Matthew Burton

The below essay appeared in The Guardian on January 26, 2010, in advance of Apple’s public announcement of the iPad.

On Wednesday, Apple is expected to unveil a product that will be, among other things, a competitor to Amazon’s Kindle. That will be a crucial test for Apple, and for society. If the company lives up to its reputation for revolutionizing media, this new product and its successors will one day replace physical books. The test for Apple is in whether they try to control what we read. The test for society is whether we let them.…

In the coming weeks, O’Reilly Media will publish Open Government, a collection of new essays on how technology can make DC more transparent and efficient. Today, O’Reilly released a preview (PDF) of the book that features the first eight chapters. My chapter is included; its entire text is below.

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The federal government should fire me. Like the thousands of other contractors who develop software for government agencies, I am slow, overpaid, and out of touch with the needs of my customers. And I’m keeping the government from innovating.

In recent years, the government has become almost completely dependent upon contractors for information technology (IT). So deep is this dependency that the government has found itself in a position that may shock those in the tech industry: it has no programmers of its own; code is almost entirely outsourced. Government leaders clearly consider IT an ancillary function that can be offloaded for someone else to worry about.

But they should worry. Because while they were pushing the responsibility for IT into the margins, the role of IT became increasingly central to every agency’s business. Computing might have been ancillary 20 years ago, when the only computers were the mainframes in the basement.…

UPDATE: Given the events of the past day, I feel it’s worth referring back to my post from last February in which I discuss how intelligence failures are normally dealt with, and propose a more common sense solution. BRIDGE, the program I discuss below, would have provided a model for doing some of the things I recommended.

Back in October, the Director of National Intelligence killed a program called BRIDGE. (I’ve written about BRIDGE before.) As such a vocal advocate of BRIDGE with a financial interest in its success, my bias is clear, but for whatever that biased opinion is worth, BRIDGE’s death was the biggest government IT failure of 2009.

The cause of BRIDGE’s death is the most frustrating aspect of it, and it’s a reminder of what makes government innovation so logistically difficult: BRIDGE wasn’t deemed a failure or a waste or a PR risk. Technically, it wasn’t even killed; it was just put on ice. Following the presidential transition, new priorities were made at the top levels of the bureaucracy. These priorities had nothing to do with BRIDGE in particular, or any other tech-related goals. BRIDGE just got lost in the shuffle along with countless other programs that deserve attention.…

Around this time yesterday, I, along with countless others, tried to bring down the Web sites of Iran’s information and justice ministries, and state-sponsored media outlets. The idea was to silence the pro-Ahmadenijad, anti-dissent messages coming from these outlets, and in so doing, strengthen the opposition protests in Tehran.

You didn’t have to be computer smart to take part: a developer in San Francisco had set up a push-button tool that would, upon your click, immediately start bombarding 10 Web sites with requests. I clicked Start, and in the 10 little boxes below, I could see the pages load and reload. About half of them were already down.

This was exhilarating. The goal was to promote democracy, and I could actually watch as it happened. Empowering.

But there’s more to it than that. I’m conflicted about the virtue of this idea. I’m still trying to sort out my thoughts about what happened, but I know that we will be talking about yesterday morning for years to come. We turned our collective power and outrage into a serious weapon that we could use at our will, without ever having to feel the consequences. Network warfare became available to the general public. That is frightening.…

For comments, see the original post on Personal Democracy Forum.

In the aftermath of Thursday’s virtual White House town hall, most of us in the tech-politics arena have been pondering one question: How do we improve upon this system to create a better virtual democracy experience? The conversation usually comes back to the problem exemplified by the marijuana questions, which were far and away the most popular questions asked of the president. Some thoughts:

To the tech-politics gurus bemoaning the marijuana questions:

“The marijuana people” did not “game” the system. They didn’t “sabotage” it. They didn’t get advanced notice. There is no (public) evidence of astroturfing or systems exploitation. They played fair. “Sabotage” is shouting from the back of a room during a Senate testimony. All these people did was show up at the polls. It’s the same thing you and I do every other November: they voted. If that’s sabotage, then senior citizens are incredibly cunning saboteurs. It’s fine to look for better ways of building this system. But stop equating fervent yet fair participation with cheating. I see the marijuana questions as a huge success, in two regards.

First, people participated. Yes, marijuana was #1 and #2 in the energy category, and this was caused by disproportionate enthusiasm for Open For Questions.…

The below is a chapter I wrote for Threats In the Age of Obama (Amazon), recently published by Nimble Books. The book is divided into two portions: one set of chapters on future threats, and another set on ideas for dealing with them. My chapter–in the latter section–focused on information technology solutions.

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What is the perfect information technology solution to coming national security threats?

