is not going to continue on this madness, and bails out, often with a fortune that sends them into retirement at an early age. Later people see this, try to do the same and get hosed. In the aftermath, everyone realizes that a business plan (if one existed) that starts with “Get a lot of money from investors to …” is not great. How did people expect to make money by sending people out on yellow scooters to deliver groceries ordered on the Internet when they had no prior experience or infrastructure? Duh.
Those of us who toiled in the day-to-day world of setting up networks for people to do real work, or dealing with normal problems with computers never got in on the craziness, and could say “What did you expect?” with an air that makes people hate you easily.
All that being said, the increasing emergence of hogs feeding at the homeland security trough makes me similarly nervous.
There are certainly differences, the chief one being that the hogs in this case seem to be the big daddy porkers, who are busy elbowing out (do pigs have elbows?) the little guy. Do a Google search on “homeland security awards” and you’ll find a lot more examples of billion-dollar companies than small start-ups, at least for now. Just the early stage awards to Lockheed Martin for a “High Altitude Airship” (i.e., blimp way up there) would feed most company’s children’s children for decades.
The main common factor, and the one that makes me nervous, is the “no idea is too far out there” syndrome. Another similarity is that things are being presented (skewed) away from their original purposes to meet the new craze. Also, buzzwords rule.
Let’s look at the “too far out” syndrome. Is protecting a water supply of a rural town, or the health of cattle in Kansas a true security measure? Perhaps, but does it pass the “oh, really?” test? Think I’m kidding? Again, fooling around with Google yields a Kansas Legislator’s Briefing Book that includes the info that the Animal Health Department notes “emergency management and bioterorrism defense remains at the forefront of the Department’s mission”. I feel better now.
Along with this come the drastic predictions of what will happen if we don’t do something NOW. All I can say is: remember Y2K? Ever get rid of those cans of stew in the basement? You probably couldn’t even give them away to a food bank in any conscience now. Maybe you could feed them to your dog, but perhaps this is what Kansas means by bioterorrism for animals.
Meanwhile, requests for grants from local governments, as well as proposals from private companies for government business, are being re-written as security measures. Our local police and fire departments are benefiting from funds passed on from Homeland Security folks, since they learned early that proposals directed there with phrases such as “direct responders” worked miracles on availability. Do I begrudge this? Nope, especially since we directly benefit from a better equipped force. I can note, however, that skewing paperwork to this instead of, say, the war on drugs (is that over? Who won?) works well. Remember that Enron had an Internet division. So did everyone. Now everyone has a homeland security division.
Perhaps buzzwords were always the stock-in-trade for large companies seeking government money, but look at this from Lockheed’s website list of Homeland security projects descriptions: “Lockheed Martin has created its Integrated Systems & Solutions (IS&S) business to horizontally integrate system-of-systems, system, and platform solutions into mission capabilities, aligned to the transformational concepts of the 21st century National Security Strategy: battlespace or situational awareness, force application, force protection, command and control, focused logistics, and homeland security.” Well, certainly. We all knew that. I don’t know how they avoided “warfighters”, the absolutely biggest must-use phrase to describe military personnel.
Do I predict a bust in the security industry like we had in dot.coms? Unfortunately, not for a while. Too many people are promoting it for political as well as business reasons, and there certainly is an underlying need for it, just not in the wild and crazy permutations it now is assuming. I just wouldn’t put my 401(k) in it.
Cliff Feldwick is president of Riverside Computer Consultants, and does consulting work as well as day-to-day setups of computers for people who work for a living, when not doing Google searches to back up his rants. He can be reached at 410-880-0171 as well as at cliff@feldwick.com.