The Evolution Of An Eco-Prophet - Newsweek.com

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Al Gore's views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself.

By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK

Published Oct 31, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Nov 9, 2009

Al Gore steps onto the portico of his century-old white colonial, its stately columns framing him and the black Lab mix, Bojangles, that he and his son rescued from a shelter as a birthday present for Tipper. Dressed in blue jeans and a button-down shirt open at the collar, Gore looks younger than his 61 years: the mountain-man beard he grew in the wake of the Florida recount debacle of 2000 is long gone, and the extra weight, which hung on several more years, is nowhere in evidence. Nor are the trappings of office, unless you count an electronic gate at the bottom of his circular driveway in the wealthy Nashville neighborhood of Belle Meade. When he travels—as he does about one quarter of the time, often to train volunteers to give the slide show that formed the core of An Inconvenient Truth—it is with no more than one aide, and he pulls his own luggage.

Despite the grueling pace, Gore is pumped on this warm October afternoon. I am there to talk about his latest literary project, and he's ready, launching into a house tour that revolves around his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis(printed on 100 percent recycled paper for a savings of 1,513 trees and 126,000 pounds of carbon dioxide; all associated CO2 emissions offset through the CarbonNeutral Co.; all profits to the Alliance for Climate Protection, which he founded in 2006 and to which he donated his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize money). Here in the dining room, he says with a wave, he papered the walls with giant 20- by 23-inch Post-its, covered with his notes. "Stacked on the floor all around the walls were these thick notebooks from the solutions summits," he says with a chuckle. The pool table was conscripted to hold material for more chapters. There was method in the chaos, but just barely. Most books take 12 months to produce from the time the author delivers the manuscript to the publisher; Gore, with two research assistants, was still writing in August, imperiling the Nov. 3 release date.

But Gore, former newspaper reporter that he is, made the deadline. Out on the patio, Gore reminisces about how he wrote. He gathered experts at half a dozen of those solutions summits—unpublicized, invitation-only, and off-the-record—in New York, Nashville, and three other cities beginning in 2007, where he listened to presentations on, among much else, renewable energy, nuclear power, energy efficiency, and the "smart grid." He also "circled back to do in-depth one-on-one interviews" with dozens of scientists and technology experts, picking their brains and getting their latest results. By the end, he says, "I had a 40-page outline, really encyclopedic. There were really about 10 books in there."

And one has absolutely no trouble—none, zero, nil—believing him.

Our Choice is Al Gore at his best and his worst. It is authoritative, exhaustive, reasoned, erudite, and logical, a textbooklike march through solar and wind power, geothermal energy, biofuels, carbon sequestration, nuclear energy, the potential of forests to soak up carbon dioxide, energy efficiency, and the regulatory tangle that impedes the development of a super-efficient, continent-wide system of transmission lines. It is, thank goodness, no "50 things you can do" primer. To the contrary. Although Gore hopes laypeople will exert political pressure for what he calls "large solutions," he told me last week in a call from Cairo, Our Choice reflects the experience of someone who knows that it is lawmakers and business leaders who can implement the "laws and policies we really need, including getting a global climate treaty."

Despite suffering one of history's worst political fates, Gore has by no means given up on politicians. Behind the scenes, he takes calls from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and strategizes with Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry, sponsors of the Senate climate bill. Although he applauds President Obama's speech last week announcing $3.4 billion in stimulus money for work on a smart grid and the Environmental Protection Agency's decision to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions, he falls short of a full-throated endorsement. "I'm optimistic they'll get legislation out of the Senate," he says, "but the jury is still out on the effectiveness of the approach they're taking" on negotiations for a climate treaty, which begin in Copenhagen next month.

To anyone with bad memories of how Gore's fact-filled debate performances against George W. Bush in 2000 failed to connect with voters, it may come as no surprise that Our Choicehas a graphic on "how a wind turbine works," and a long section that begins: "Conventional hydrothermal plants are built according to one of three different designs. The steam can be taken directly through the turbine and then recondensed … " But because of one sentence, and one chapter, it does surprise. The chapter is an astute analysis of the psychological barriers that keep most Americans from taking the threat of climate change seriously, his acknowledgment that emotion, not just reason, drives the decisions people make. The sentence is this: "Simply laying out the facts won't work."

Asked how he reconciles that realization with the wonkish content of the book, Gore at first seems stymied. But then, when I prompt him, he points to pages on the spiritual dimension of climate change, the idea that God gave man stewardship over the earth, and that preserving it for future generations is a sacred obligation. Then he opens his laptop to show a commercial by his Alliance for Climate Protection, in which the Revs. Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson make an odd-couple plea for "taking care of the planet." Gore allows that he's been tailoring the slide-show training he gives to faith-based volunteer groups. "I've done a Christian [-based] training program; I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training program coming up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references. It's probably my favorite version, but I don't use it very often because it can come off as proselytizing."

The book's most significant concession to going beyond "laying out the facts" comes in the final chapter. Here, Gore imagines a future generation asking how we averted catastrophic climate change. He paints a scenario in which the U.S. passed climate legislation this year, a global treaty was negotiated, and the world was "pleasantly surprised that so many of the changes [in energy supply and use] were not only inexpensive but actually profitable," he writes. "We should have known we were capable of coming together in supporting such an urgent cause … With God as our witness, we made mistakes. But then, when hope seemed to fade, we lifted our eyes to the Heavens and saw what we had to do."

Gore comes by his optimism honestly: it reflects the three years of research he did for Our Choice, centered on those summits. Energy experts at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture-capital firm where Gore became a partner in 2007, identified many of the invitees, especially in the business world. For the rest, Gore tapped his decades-old network of climate scientists and renewable-energy buffs, landing what former Department of Energy official Craig Cornelius calls "all the superstars," from the CEO of French nuclear giant Areva to renewables guru Amory Lovins. This, after all, is the man who researched his senior thesis at Harvard, on "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947–1969," by interviewing presidential aides Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Gore assigned each speaker at the summits a half dozen or so questions: Is nuclear power a viable solution? How can new photovoltaic technologies enter the market? He moderated every discussion, and no one remembers him ever glancing at his iPhone during even the most eye-glazing PowerPoint slides ("differentiation of value chain strategies"). Every panel at the New York meetings ran late, recalls Joseph Romm, who oversaw the Department of Energy's renewables program from 1995 to 1998, as Gore asked question after question. "It was a fire hydrant of information," says Romm, and it taught even experts things they didn't know "about the latest technologies and strategies for clean energy." Gore also hosted a reception afterward, where he betrayed no doubt that everyone would find everything as fascinating as he did. "Have Tim tell you all about soil carbon!" he said to one scientist. "Gore bothers to come talk to us," says climatologist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "Most other politicians are too busy: 'Just give us the talking points.' He's the only politician who's interested in the nuts and bolts of the science—and the only one who knows what a hydroxyl radical is."

