Summary Remarks by David Guston

Three Proposals for Connecting S&T and Security in the New Environment

The question of how- in the context of the new security policy - to manage the interaction between science and technology (S&T) on one hand and decision making on the other reflects similar questions in fields related to knowledge and action.

Among the various ways of framing the issue is through the following anecdote: Several months ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was awarded the New York Times quote of the day for the way he referred to what information about Iraq's development of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons the United States possessed. Secretary Rumsfeld identified three categories: the known knowns, for example, the information inspectors had uncovered and verified about the extent of such programs; the known unknowns, that is, the suspicions about what was potentially going on based on inferences from what was know; and the unknown unknowns, that is, what remained entirely concealed about Iraq's capabilities in the production, weaponizing, and delivery of such weapons.

Rumsfeld is obviously constructing a two-by-two matrix, but he excludes one of the cells. The category of unknown knowns might appear to be a logical impossibility - something that is known cannot logically be unknown as well. This appearance, however, is based on the premise that knowledge is universal and decontextualized. It is knowledge as portrayed by information theory or neo-classical economics, moving without friction or loss among a large set of idealized minds.

But knowledge is not so ethereal. Knowledge has contexts, locations, tacit dimensions, and specific embodiments. The unknown known is just this kind of knowledge, situated in local or particular contexts but not yet widely appreciated or available to people who could put it to best use. An essential part of our task is contemplating the creation of channels, networks, or other mechanisms, institutions, or policies for converting the unknown knowns about science, technology, and security, into known knowns (while, at the same time - as Lewis Branscomb emphasizes - not making some information too well-known so that it informs people who would abuse it).

In asking what kind of connections need to exist between (and among) the political and scientific communities in order to have the right kind of benefits, and avoid the worse consequences, of the new proximity of S&T and security, we need to recognize that we have a meta-problem of unknown knowns. There are a number of local, national, and international institutions that can serve as models for the kind of exchange or connections that need to exist, but they obviously need to be modified to take into account the demands of the new environment. We in fact know a great deal about how to engage in self-conscious design of new institutions (or new increments to old institutions) for S&T and security, but putting that knowledge into the right decision contexts is a challenge.

The suggestions below will be based on four premises. The first is that the confrontation between democratic institutions and terrorism will be a long-term affair. Even if the specific contemporary threat disappears, there will be other threats, internal and external, in the future. The second is that the federal government, constitutionally charged with providing for the common defense, will furnish the largest share of resources to confront the challenge of terrorism. These resources importantly include the knowledge generated by federal investments in scientific research, particularly the three-fifths of all federal R&D expenditures provided to universities, government labs, university-operated FFRDCs, and other non-profit organizations. Third, the population of first responders and state and local decision makers is critical to support. Not only do they have a great deal of responsibility in the federal system in the sense that the health and safety of great numbers of people may depend on their specific competencies, but in many instances their health and safety depends on it as well. Fourth, these state and local officials and first responders have tacit knowledge about their informational, material, organizational, and technological needs that are not (and cannot be) anticipated by other, distant actors.

The structure of these premises is akin to the structure of the problem of unknown knowns in other domains. For example, agricultural production is a long-term problem, solutions to which can be offered by the knowledge generated by research conducted in land-grant universities. But the problem is ultimately grounded in the competencies of farmers who have tacit knowledge about their particular situation that the university scientists likely do not have.

The organizational solution to this problem has been agricultural extension, a process of active mediation and collaboration between traditionally conceived knowledge producers and knowledge users. I write "traditionally conceived" because the collaboration is based on local knowledge that the "users" possess, and thus the collaboration results in the "co-production" of knowledge-based innovations that benefits both parties. Researchers based in land-grant institutions benefit from access to real data and opportunities and from seeing their research reduced to practice. Farmers benefit from knowledge-based innovations that incorporate their particular needs, and the mediators - extension agents - benefit from their successful facilitation of the co-production. Although there are important criticisms of the environmental consequences of the industrialized farming that agricultural extension has in part fostered, there is little dispute about the levels of productivity it has spurred.

The century-long success of agricultural extension has more recently inspired the organization of manufacturing extension, in which the federal government teams up with states to provide local, knowledge-based assistance to small manufacturing enterprises. In a similar fashion, the federal government and states could team up to provide knowledge-based assistance to all manner of private and public institutions for the purpose of security in the new environment. A "Homeland Security Extension Service" would help connect the traditionally conceived users of security services with the producers of innovations, helping make such innovations more easily deployable through co-production, and thereby improving the security of places of business, hospitals, universities, libraries, state and local government offices, and other institutions that might not be well-protected against moderately sophisticated terrorists.

A second recommendation would take further advantage of publicly generated knowledge resources, particularly those at federal laboratories, which exist in most states and which have a clearly defined missions to respond to national needs and to engage in technology transfer. A "Homeland Security Cooperative Exchange and Fellowship Program" would allow for greater interaction of knowledgeable individuals from federal labs and local and state governments. State public health officials, for example, could receive fellowships for training in computer simulations at federal laboratories, and government scientists could similarly be funded for experience with local officials and first responders that would inform their research efforts. Not only would such an arrangement return some of the prior sense of technology transfer - which included transfer to state and local governments in addition to commercial entities - to the mission of the federal labs, but it would also provide greater opportunities for the labs to respond to their external environment and engage in more market-like behavior without being caught in commercialization.

A third recommendation concerns the problem of rendering unknown knowns known to the right people but keeping them unknown to the wrong people. Inquiries into security and vulnerabilities since September 11, such as that by the National Academy of Science, have confronted popular concern for, and engaged in active protection against, the creation and dissemination of knowledge that may be turned against society by terrorists. There have been proposals that faculty at individual institutions engage in security-motivated review of the research performed there for its possible appropriation by terrorists. The experience of human subjects research and research integrity, however, demonstrates that this type of institutional-based self-regulation does not work well enough without some federal role in overseeing and coordinating the activity. The federal government could thus undertake an effort to spur the creation of locally based offices for anti-terrorism technology assessment, roughly based on the current models of human subjects protection and research integrity. Local committees would not censor work, but they would advise researchers at any and all stages of their work about how to secure their laboratories and research materials and how best to communicate their research results without increasing the risk of misappropriation. They could also be a focus of decision making about whether to engage in high-risk research, e.g., recombinant DNA research with pathogens, and they could help identify research that could have potential terrorist applications before the researchers themselves, or the terrorists, know.

These three suggestions - the potentially large-scale Homeland Security Extension Service and the relatively modest Homeland Security Cooperative Exchange and Fellowship Program and the offices for anti-terrorist technology assessment - could contribute a great deal to the critical connections between S&T and security sought in the new environment. They could also go further to create inter-sectoral, interdisciplinary, and other cross-cutting bonds, that is, social capital, that terrorists often seek to destroy.