The terrorist strike on Sept. 11 made us realize how much we depend on technology in our daily lives -- either because it knocked it out, or because we turned to our cell phones and our computers in droves to find out what was happening. But did that one day change technology itself?

Recently, David Stonehouse interviewed internationally recognized information technology (IT) consultant Edward Yourdon, author of the book Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11 from his office in New York to find out.

Q: How has Sept. 11 affected actual technology itself, or our use of it?
A: I don't know whether it has changed the technology itself. It certainly has pumped a lot more government research and development funding into security-related things surveillance-related things, and funding for computer technology. A few months ago, for example, the FBI announced that it was reorganizing partly because of all the lapses and the mistakes that they made, and they put out this big 10-point plan about their priorities for the coming years. As you'd expect, terrorism and stuff like that were at the top. Interestingly, No. 3 on their list was technology. This certainly doesn't come down to the level of the individual citizen, but certainly governments all over the world are realizing that in order to deal with terrorism, they have to provide much more funding for the kind of technology that all law enforcement agencies need, and they have to spend an awful lot more money helping these various agencies coordinate and integrate their information.

Q: Has it affected technologies like Web conferencing, for example? Are we using that more to avoid traveling or cut costs because of the economic downturn that followed?
A: Sept. 11 served as a catalyst to accelerate a trend that was already in place. Even before Sept. 11, some of us were facing up to increased costs and just the general hassle associated with business travel. That has been occurring at pretty much the same time that more and more companies have been getting access to the kinds of high-speed Internet mechanisms that they need -- broadband -- for videoconferencing. We do have statistics in the United States indicating that not only is travel in general down, but business travel for conferences and so on has dropped significantly. It is a combination of the economy and the dot-com collapse, but Sept. 11, I think, was the real catalyst.

Similarly, along the same theme that you have been mentioning is one of the immediate reactions after Sept. 11. Why on earth do we have to put 40,000 people in a big fat office building anyway? This whole notion of a centralized, headquartered work environment has come into question so that the trend towards telecommuting, which had already been under way for the last 20 years, got a big boost suddenly. All of a sudden, there is this horrendous big event that, first of all, makes a lot of employees less willing to travel into places that they perceive to be dangerous, whether it is New York or some other urban place. It was also enough of a shock to some of the corporate bureaucrats that they began to say, "You know what? Maybe we ought to allow some of these folks to work at home or some sort of regional workplace supported by videoconferencing and so on."

Q: What about a global positioning system (GPS)? There are companies out now making GPS’ inside devices that children wear so parents know where their kids are at all times. Are we going to see more of this kind of thing?
A: There has been more of a tendency by companies to use GPS to track what they consider to be valuable assets whether it is their trucks, ships, or whatever. At the level of individual assets, you are right. There are devices that you can put around your kids' ankle or neck or whatever. I think a much more fundamental thing -- at least that we have seen here in New York -- is the realization that if there is an unanticipated disruptive event, it would be great as a parent to know that at this very minute, your kid is located at such and such precise geographical location. However, that is not enough for you to be able to communicate with your kid and say, "Get the hell out of there, and come home."

For example, here in New York, the sale of cell phones shot sky-high right after Sept. 11 because parents realized their kids were in school, but they didn't really know where they were, or their spouse worked in another office. One of the statistics I put into the book that still astounds me is that on Sept. 11 itself, America Online transmitted 750 million instant messages because the phone lines were down and e-mail was too slow. Instant messages turned out to be the thing that everybody relied on. Now, as you know, you can do that sort of text messaging on your cell phone as well.

Q: What about biometrics? A lot of the focus now post-Sept. 11 is on developing security technologies, including better biometrics systems for security and for surveillance. Is that going to trickle down to individual use? IBM, I notice, has some fingerprint security systems for its laptops now.
A: I don't think you are going to see it, at least in any widespread fashion, down at the level of personal technology. There is a bit of recognition at the home or individual citizen level on a slightly different area. The realization is that more and more of us are attached to the Internet at home through cable modems and other high-speed Internet connections, which we are now beginning to realize, makes us more vulnerable to cyberattacks.

What the average citizen doesn't realize is that it may have far more profound consequences than just some hacker simply deleting your hard files. It can be used to create what some of us are calling zombie armies or network armies to facilitate massive attacks on banks and government agencies or whatever. Again, this doesn't involve biometric stuff necessarily, but simply the realization that if I am going to have my home computer turned on 24 hours a day and connected to the Internet, I really ought to get a firewall so that some hacker doesn't come in and take over my machine and redirect my machine so that it begins launching some of these denial-of-service attacks against some government Web site or whatever.

Q: A lot of the push for better surveillance technology seems to have shunted aside privacy concerns that dominated the surveillance arena before Sept. 11. Do you think we are going to see a resurgence of privacy concerns as some of these new and better surveillance technologies take hold, or are people still going to be more concerned with security?
A: I don't know I would go so far to say privacy concerns have evaporated, but certainly there were some lobbying efforts being made by certain politicians to protect privacy that evaporated because how could you stand up after Sept. 11 and argue we shouldn't be able to get the information to find these terrorists? I do think it will swing back the other way at some point, either because of a gradual decrease in concern about terrorism -- if nothing bad happens in the next year or two, we will gradually start to become annoyed that the government is collecting whatever information it is getting -- or, far more likely, there will be some sort of mischievous misuse of what ought to be sensitive and private information on the part of some government agency.