By all accounts, Gore was open to changing positions he brought to the summits. He originally thought that concentrated solar thermal power, in which the sun heats liquids that then power an electric generator, is superior to photovoltaics, in which sunlight produces electricity directly (PVs are the solar panels sprouting on rooftops these days). But "the PV industry surprised people over the last three years with the speed at which costs dropped," says Cornelius, who is now at Hudson Clean Energy, a private-equity firm. Gore came around. "We are at or near a threshold beyond which photovoltaics will actually have a cost advantage" over concentrated solar as well as fossil fuels, Gore writes. He likes the fact that they can be deployed in small installations—those rooftops—whereas solar thermal projects are immense; he's impressed that the price of photovoltaics is dropping while their efficiency is rising, thanks to new materials and manufacturing techniques. "Photovoltaics are a prime example of where the developmental pathway had a big impact on my conclusions," Gore said at his home last month. "The rate of cost reductions and increases in efficiency for PVs is very impressive. PVs probably overtakes concentrated solar thermal within the next half year."

In the obligatory chapter on wind, he writes that it is cheaper and faster-growing than any other renewable except geothermal, and competitive with fossil fuel in some places and for some uses. (Wind supplies just over 1 percent of U.S. electricity, but the DoE projects that could easily reach 20 percent by 2023.) Gore doesn't try to pick winners, instead taking an "all of the above" approach. He is predictably bullish on efficiency, noting that McKinsey & Co. released a report in July concluding that replacing inefficient motors, windows, and other energy guzzlers with high-efficiency ones could cut U.S. energy use 23 percent by 2023.

So, if efficiency is so great and saves so much money (leave aside the CO2 part), I ask, why don't businesses do it? "You know, I was raised in an Enlightenment-influenced family," Gore says. "Both my parents were such believers in the preeminence of reason, and I still believe all that." Other people, not so much. Gore offers a disquisition on how U.S. utility regulations make it more profitable to waste two thirds of the energy in the fuel they burn than to capture waste heat and make it move electrons. But there is also the irrationality factor, which drives him crazy. In a poll, he says, 80 percent of CEOs and CFOs said they would not spend money to make their factories more efficient and save money in the long run if it hurt their next-quarter bottom line. "That," says Gore, "is functionally insane."

If a good gauge of Gore's enthusiasm for something is how voluble and technical he gets, then you can be sure that he loves biofuels. There is some irony in that, since biofuels were the subject of his worst political mistake on the environment. As vice president, he cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate in 1994 to institute an ambitious federal ethanol program even though, he admits in the book, "there were already ample warnings" that production of corn ethanol is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the gasoline it displaces. But next-generation biofuels are a different story, he says. "The pathway that I think is likely to be the winner is enzymatic hydrolysis, which essentially uses engineered enzymes to break down the cellulose, the lignin, into fermentable compounds that would then yield many more liters per hectare than any of the first-generation ethanol options," Gore tells me. "I think it's going to play a significant role … One of the many advantages of third-generation biofuels is that they can yield fuels like biobutanol that don't have any blending problems. You just burn them directly. Enzymatic hydrolysis, if I can make another point about that: there is no theoretical upper limit to how efficient they can become. So I think there might be some pleasant surprises on enzymatic hydrolysis."

Gore loves plants and soils as only a former farm boy can (well, a summertime farm boy: as a kid he spent the school year in Washington, where his father was a senator). He regales you with numbers: more CO2 is emitted from burning and destroying forests—20 to 23 percent of the annual total—than from all the world's cars and trucks; only by the 1980s did CO2 from fossil fuels overtake that from deforestation, which accounts for 40 percent of the CO2 increase since the 1800s.

The potential for soils to absorb more of the CO2 that our utilities, factories, and vehicles spew poses a dilemma for Gore, one of two where his scientific and political instincts collide. With better management, soils could sequester much more carbon than they do now. The question is how much more. Soils scientist Rattan Lal of Ohio State University was surprised to get a call last summer ("Vice President Gore would like to talk to you") that began, "I have 15 or 20 questions about soils and climate for you." Lal calculates that if more farmers adopted mulching, no-till farming, and the use of cover crops and manure, 3,700 million acres worldwide could sequester 1 gigaton per year of CO2, roughly 12 percent of annual global emissions. Other experts are even more sanguine. "If we feed the biology and manage grasslands appropriately, we could sequester as much carbon as we emit," says Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who presented at two summits. The political clash is this: if you tell people soils can be managed to suck up lots of our carbon emissions, it sounds like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and could decrease what little enthusiasm there is for reducing those emissions—as one of Gore's assistants told LaSalle in asking him to dial down his estimate. (He didn't.)

To his credit, Gore sides with the science, letting the political chips fall where they may. He writes that soils could sequester an additional 15 percent of annual global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. That could cut 50 parts per million of CO2 from the atmosphere over the next 50 years. (We are now at 387, up from 280 before the industrial era, with 450 ppm or even less a dangerous level.) To encourage changes in agriculture that would foster carbon sequestration, Gore advocates moving away from price supports and toward paying farmers for "how much carbon they can put into and keep in their soil," he says. Paying farmers to sequester carbon might jump-start the use of biochar, which Gore calls "one of the most exciting new strategies for restoring carbon to depleted soils, and sequestering significant amounts of CO2." Biochar, which he learned about during a 1989 trip to the Amazon, is basically porous charcoal. Made by burning switch grass, corn husks, and other waste, it can absorb CO2 like a charcoal filter in a cigarette absorbs gases. Gore estimates that biochar could sequester 40 percent of annual CO2 emissions.