There isn’t one solution to multiple threats. Rather than searching for a single solution, our national security community should adapt its IT procurement strategy to develop many solutions, each addressing a specific threat at the lowest possible cost.

The existing strategy is as follows: after being caught off guard by an unforeseen crisis–a terrorist attack, an outbreak of violence, a surprise nuclear test–we reflect on our failure and identify a single cause. Maybe we didn’t have enough information. Maybe we had too much information and couldn’t sort through it all. Or maybe we had the right information but we didn’t collaborate.

After pinpointing the cause we spend years–and tens of millions of dollars–trying to develop a handful of Perfect Software Tools to remedy the deficiency. Much of that time and money is spent on procurement bureaucracy: the first line of code is written after months of identifying requirements, issuing RFPs, waiting for bids, and awarding contracts.…

The Washington, DC government just procured 47 Web-based tools in 30 days.

That’s gotta be a record, because government software procurement is a nightmare. For a single piece of software, it probably takes 30 days just to write the RFP–Request for Proposals, a document that explains what the government wants and how much they’ll pay for it.

Once the RFP is announced, government contractors spend the next few months submitting their bids, before the government at long last chooses a winner. It’s already been several months, and not a single line of code has been written. The winning contractor delivers the final product a year or two later. (Oh, yeah: even if the product stinks and nobody ever uses it, the contractor keeps the money–your money.)

So what government contractor is responsible for this unprecedented success in DC? None. The DC Chief Technology Officer (Vivek Kundra) simply opened its data catalog and asked the general public to have at it. One month later, the DC government has dozens of new mashups and mapping tools for city transportation, tourism, law enforcement, and public safety. The CTO estimated that the normal contracting process would have taken up to two years.

This is phenomenal, but it’s not the best part.…

The below was written with large organizations in mind. If you’re a techie, most of it will be old news, but you might find the intelligence stuff interesting. There’s also a PRINTABLE PDF version.

Recently, I was a panelist at the Director of National Intelligence’s Open Source Conference. The title of my panel was “Young Analysts Talk About the Value of Open Source.” The intelligence field’s definition of “open source” is different from what you might think: all it means is “information derived from public sources”: newspaper articles, television broadcasts, Web sites, etc.

To outsiders, it might seem odd to have a conference about this: doesn’t everyone understand the value of information? But when your desk has piles of secrets stolen from the enemy, it’s understandably difficult to spend time reading about things the whole world already knows. And because those secrets are transmitted over private, physically impenetrable networks, the Web isn’t available at everyone’s desk. So the Intelligence Community is slow to realize the power of publicly available information in anticipating threats.

Judging by the product booths in the exhibit hall, the conference revolved around helping analysts navigate the Web, and harnessing Web content en masse so that it can be delivered to analysts on a non-Web network.…

Three years ago, when I told a mentor from the tech sector that I was soon leaving my job as an intelligence analyst to start a technology Masters program, she replied, “It’s good that you’re getting out of that field.”

She didn’t like the Intelligence Community’s work, and in her eyes, the longer I stayed, the more it would corrupt me. I’ve always thought of it in reverse: the longer I stayed involved, the more opportunities I would have to change it. Afterall, if you want something to get better, should you entrust the job to those who caused the problem in the first place? Or should you take care of the problem yourself? To me, it’s a pretty simple question. (That’s why I still work with the Intelligence Community as an outside consultant.)

Unfortunately, among my colleagues—fellow politicos and geeks who are trying to reform the U.S. Government—my mentor’s philosophy seems to be more popular than mine. It’s a philosophy that won’t get us very far. By not engaging our government directly, and instead choosing to merely blog about it from afar, we are surrendering the most important, most influential roles to the very people we want to get rid of.…

Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident recently sponsored an essay contest:

When the Framers met in Philadelphia in 1787, they bravely conjured a new form of self-government. But they couldn’t have imagined a mass society with instantaneous, many-to-many communications or many of the other innovations of modernity. So, replacing that quill pen with a mouse, imagine that you have to power to redesign American democracy for the Internet Age. What would you do?

Below is my blue sky response, which was selected for publication. You can order the whole book from Amazon.

NOTE: The first three paragraphs below were inserted post-publication and do not appear in the printed version.

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Richard Feyman—possibly the most brilliant physicist of his generation—once said that “nobody really understands quantum physics.”

We’ve had the Web for 16 years, and I think I can safely say that nobody really understands it, either. Sometimes we think we do, but then it surprises us with something new. We know a lot about what it’s done so far, but none of us know what lies ahead.

In spite of this, here we are, proposing Constitutional changes based on our elementary knowledge of the Web. Such changes would become obsolescent as quickly as the Web churns out new surprises.…