I had the unique opportunity on Wednesday day to have dinner with Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism adviser to the past for the past four US presidents and current member of PGP Corporation’s Business Advisory Board. I had thought this was going to be part of a rather large and informal gathering as part of Richard Clarke’s speech at the Commonwealth Club, but instead it turned out to be a small gathering (about two dozen people in total, including PGP creator Phil Zimmermann and famed Silicon Valley marketer Bill Cleary) at Postrio to celebrate Richard’s new book, The Scorpion’s Gate, where everyone got a chance to sit with Richard and chat.
I’d had a recent experience that I thought would provide an interesting topic of discussion with Richard. On our recent vacation in Hawaii, Ashley and I had the unfortunate bad luck to end up sitting down at a table at Benihana stuck between a very nice young military couple at one end of the table, and a Vietnam-veteran Marine and his wife at the other. The Vietnam-vet opened the meal on a bad note (“So, who here is a Republican and who here is a Democrat?”) and just went downhill from there. The vet quickly sniffed out that I was soft on unilateral military action (“Freedom isn’t free!”), but graciously allowed me to have an opinion he didn’t like (“You can say that because guys like this fight to protect your right to free speech”). I thought this was an especially curious opinion to have, especially in light of the fact that the greatest threat to citizens’ rights these days seem to be originating from their fellow citizens and their own government, not terrorists or militant foreign governments.
I asked Richard how he felt it was possible for the government to diffuse both the external and internal threats to our civil liberties, especially given that the root cause of these threats (non traditional, distributed militant terrorists) that were promoting these behaviors could only be solved on a timeline that outlived any given legislator’s term in office. From his point of view, the only way to effectively combat these threats over the long term was to have lifelong civil servants in government capable of working on initiatives that could diffuse these threats across the boundaries of legislative terms. The unfortunate problem with that solution is, according to Richard, that 50% of the government will soon be eligible to retire and there are fewer university graduates choosing to enter the civil service. This problem is compounded by the fact that most civil servants, especially those working within Washington DC and the surrounding area, are poorly paid. This offers little incentives to graduates to forgo a career in the private sector, and will only prolong these threats.
On a lighter topic, Richard later revealed that he had been somewhat bewildered that people on the street recognized him. He’d been especially amused when a taxi driver in New York had turned to him and asked him, “Aren’t you Richard Clarke?” – the taxi driver was from Equatorial Guinea. I thought this was kind of funny, especially given the increasing prevalence of digital cameras, photo-sharing sites, and other distributed media. The world’s getting smaller – why would Richard Clarke not expect people to recognize him when he’d been on TV repeatedly, as well as at the center of a particular widely publicized condemnation of the government’s failure to prevent 9/11? Who needs to be worried about a centralized Big Brother, when we’re all willing to play Little Brother against each other?