The other issue where science could be an inconvenient truth for climate politics is the basic question of what is causing the greenhouse effect. Earlier this year Gore phoned two scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute, which is above the Manhattan coffee shop where the Seinfeld characters hung out. Drew Shindell, Schmidt, and colleagues run state-of-the-art computer calculations on how much various greenhouse gases contribute to global warming. The relative impact of each, they were finding, was different from what simpler models had suggested. As they reported last week in Science—findings that Gore got hold of last spring—methane accounts for about 27 percent of the man-made warming so far, largely because of how it interacts with atmospheric aerosols. Halocarbons have caused 8 percent of the warming; black carbon (sooty emissions from burning wood, dung, and diesel), 12 percent; carbon monoxide and volatile organics, 7 percent—and carbon dioxide, 43 percent.

Depending on your bent, you can append an "only" to that last number. On the one hand, the NASA calculations provide a glimmer of hope. Reducing CO2 emissions strikes at the lifeblood of the global economy—namely fossil fuels, which provide 86.5 percent of the world's energy. But targeting other greenhouse gases is "likely to be much more cost-effective than CO2-only strategies," the NASA team writes in Science. For example, methane emissions could be cut by changing farm practices and by capturing the huge quantities that are flared at oil wells. And "removing one ton of black carbon will have the same [climate] effect as removing 2,000 to 3,000 tons of CO2," says climatologist Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who talked to Gore for hours about it. "The technology is there—you can buy a $250 diesel filter for your Mercedes—and the beauty of black carbon is that if you cut it today, it's gone in a month because rain causes it to fall out. [CO2 stays up for decades.] By going after other greenhouse gases we can buy the planet time, postponing by 30 to 50 years the day when warming exceeds 2 degrees." At 2 degrees, sea-level rise, droughts, floods, and other climate disasters will likely kick in with a vengeance.

On the other hand, the prospect of what Schmidt calls "this low-hanging fruit, which may be bigger than we think," could—like biochar—diminish enthusiasm for cutting CO2. Does that worry Gore? "Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that's still justified," he says on his patio. "But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all" of the greenhouse culprits identified in the NASA study.

Critics will find much to attack in Our Choice, most likely for downplaying the barriers to a low-carbon economy. Gore was pilloried for supposed errors in An Inconvenient Truth. The Web site of one climate skeptic lists 35, but they're points of scientific dispute, such as the extent and timing of sea-level rise. The only outright mistake is in verb tense: Gore says some Pacific islanders "have all had to evacuate to New Zealand" due to sea-level rise, but that is a projection, not a current fact. For Our Choice, he has scientific backing for every chapter, albeit not unanimous backing.

Gore is a canny-enough politician to know that change of this magnitude takes time, and that politics tends to trump science. A new poll by the Pew Research Center found sharp declines in the numbers of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world is warming (57 percent, compared with 71 percent in April 2008), and in how many believe it is because of human activity (36 percent vs. 47 percent). Gore blames this on the boatloads of money the coal and oil industries have spent to muddy the science and confuse the public. (Disclosure: in the book, he praises NEWSWEEK for a 2007 story on greenhouse deniers.) His favorite quote in Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): "The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false."

"You know, the political system is [like climate] also nonlinear," Gore says. "I've been waiting a long time for that tipping point," when politicians and the public recognize the threat of climate change and act to avert it. "But I think we're closer than ever. Reality does have a way of knocking on the door."

Walking back through the house, I ask Gore again whether he believes the sanguine vision of Our Choicewill come to be. He points to solar panels on his roof, and to his driveway, 300 feet beneath which seven geothermal wells gather the planet's warmth to heat and cool his house. "I have to," he says.

Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor and author of The Plastic Mind: New science reveals our extraordinary potential to transform ourselves and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves .

The Geekdom of Google - BusinessWeek

Image by jdlasica via Flickr

Ken Auletta probes the hard-driving personality of the search giant, where the tech mindset is all-pervasive

By Robert D. Hof

Googled:
The End of the World as We Know It
By Ken Auletta
Penguin Press; 384pp.; $27.95

In just the past four years, Google (GOOG) has been profiled in no fewer than six books, from John Battelle's seminal 2005 The Search to Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do? earlier this year to former BusinessWeek correspondent Richard L. Brandt's Inside Larry & Sergey's Brain in late September. Thanks to Ken Auletta's high profile as media columnist for The New Yorker and as the author of eight previous books, his Googled: The End of the World as We Know It is among the most anticipated. And for the most part, Auletta delivers.

Googled provides the most deeply reported look yet at what is perhaps the world's most closely watched company. It chronicles how Google has grown into an advertising powerhouse whose revenues now match those of the five broadcast networks combined—most of this coming from those little four-line text ads that appear next to search results. The book comes at a pivotal time for Google. Despite a recent earnings upswing, it faces an increasing number of challenges. It still has not managed to make much money on its many attempts to move beyond search ads. Moreover, resistance to its widening influence is growing from government regulators and its own customers.

With unprecedented access to the secretive outfit, Auletta interviewed 150 current and former Google employees along with 150 outsiders. The effort shows in the many entertaining details and anecdotes about Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the acutely engineering-focused culture they created, and their growing conflicts with the rest of the media world they're helping to disrupt. One example: Auletta describes how Page couldn't stop staring at his handheld device during a meeting between the founders and mogul Barry Diller. Diller told him to choose between it and their conversation. "I'll do this," Page replied, not raising his eyes. Diller's conclusion: "More than most people, they were wildly self-possessed."

PROFESSED VIRTUE

That meeting captures an essential truth about Google, one that's a central theme of the book: The company is the most concentrated gathering of left-brain types on the planet. Auletta understands that this engineering mindset is both the company's greatest strength and its Achilles' heel.

On the positive side, the co-founders' focus on providing the best possible search technology allowed them to zoom past rivals such as Yahoo! (YHOO) and AOL (TWX), both of which alienated users with their sometimes annoying and ineffective ads. Google uses its mysterious mathematical formulas to give higher play on search results pages to ads that get lots of clicks. It even stops running ads on which nobody clicks, although that means less revenue in the short term. Google's tech mastery means that it now utterly dominates search advertising, with more than 75% of the market.

Google's geeks also question everything, most of all conventional corporate thinking. In what is as much a pointed attempt to lessen management control as it is an employee perk, Google urges engineers to spend 20% of their time on personal projects. The co-founders view their company as being as much a social force as an economic one. In their initial public offering prospectus, the duo said eight times that Google wants to make the world a better place.

But the company's professed virtue can turn too easily to hubris, Auletta notes. Time after time, Google's executives have been surprised by opposition to their actions. The most conspicuous miscue came last year when Google proposed a search ad deal with Yahoo to keep the latter out of Microsoft's (MSFT) clutches. Google seemed shockingly blind to the likelihood that many outsiders—including the Justice Dept., which threatened an antitrust lawsuit before Google backed down—could question the dominant industry leader's motives.

