PASADENA, California - Government may appear to be left in the dust when it comes to high-tech issues like the ongoing encryption controversy. But perhaps that's no great surprise given the glacial pace at which government workers adopt new technologies.
"We need a GPS [global positioning system] to find out where we are and where we are going in regards to technology," A. Peter Kezirian Jr., general counsel for California's Department of Corporations, said at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Futurist Conference. Government employees have to make do "with Soviet-style pagers," he said.
While government has clearly been out-gunned in keeping up with technology, it can still can be effective in detecting fraud that employs high-technology devices. Kezirian said his department catches people often because the technology they are using draws attention to them.
People committing fraud "usually do the technology stuff really well," Kezirian said. "We don't catch them because they make the mistakes on the tech side. It's their technological capacity that raises their visibility." Financial scams and phony stock exchange markets are among the things investigators in California look out for.
At the California Department of Corporations, staff monitor the Internet. "We're probably the only state that has an effective Internet surveillance unit that has more catches than even the SEC, in terms of what they do," Kezirian said.
The industry does a good job letting government know what it needs in terms of intellectual property rights. The problem, said Kezirian, is that industry needs to do a better job educating government about the "dark side" of new technology.
Later, at a conference lunch, Robert A. Cochran, chief of staff for Congressman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, said one member of Congress who will be key in making upcoming decisions about encryption laws coming out of Washington still has his secretary type his daily schedule on an old Selectric II typewriter.
Cochran said older members of Congress are the least advanced technologically, but that as younger politicians are elected, the level of sophistication in Washington is changing.
