Let me start with a brief story.
The Biggest Guy flew back from Virginia yesterday, and because I’m a cheap bastard, his flight took him through three airports and two airlines (thanks Orbitz!!). When I picked him up, of course his bag was nowhere to be seen.
So we walked over to the United Airlines baggage office, and walked up to the counter where three bored-looking, seemingly inattentive staff members waited. We got Angela, who took the information, and noted that the bag didn’t seem to exist in their computer system, and then walked away.
I put myself into ‘deal with hostile bureaucracy’ mode, and waited for her to come back, with the ‘we can’t find it, it’s not our problem’ response, and readied myself for a painful escalation up the bureaucracy.
Instead, she came back, said that she’d confirmed that the bag hadn’t made the Chicago-LA flight, and that it was probably with US Air. But she’d called US Air, hadn’t been able to get to the baggage desk, had called the front desk, and a supervisor was headed over to the baggage office. She had us fill out a form, and said she’d stay on it and make sure the bag was chased down; United would take responsibility and they’d see that it was delivered to my house.
And this morning, it’s in our house, sitting in the foyer.
And the reason is that the person responsible for dealing with the customer had the initiative and flexibility to pick up the phone and chase something across airlines, rather than explain ‘not in our system, never got on our plane’, which is what I expected.
One approach to the War on Terrorism is to built giant formally structured security systems, backed by massive, centralized technology, and as the complex, ‘wicked’ world keeps asking questions the system can’t ask, add pages and pages to the three-ring binders of regulations and policies the minimum-wage front-line employees must follow. You can hire and retain them based on their ability to follow the rules, even when it means taking the wire clippers away from a uniformed Special Forces soldier—who has his mouth wired shut because he’s wounded, and needs the cutters to cut the wires in the event he has to throw up. Or who want to take away the Congressional Medal of Honor from an 80-year old man flying to give a speech at the Air Force Academy.
It will involve a massive investment in machines that will be rushed into production and still be obsolete long before we have finished paying for them.
I obviously don’t think much of this model in this application. I think it is based on old, Taylorian models in which you attempt to break the process into a finite series of discrete steps, and train the human portions of the system in performing these exact steps as precisely and efficiently as possible. It also removes the necessity for any kind of judgment or expertise on the part of the employee.
I’ll suggest that there is an alternative model, based on the kind of flexible, adaptive model I am talking about here.
One of the benefits of doing this in public and slowly is that sometimes people finish your thoughts for you.
Bill Whittle, another Angelino, first slagged me – ‘My God, man! What color is the sky on the strange planet where you live?’ and then made my blogging weekend. (The non-blogging part was made over dim sum by my sons, fiancée, brother and mom) I can’t imagine a better feeling from doing this – well, I could get paid – than to trigger a perfect expression of one an idea you’re struggling with in someone else.

Rather than issuing today’s color of anxiety warning, how much better would it be to offer some realistic training and intelligence to normal citizens so that the defenses are everywhere. If United 93 taught us anything, it’s that the American sense of self-reliance, determination, courage and patriotism has not been bred out of us after all. We are the white blood cells. Remember that pilot who told his passengers a few days after 9/11 that once the cabin doors were shut, no one could help us but ourselves, so get to know the person sitting next to you? That is exactly the kind of mindset I am talking about.
I’m a little short on time here, but I feel that you don’t fight a nanobot invasion with the Great Wall of China.
Okay, so I’m starving and metaphorically challenged at the moment. But that is to say that a monolithic Office of Homeland Security is ill-suited to defend against such low-signature infiltrations. What we really need is a system as decentralized and flexible as Al Qaeda’s, one that is so diffuse and interwoven into the American fabric that it can detect intrusions much as an immune system can. Such a network of private citizens could then call in the airstrikes (FBI, etc) when they get a solid hit on the detection network. Furthermore, it seems that such a diffuse, low-power system would be far less prone to abuses since the amount of power concentrated would be small.
I am NOT talking about armbanded Nazis who previously sat on Condominium Associations being deputized to snoop on neighbors. God knows that China has shown what a horror these neighborhood snitches can be. But surely raising the awareness of the public and inculcating a spirit of action when a threat is detected could do us nothing but good.
-Bill Whittle, via email

I doubt that I could say it better. ‘you don’t fight a nanobot invasion with the Great Wall of China’.
So what does this mean? We need to find models that rely on the intelligence and abilities of the Angelas of the world. She didn’t let me down, and it is the folks like her…not remote administrators creating inflexible policies…who have the best chance of defending us.
Next, I’ll talk about how a ‘liberal’ set of policies could work in the same ways, and over the next week, I’ll try and make concrete policy and tactical suggestions.