Background

Anticipation of new or emerging threats and possible new uses of technological advances that terrorist groups might use against the United States must be an important element of a broad counter-terrorism research program. Furthermore, a critical purpose of any overall national threat assessment and prevention strategy is to either reduce the risks associated with or eliminate the possibility of technological surprise as much as is possible. In some cases, the technological advance, as in cyber areas, may be only a year or even less away, in others one may want to explore scenarios 10 or more years in the future.

Today, rapid advances in computer technology, telecommunications, nanotechnology, specialized materials, and biotechnology promise not only positive advances for commerce but also growing opportunity for emergent threats against the security of our nation as well as against the performance of vulnerable computer systems derived from those advances. In cyber-security, advances with both positive and negative possibilities move at rates as slow as a year or two to as fast as two months. This rapid evolution is often seen as a technology, counter-technology development process.

There is demonstrable national need to provide early assessment and warning of emergent technologies with possible terrorist applications, or that might have vulnerabilities to known threats. Such emergent threats to our increasingly information- and infrastructure-dependent society are, for example, compact devices capable of creating a powerful electromagnetic pulse that could destroy a whole network of computers, or high-power radio frequency interference devices capable of severely disrupting similar networks. The irony of such vulnerabilities is that these EMP/RFI threats are associated with greater sensitivity of today's semiconductor micro-chips as opposed to the more robust, albeit more limited, technology of vacuum tubes of several decades ago. For a host of reasons, as has been noted in national expert reports, our e-systems were at their most secure some 30 years ago.

Similarly, advances in genetic engineering offer not only opportunities for important medical advances, but also potential biological threats of enhanced lethality and even selective lethality against population centers. The end of the Cold War has meant that these weapons of mass casualties, as well as nuclear weapons of mass destruction, may more easily spread to become tools in the terrorist arsenal.

The Institute's Assessment Project

Much of the study of such consequences may depend on intelligence information and access to classified information and, as such, may be most effectively conducted in our national laboratories and other appropriate facilities. However, there may also be a significant contribution that the best and most creative minds from a range of professions and institutions convened in an academic setting can give to this area. The Institute's project will seek to draw upon such intellectual resources to develop and effectively integrate that contribution with the overall national effort of terrorist threat reduction, as well as to provide additional direction to the Institute's own efforts in other areas.

The Institute's evolving emergent threats assessment project will convene leading national experts from across a wide spectrum of technological disciplines and experience in order to provide a continuing alert on such vulnerabilities. In line with that purpose, the Institute plans to conduct a series of state-of-the-art conferences and workshops focusing on emergent threat assessment in electronic and cyberspace disciplines and, as appropriate and effective, in other areas as well. The resultant alerts will take several different forms. In most cases they will be conveyed appropriately to law enforcement, first responders, and other governmental entities. In others they may take the form of written reports with specific recommendations as well as widely circulated executive summaries. The threats assessment project may also develop an interactive web site as an active part of each conference's development.