Readers might feel they've already heard much of what's here, and Auletta sheds little new light on Google's impact. The book also occasionally overplays the company's enthusiasm for strictly data-driven decisions. Google's engineers, Auletta writes, "naively believe that most mysteries, including the mysteries of human behavior, are unlocked with data." Yet so far, that belief seems more savvy than naive, and in any case it's not nearly as absolute as Auletta implies; Google uses thousands of human "raters" to help perfect its search results, for instance.

At the same time, Auletta takes Old Media to task for using Google as a "convenient piñata" for their frustrations about the power the Net gives people over their media consumption. Media companies would be better off embracing change, he contends. "If Google is destroying or weakening old business models, it is because the Internet inevitably destroys old ways of doing things," he writes. "It is a wave-generating company that other media companies ride, crash into, or are submerged by." What no one, including Auletta, can yet answer is how long Google can stay atop the waves it is creating.

Elder Care by Remote - BusinessWeek

Image by cactusbones via Flickr

By Arlene Weintraub

For three months early this year, 63-year-old Ronald Lang was one of the most plugged-in patients in America. Lang, who suffers from congestive heart failure and multiple sclerosis, was pilot-testing the Intel (INTC) Health Guide, a device that lets doctors monitor his health remotely. Each day after he woke up, he'd step on a scale and strap on a blood pressure cuff that was attached to the Health Guide. The device collected his vital signs and zapped them to his doctor's office. From there, Nurse Marie DiCola scoured the data, and if she noticed anything amiss, she dialed Lang and chatted with him over Health Guide's videophone.

Health Guide is at the leading edge of a new technology trend called "aging in place," designed to help seniors stay longer where they're most comfortable—at home—rather than having to move into nursing or assisted-living facilities. Aging-in-place equipment is installed in a person's home, monitors symptoms on the spot, and sends reports to doctors or family members in real time.

As 77 million baby boomers race toward their golden years, the world's leading tech innovators are unveiling a range of futuristic gizmos. There are beds that can monitor patients' vital signs as they sleep and stoves that can turn themselves off when owners forget. Besides Intel, the aging-in-place market has attracted companies such as General Electric (GE), Philips Electronics (PHG), Honeywell (HON), Bosch, and dozens of tech startups. The companies say these products, just now being deployed by a handful of health plans and home-care agencies, can drastically cut the rate of medical complications that force seniors into hospitals and other intensive-care facilities.

Health Guide epitomizes the kind of in-home gear that can reduce the hassle factor for patients and clinicians, especially those dealing with chronic but easy-to-monitor diseases. Heart failure patients, for example, must measure their weight and blood pressure frequently because changes in either metric can signal the type of trouble that requires emergency intervention. But distinguishing between a minor setback and a serious situation depends on being able to figure out how the patient is feeling.

In the program Lang was a part of, Nurse DiCola was able to assess symptoms both by talking to patients and examining them visually. She downloaded real-time data for as many as 25 patients every day and spoke to many using Health Guide's videophone. "I could make decisions about treatment," she says. "If they needed to see the doctor, I got them in to see a cardiologist right away." For Lang, desktop access to DiCola was comforting. "I used to have to get dressed, go to the doctor's office, wait, and pay my $10—just for them to take my blood pressure," Lang says. "Then the doctor would say: 'Everything is fine. Take your medicine.'"

Executives at Intel envision a suite of products that can give any house the characteristics of an assisted-living facility, but without the sterile environment many seniors despise. A survey taken late last year by AARP revealed that nearly 80% of baby boomers expect to stay in their homes as they age.

Intel has enlisted a big ally to help position itself in this market. In April, Intel and General Electric announced they would spend $250 million over five years to co-develop products that will help seniors manage chronic conditions from home. As part of the deal, GE will sell the Intel Health Guide. The partnership will give Intel access to monitoring technology, which ultimately could enhance Health Guide's capabilities. GE already has a product, QuietCare, which uses sensors stationed throughout the home to keep an eye on seniors as they go about their day-to-day lives. GE is marketing the product through home health-care companies and to assisted-living facilities. For an individual who wants the system at home, it's not cheap—the cost would be about $70 to $110 per month, depending on the size of the unit and the length of the monitoring agreement.

Amsterdam-based Royal Philips Electronics is also focusing on the aging-in-place market. Since 2006 it has spent $6 billion snapping up home health-care companies, including Lifeline, a maker of personal emergency alert systems that cost subscribers from $35 to $75 per month. Philips also purchased breathing device maker Respironics, as well as Raytel Cardiac Services, a provider of remote cardiac monitoring services. And recently Philips developed the smartBed, which contains tiny, high-tech electronic sensors that can measure patients' vital signs, movement, and breathing as they sleep. (The product is part of a research project and not commercially available.)

As helpful as aging-in-place technology may be, there is one big question yet to be answered: Who is going to pay to put the systems into seniors' homes? "Right now this is a niche market made up of affluent people who want to monitor their parents," says Scott Lundstrom, vice-president for research at IDC Health Insights. "The technology is going nowhere without a reimbursement model that supports it."

Intel and others are trying to convince public and private insurers that it is an investment worth making. During a road show to launch Health Guide, Intel referred to a study published by the Veterans Administration late last year. It found that remote patient monitoring decreased hospital visits significantly—for instance, 20% for diabetes patients and 56% for patients with depression. The technology cost $1,600 per patient per year on average, it reported, as opposed to $77,745 for nursing home care. Intel says it's currently talking with health-care organizations that may provide the full package of service and support directly to consumers. It is also evaluating monthly service programs.

Intel has pilot-tested Health Guide with Aetna and other insurance companies. Lang, who lives in Cypress, Calif., was part of a test conducted by SCAN Health, a nonprofit health plan in California and Arizona. "It became obvious, as we looked at the growth of the aging population and the number of caregivers we had, that relying on an entirely people-based model would be untenable," says Hank Osowski, senior vice-president for corporate development at SCAN. Osowski isn't ready to commit to any specific system, but says remote monitoring will be part of SCAN's model. "We're willing to fund these tools," he says, "because at the end of the day it will result in better [patient] outcomes."

The Return of the House Call - BusinessWeek

Companies eager to cut health-care costs may do well to consider the home doctor visits Microsoft offers

By Michelle Conlin

With health-care reform dominating Washington, policy analysts and benefits experts are looking at every possible cranny to unearth new, futuristic ways to slash costs. Yet one innovation that has captured their imaginations actually comes from the dusty, predigital past. The Obama Administration has been keeping a close eye on Microsoft (MSFT), which, in a bid to slash costs, improve employee health, and even contain potential pandemics such as swine flu, has brought back the old-fashioned doctor's house call for employees. House calls appear in the proposed health-care reform package pending before Congress, and President Barack Obama himself has hailed them as one of the private sector's "terrific innovations."

Microsoft is one of the only, and by far the biggest, employers that is offering such white-glove, concierge-like service to workers. "The program," says CEO Steve Ballmer, "is an example of the importance the company has always put on its people." The Microsoft template doesn't make sense for every company. But for those with big concentrations of employees in densely packed locales—think of the 40,000 Microserfs and their 58,000 dependents in the Puget Sound area alone—the long-term rewards and savings can be substantial.

The Microsoft house call program, called Mobile Medicine, got its start in 2006 after a massive analysis of the company's health-care data. The team discovered that employees, like those at most companies, were using the emergency room mostly for non-life-threatening problems such as ear infections, skeletal bruises, and the flu.

Microsoft was already offering the Maserati of health plans. Employees usually don't pay a dime for a bevy of luxe offerings, including a weight-loss program that comes with personal coaches, behavioral therapists, and private dressing rooms in the gym to avoid locker room embarrassment. The goal behind the comprehensive health bennies is radical prevention: that it is cheaper to attack employees' health problems early rather than allowing them to metastasize into chronic, even costlier diseases.

COMPELLING SAVINGS

After realizing how many employees were using the ER for basic maladies, the company figured there had to be a better and cheaper way of doing business. "We didn't just want to say to people, 'Don't go to the ER,'" says Julie Sheehy, Microsoft's wellness and productivity chief. "We wanted to get at the reasons why they were going to the ER and address those issues."

At the time, a Seattle medical company called Carena was exploring different delivery models for medical care. Carena was already dispatching family doctors for visits on-site at companies including Starwood and Costco (COST). Why not get Carena doctors to make Microsoft house calls?

Today, Carena physicians make some 350 house calls a month to Microsoft's Seattle employees. At a time when most natives in cubicle land are watching their employers whack benefits, Microserfs are having family doctors show up at their bedsides in the dead of night, sometimes even wearing a white lab coat and carrying a little black bag. The math makes a lot of sense for Microsoft. Trips to the emergency room average $1,500 a visit, according to the American Academy of Home Care Physicians. That's the cost of 10 house calls. Microsoft says the "housepitalists" are shaving approximately 35% off average ER bills, which make up the fastest-growing portion of health-care costs.

The strategy is part of a movement to give primary-care docs more responsibility to manage patients' treatments. The argument is that by getting more time with a doctor—perhaps even online—patients will be healthier in the long run. House calls enable doctors to examine patients in the context of their homes—a gold mine of clues.

Because home visits typically last up to an hour, compared with the 10 minutes most Americans are lucky to get at the doctor's office, studies show that physicians are better able to identify the underlying causes of a complaint and target which family members may be at risk. The doctors also serve as ambassadors to Microsoft's health plan, often signing patients up with a primary-care doctor on the spot.

What's more, house calls are playing an important role in health emergencies. Far better, Microsoft figures, to treat people for swine flu in their own homes than have them travel to the workplace, a hospital, or a doctor's office and infect others. "This isn't just a good benefit, it's an incredible benefit," says Microsoft attorney Ronald Rice, whose 5-year-old son recently saw a house call doctor for swine flu. "I recommended it to three of my co-workers whose kids also had flu symptoms."

The Carena doctors, who recently began making house calls to employees of Seattle-based Drugstore.com, have portable labs in their cars. That means they can turn a kitchen counter into a mini-clinic, capable of doing anything—strep throat culture, stress test—that can be done in a doctor's office. Christine Bennett, a Microsoft senior content manager, recently woke up in the middle of the night and discovered that her eyes had swollen shut. "I would have had to take my two kids and my husband, our whole family, to the ER," she says. Her husband called the help line. Within half an hour a doctor was at Bennett's side, diagnosing an eye infection and handing her an antibiotic. Says Bennett: "We were all back to sleep within two hours."

Private insurers, hospitals, and the Medicare program have all experimented with house calls for the elderly and chronically ill. The Independence at Home Act pending before Congress would increase the use of house calls for Medicare beneficiaries. Microsoft's Sheehy has also been inundated with requests from other companies who want to learn more. Says Sheehy: "It's kind of an old-fashioned idea, so people sometimes find it hard to grasp that it could be the way of the future."

The Accidental Hero - BusinessWeek

Image by miskan via Flickr

Subway's $5 footlong, the brainchild of an obscure Miami franchisee, is the fast-food success story of the recession

By Matthew Boyle

Stuart Frankel isn't what you'd call a power player in the world of franchising. Five years ago he owned two small Subway sandwich shops at either end of Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital. After noticing that sales sagged on weekends, he came up with an idea: He would offer every footlong sandwich (the chain also sells 6-inch versions) on Saturday and Sunday for $5, about a buck less than the usual price. "I like round numbers," says Frankel, a brusque New Yorker who moved to Miami in 1972 and owned a drugstore before opening his first Subway outlet in 1988.

Customers liked his round number, too. Instead of dealing with idle employees and weak sales, Frankel suddenly had lines out the door. Sales rose by double digits. Nobody, least of all Frankel, knew it at the time, but he had stumbled on a concept that has unexpectedly morphed from a short-term gimmick into a national phenomenon that has turbocharged Subway's performance. "There are only a few times when a chain has been able to scramble up the whole industry, and this is one of them," says Jeffrey T. Davis, president of restaurant consultancy Sandelman & Associates. "It's huge."

In fact, the $3.8 billion in sales generated nationwide by the $5 footlong alone placed it among the top 10 fast-food brands in the U.S. for the year ended in August, according to NPD Group. That puts the $5 menu's success just a notch behind KFC (YUM) and ahead of Arby's and Domino's Pizza (DPZ). It helped privately held Subway, of Milford, Conn., lift U.S. sales 17% last year at a time when most restaurant chains, save for industry leader McDonald's (MCD), struggled. Actually, make that soon-to-be-former industry leader McDonald's. Subway's low-cost franchising model and mainstream appeal have allowed it to add 9,500 locations in the past five years, for a total of about 32,000 outlets. At its current growth rate of 40 new stores a week, Subway is poised to surpass McDonald's in worldwide locations sometime early next year. (Measured by total sales, McDonald's $30 billion still dwarfs Subway's $9.6 billion, although Subway has now supplanted both Wendy's (WEN) and Burger King (BKC) in market share.)

"A LIFE OF ITS OWN"

Frankel's $5 footlong idea illustrates how a huge company can wake up and eventually seize on a good idea that's not generated at headquarters. Frankel, along with two other local managers in economically ravaged South Florida, ceaselessly championed the idea to Subway's corporate leadership amid widespread skepticism. Once it was approved, Subway's marketing team quickly generated a memorable campaign that firmly established the $5 footlong nationwide. The promotion's success spawned imitators and created an unprecedented demand for staple ingredients such as turkey, ham, and tuna. "The whole thing took on a life of its own," says Jeff Moody, CEO of Subway's franchise-owned advertising arm, the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust.

The fact that a sandwich, the quintessential American food, has grabbed the spotlight right now comes as no surprise to some. Its appeal goes beyond the low sticker price—you can share a footlong with a co-worker or a friend (something that's not quite as easy with a Big Mac). "People are not eating out as much anymore, so anything that brings people together through food is much more compelling nowadays," says Michelle Barry of the Hartman Group, a Seattle consultancy that employs anthropologists and sociologists to ferret out consumer perceptions for such companies as Kraft Foods (KFT) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT).

For Frankel, the biggest surprise from his $5 promotion was that his profit margins didn't decline. Many promotions are so-called loss leaders designed to draw customers in the hope they'll buy higher-margin items alongside the featured special. That's one reason most offers have a time limit. Frankel's food costs did rise as a percentage of sales, but that was offset by the overall boost in volume and the increased productivity of his employees, who had less down time. Even after adding two new staffers, Frankel made money on each $5 sandwich.

Frankel kept the weekend promotion going for more than a year. At the same time, Subway's top brass was growing tired of a national ad campaign that featured spokesman Jared Fogle, who had lost 245 pounds almost a decade earlier by eating Subway six-inch subs for lunch and dinner. Company insiders envied the success of McDonald's dollar menu and wanted a "value" offering of their own. In September 2007, Steve Sager, a Subway development agent who oversaw about 225 franchises across South Florida, heard about the success of Frankel's $5 deal. He decided to try it in a troubled Fort Lauderdale outlet on Commercial Boulevard, a gritty thoroughfare dotted with strip malls. On the first day of the promotion, the store nearly ran out of bread and meat. Sales doubled.

Sager called Subway co-founder Fred DeLuca, who lives in the vicinity, and excitedly shared the news. An intrigued DeLuca came by the shop and, Sager says, "saw the potential instantly." (DeLuca declined to comment.) Charlie Serabian, the owner of 50 South Florida Subways, decided to launch the promotion in some of his stores. To advertise, he slapped crude homemade signs in the windows that spelled out "ALL FOOTLONGS $5." DeLuca joked that they looked like ransom letters. It didn't matter: Sales rose as much as 35%. Some locations, such as those housed inside Wal-Mart stores, did even better.

Moody, the marketing chief, hopped a flight to Fort Lauderdale a month later. He arrived at one store at 11 a.m. to find a line out the door. Frankel and Sager, who accompanied him, jumped behind the counter to help make sandwiches, while Moody talked to customers. Most were buying footlongs, and some were saving half for later.

Clearly, the South Florida crew was onto something. The question was whether it would resonate elsewhere. "Unless it was in your store, you were skeptical," Moody says. At a meeting of the franchisee marketing board that fall, Frankel presented his idea. Many owners thought the promotion would send food and labor costs soaring, erasing any hope of profits. A motion to roll it out nationally failed.

ANNOYING JINGLE

But others picked up on Frankel's idea and tried it in locations ranging from Washington to Chicago. Right before Christmas 2008, the board voted again, and the motion passed. (Franchisees still had the option to not do it.) Moody pushed ahead with a national campaign, despite having no market research to back up the idea. "It violated all our normal processes," says Moody, whose annual ad budget is around $500 million.

Subway soon brought in its ad agency, MMB of Boston. "Let's not overcomplicate this," MMB managing partner Chad Caufield recalls thinking. The idea was to use hand gestures and an irritatingly addictive jingle to convey both the price (five fingers) and the product (hands spread about a foot apart). MMB also shot on a soundstage, giving the commercial a stylized, campy look. "We wanted to create the feeling that this was a movement taking hold," Caufield says.

The campaign was launched on Mar. 23, 2008—the same month that Bear Stearns collapsed into the arms of JPMorgan Chase (JPM). "The timing could not have been better," says Dennis Lombardi, executive vice-president at restaurant consultancy WD Partners. Over the first two weeks, franchisees reported that sales shot up 25% on average. Within weeks, 3,600 videos of people performing the jingle appeared on YouTube (GOOG). Fogle, attending the NCAA Final Four college basketball tournament soon after the launch, was serenaded with the song by students. The $5 footlong was mentioned on ESPN, The Tonight Show, and celebrity gossip site TMZ (TWX). The North Carolina State Fair even held a $5 Footlong Song Challenge—an American Idol-style event for the 4-H crowd.

The franchisee marketing board quickly voted to extend the four-week promotion to seven weeks. When that ended, Subway kept it going but limited the number of $5 sandwiches to just eight, removing items with high ingredient costs, such as the Chicken & Bacon Ranch sandwich.

Suddenly Subway needed 50% more food supplies. Bread shortages became a problem, as the ratio of six-inch sandwiches to footlong orders, normally 2 to 1, flipped. Subway's franchise-owned Independent Purchasing Cooperative, or IPC, had to scramble to find new sources of bread. Even mundane items, such as plastic sandwich bags from China, nearly ran out. "I was in a panic," recalls IPC CEO Jan Risi, who furiously worked the phones, cajoling her network of suppliers to run extra shifts.

EVEN CHEAPER

Soon, copycat offers emerged. Boston Market offered 11 meals for $5 each, while Domino's sold sandwiches for $4.99 and KFC launched $5 combo meals. T.G.I. Friday's began selling $5 sandwiches. "Five dollars is the magic number now," says restaurant consultant Malcolm Knapp. "It's become a price point that consumers respond to," says Judy Cantrell, Boston Market's chief brand officer.

The question now is when the campaign will run out of steam. MMB's Caufield admits the issue keeps him up at night: "Are we riding this pony too long?" Tony Pace, a senior executive who works with Subway's marketing arm, replies bluntly: "If you had a brand that represented nearly $4 billion in sales, would you plan an exit strategy for it?"

Pace says the footlong will remain "as long as it makes good economic sense," so a decline in footlong sales could force price hikes, or limits such as $5 after 4 p.m. (Serabian has gone the other way as the South Florida economy has worsened, offering footlongs for $4 in his stores.) There are also concerns that Subway's focus on the footlong could distract it from new growth areas, such as a planned push into breakfast items or international expansion. (Save for some tests in Australia and Canada, the $5 footlong hasn't gone beyond the U.S.)

Meanwhile, Frankel has moved on to a new idea. Now he's pushing for Subway loyalty cards that let purchasers accrue points toward free sandwiches. Driving down Interstate 95 toward Jackson Memorial on a cloudy autumn day, Frankel chronicles the frustrations he's had convincing DeLuca and others that this could be a hit. Maybe now that Frankel is the Father of the $5 Footlong, they'll listen.

Who's in Big Brother's Database? - The New York Review of Books

Image via Wikipedia

By James Bamford

The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency

by Matthew M. Aid

Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (10²⁴ Bytes) by 2015."^[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

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In the near decade since September 11, the tectonic plates beneath the American intelligence community have undergone a seismic shift, knocking the director of the CIA from the top of the organizational chart and replacing him with the new director of national intelligence, a desk-bound espiocrat with a large staff but little else. Not only surviving the earthquake but emerging as the most powerful chief the spy world has ever known was the director of the NSA. He is in charge of an organization three times the size of the CIA and empowered in 2008 by Congress to spy on Americans to an unprecedented degree, despite public criticism of the Bush administration's use of the agency to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance as part of the "war on terror." The legislation also largely freed him of the nettlesome Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). And in another significant move, he was recently named to head the new Cyber Command, which also places him in charge of the nation's growing force of cyber warriors.

Wasting no time, the agency has launched a building boom, doubling the size of its headquarters, expanding its listening posts, and constructing enormous data factories. One clue to the possible purpose of the highly secret megacenters comes from the agency's British partner, Government Communications Headquarters. Last year, the British government proposed the creation of an enormous government-run central database to store details on every phone call, e-mail, and Internet search made in the United Kingdom. Click a "send" key or push an "answer" button and the details of the communication end up, perhaps forever, in the government's data warehouse to be scrutinized and analyzed.

But when the plans were released by the UK government, there was an immediate outcry from both the press and the public, leading to the scrapping of the "big brother database," as it was called. In its place, however, the government came up with a new plan. Instead of one vast, centralized database, the telecom companies and Internet service providers would be required to maintain records of all details about people's phone, e-mail, and Web-browsing habits for a year and to permit the government access to them when asked. That has led again to public anger and to a protest by the London Internet Exchange, which represents more than 330 telecommunications firms. "We view...the volume of data the government now proposes [we] should collect and retain will be unprecedented, as is the overall level of intrusion into the privacy of citizenry," the group said in August.^[2]

Unlike the British government, which, to its great credit, allowed public debate on the idea of a central data bank, the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11. For example, the agency built secret rooms in AT&T's major switching facilities where duplicate copies of all data are diverted, screened for key names and words by computers, and then transmitted on to the agency for analysis. Thus, these new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA in America's version of the "big brother database" rejected by the British.

Matthew M. Aid has been after the NSA's secrets for a very long time. As a sergeant and Russian linguist in the NSA's Air Force branch, he was arrested and convicted in a court-martial, thrown into prison, and slapped with a bad conduct discharge for impersonating an officer and making off with a stash of NSA documents stamped Top Secret Codeword. He now prefers to obtain the NSA's secrets legally, through the front door of the National Archives. The result is The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency , a footnote-heavy history told largely through declassified but heavily redacted NSA reports that have been slowly trickling out of the agency over the years. They are most informative in the World War II period but quickly taper off in substance during the cold war.

Aid begins his study on the eve of Pearl Harbor, a time when the entire American cryptologic force could fit into a small, half-empty community theater. But by war's end, it would take a football stadium to seat the 37,000 military and civilian "crippies." On August 14, 1945, as the ink dried on Japan's instruments of surrender, the linguists and codebreakers manning the thirty-seven key listening posts around the world were reading more than three hundred diplomatic code and cipher systems belonging to sixty countries. "The American signals intelligence empire stood at the zenith of its power and prestige," notes Aid. But within days, the cryptanalysts put away their well-sharpened pencils and the intercept operators hung up their earphones. By the end of December 1945, America's crypto world had shrunk to 7,500 men and women.

Despite the drastic layoffs, the small cadre of US and British codebreakers excelled against the new "main enemy," as Russia became known. The joint US-British effort deciphered tens of thousands of Russian army and navy messages during the mid-to-late 1940s. But on October 29, 1948, as President Truman was about to deliver a campaign speech in New York, the party was over. In what became known within the crypto world as "Black Friday," the Russian government and military flipped a switch and instantly converted to new, virtually unbreakable encryption systems and from vulnerable radio signals to buried cables. In the war between spies and machines, the spies won. The Soviets had managed to recruit William Weisband, a forty-year-old Russian linguist working for the US Army, who informed them of key cryptologic weaknesses the Americans were successfully exploiting. It was a blow from which the codebreakers would never recover. NSA historians called it "perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in US history."

In the 1970s, when some modest gains were made in penetrating the Russian systems, history would repeat itself and another American turncoat, this time Ronald Pelton, would again give away the US secrets. Since then, it has largely been a codemaker's market not only with regard to high-level Russian ciphers, but also those of other key countries, such as China and North Korea. On the other hand, the NSA has made significant progress against less cryptologically sophisticated countries and, from them, gained insight into plans and intentions of countries about which the US has greater concerns. Thus, when a Chinese diplomat at the United Nations discusses some new African venture with a colleague from Sudan, the eavesdroppers at the NSA may be deaf to the Chinese communications links but they may be able to get that same information by exploiting weaknesses in Sudan's communications and cipher systems when the diplomat reports the meeting to Khartoum. But even third-world cryptography can be daunting. During the entire war in Vietnam, writes Aid, the agency was never able to break the high-level encryption systems of either the North Vietnamese or the Vietcong. It is a revelation that leads him to conclude "that everything we thought we knew about the role of NSA in the Vietnam War needs to be reconsidered."

Because the book is structured chronologically, it is somewhat difficult to decipher the agency's overall record. But one sees troubling trends. One weakness that seems to recur is that the agency, set up in the wake of World War II to prevent another surprise attack, is itself frequently surprised by attacks and other serious threats. In the 1950s, as over 100,000 heavily armed North Korean troops surged across the 38th parallel into South Korea, the codebreakers were among the last to know. "The North Korean target was ignored," says a declassified NSA report quoted by Aid. "North Korea got lost in the shuffle and nobody told us that they were interested in what was going on north of the 38th parallel," exclaimed one intelligence officer. At the time, astonishingly, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), the NSA's predecessor, didn't even have a Korean-language dictionary.

Unfortunately for General Douglas MacArthur, the codebreakers were able to read the communications of Spain's ambassador to Tokyo and other diplomats, who noted that in their discussions with the general, he made clear his secret hope for all-out war with China and Russia, including the use of nuclear weapons if necessary. In a rare instance of secret NSA intercepts playing a major part in US politics, once the messages were shown to President Truman, MacArthur's career abruptly ended.

Another major surprise came in the 1960s when the Soviet Union was able to move large numbers of personnel, large amounts of equipment, and many ballistic missiles to Cuba without the NSA hearing a peep. Still unable to break into the high-level Soviet cipher systems, the agency was unaware that the 51st Rocket Division had packed up and was encamped in Cuba. Nor did it detect the move of five complete medium-range and intermediate-range missile regiments from their Russian bases to Cuba. And it had no knowledge that Russian ballistic missiles were on Cuban soil, being positioned in launchers. "Soviet communications security was almost perfect," according to an NSA historian.

The first clues that something unusual was happening had come in mid-July 1962, when NSA analysts noticed record numbers of Soviet cargo and passenger ships heading for Cuba. Analysis of their unencrypted shipping manifests led the NSA to suspect that the ships were delivering weapons. But the nuclear-armed ballistic missiles were not detected until mid-October, a month after their arrival, and not by the NSA; it was the CIA, acting on information from its sources in Cuba and Florida, that ordered the U-2 reconnaisance flight that photographed them at launch sites on the island. "The crisis," Aid concludes, "was in fact anything but an intelligence success story." This is a view shared by the agency itself in a candid internal history, which noted that the harrowing events "marked the most significant failure of SIGINT [signals intelligence] to warn national leaders since World War II."

More recently, the NSA was unaware of India's impending nuclear test in 1998, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the 1998 bombing of two of America's East African embassies. The agency first learned of the September 11 attacks on $300 television sets tuned to CNN, not its billion-dollar eavesdropping satellites tuned to al-Qaeda.

Then there is the pattern by which the NSA was actually right about a warning, but those in power chose to ignore it. During the Korean War, the AFSA picked up numerous indications from low-level unencrypted Chinese intercepts that the Chinese were shifting hundreds of thousands of combat troops to Manchuria by rail, an obvious signal that China might enter the war. But those in charge of Army intelligence simply refused to believe it; it didn't fit in with their plans.

Then, by reading the dispatches between India's well-connected ambassador to Beijing and his Foreign Office, it became clear that China would intervene if UN forces crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea. But again, says Aid, the warning "was either discounted or ignored completely by policymakers in Washington," and as the UN troops began crossing the divide, Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River into North Korea. Even when intercepts indicated that the Chinese were well entrenched in the North, officials in Washington and Seoul remained in a state of disbelief, until both South Korean and US forces there were attacked by the Chinese forces.

The pattern was repeated in Vietnam when NSA reporting warned on January 25, 1968, that a major coordinated attack would occur "in the near future in several areas of South Vietnam." But neither the White House, the CIA, nor General William Westmoreland at US military headquarters in Saigon believed it, until over 100,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops launched their Tet offensive in the South five days later on January 30. "The [NSA] reports failed to shake the commands in Washington and Saigon from their perception," says an NSA history. Tragically, Aid notes, at the end of the war, all of the heroic Vietnamese cryptologic personnel who greatly helped the NSA were left behind. "Many," the NSA report reveals, "undoubtedly perished." It added, "Their story is yet untold." Then again in 1973, as in Korea and Vietnam, the NSA warned that Egypt and Syria were planning "a major offensive" against Israel. But, as Aid quotes an official NSA history, the CIA refused to believe that an attack was imminent "because [they thought] the Arabs wouldn't be 'stupid enough' to attack Israel." They were, they did, and they won.

Everything seemed to go right for the NSA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which the agency had accurately forecast. "NSA predicted on December 22 [1979], three full days before the first Soviet troops crossed the Soviet–Afghan border, that the Russians would invade Afghanistan within the next seventy-two hours," writes Aid, adding, "Afghanistan may have been the 'high water mark' for NSA."

The agency also recorded the words of the Russian fighter pilot and his ground controllers as he shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983. Although the agency knew that the Russians had accidently mistaken the plane for a potentially hostile US military aircraft, the Reagan administration nevertheless deliberately spun the intercepts to make it seem that the fighter pilot knew all along that it was a passenger jet, infuriating NSA officials. "The White House's selective release of the most salacious of the NSA material concerning the shootdown set off a firestorm of criticism inside NSA," writes Aid. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the NSA's product was used for political purposes.

The most troubling pattern, however, is that the NSA, through gross incompetence, bad intelligence, or deliberate deception through the selective release of information, has helped to push the US into tragic wars. A prime example took place in 1964 when the Johnson administration claimed that two US Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, one on an eavesdropping mission for the NSA, were twice attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Those attacks were then used to justify the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. But Aid cites a top-secret NSA analysis of the incident, completed in 2000, which concluded that the second attack, the one used to justify the war, never took place. Instead, NSA officials deliberately withheld 90 percent of the intelligence on the attacks and told the White House only what it wanted to hear. According to the analysis, only intelligence "that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to administration officials."

Not having learned its lesson, in the lead-up to the war in Iraq the NSA again told the administration only what it wanted to hear, despite the clearly ambiguous nature of the evidence. For years beforehand, the agency's coverage of Iraq was disastrous. In the late 1990s, the Iraqis began shifting much of their high-level military communications from radio to buried fiber optic networks, and at the same time, