After 9/11: Wiring Networks for Security and Liberty

As part of the English Department’s Transcriptions Project, directed by my colleague Alan Liu, I’ve joined with other faculty and grad students in teaching our students to use their core abilities to read and write so as to build web-pages that link their work to the resources and communities available through the World Wide Web. The events of 9/11 have dealt a powerful shock to this project. It is forcing us to ask difficult new questions about the utility and dangers of intelligent networks and the global communication of information. My talk this morning will seek to do three things: first, understand how the attacks on 9/11, and the subsequent anthrax attacks, have succeeded in compromising our networks; second, suggest how early American communication networks played a central role in winning American independence from the British Imperial system. Finally, I will end this talk by arguing that 9/11 should not mean that we reconfigure American networks by bartering away our liberty in the name of security. Instead, in the wake of 9/11, we should think through ways to make our networks more secure by making them more robust, more extensive, and more intelligent. http://dc-mrg.english.ucsb.edu/committee/warner/Liberty.Security.911.htm...