A Modest Proposal

Earlier this week, there was a scare in our Nation’s capital, during which the Capitol was evacuated. Specifically, everyone in the Capitol building and the White House was notified to evacuate, instructing them (according to one interview I saw on the television) to "Run, not walk, as far and as fast as you can". Is this really as far as we’ve come since 9/11? In almost four years, our terrorism preparedness can be summed up by the Monty Python movie about the Holy Grail: Run Away!

It is frightening to me that the best we can do to protect the main governing bodies of our country is to make sure that they have new Reeboks and a good time in the Boston Marathon. Let’s face it, if that plane had actually been carrying a terrorist threat (a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon or even just the intent to crash it into the Capitol, the White House or the Supreme Court), by the time the message had gotten to anyone, the threat would have been realized.

It is astounding to me, when airplanes routinely travel at 500 mph, and the Concorde traveled at well over 1000 mph, that the protection for our country’s capital is less than 16 miles of radius around the building. A 747 covers that distance in under 2 minutes. I’m sure we have a greater awareness of the planes in the area, but a plane destined for Washington National or Dulles could get mighty close before there was any indication that anything was wrong.

In the age of instantaneous information transfer, is there really any good reason for a centralized seat of government anymore? Would it not make more sense for our Senators and Representatives to remain in their home territories and meet electronically? You can’t tell me with the huge investment that we’re making in national security, we couldn’t come up with one heck of a networked holographic system, so that it could FEEL almost like business-as-usual.

How much harder would it be for a terrorist group to have to hit 50 states’ US congressional offices than to take out the bulk of our Congress in one fell swoop with a nuke during congressional session? I think Congress (particularly the Senate) is actually a much greater potential for disruption than the President. We’ve had Presidents assassinated before, and the country went on, because there is a clear order of succession. Thus, even if someone were to manage to take out the Pres, the VP and a large part of the Cabinet, there’s a clear, unquestionable awareness of whose hands immediately take up the reins of the governmental bridal, and there’s very little time when the ship of State has no hands on the wheel.

Congress, on the other hand, has no clear line of succession. I’ve done some looking, and the best I can determine, the rules of succession for a Senator or Congressman are determined state by state. That means that while in mere moments after a catastrophic event in our governance we should be able to determine who is the President, it might be weeks or months before we could figure out who now made up the Congress.

Look, Disney World had some pretty impressive holography going on in it’s Haunted House when I visited there as a child, more than a quarter century ago. Tell me we couldn’t set something up whereby people testifying before Congress could get exactly the same experience they get now, minus only the shaking of hands. There would be issues, certainly. One would be how to make sure the network was truly secure when Congress was discussing matters of a top secret nature. Another, how to handle the (comparatively minor) disruption if a terrorist attack took out the network, thus temporarily preventing the congressmen from meeting?

Our country is well set up. An attack on our World Trade Center and our Pentagon (and even our White House, had that part been successful) by terrorists was not even close to sufficient to shake our foundations. But why run the risk, when we clearly have the technology available to protect our country’s core?

(I'm open to counter arguments. This is an idea I've been kicking around for a while now, but as with all radical ideas, there is a good chance I've missed some very important reason why it would not be possible or a good idea, and if they exist, I'd love to hear them!)

Copyright (c) May 15, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net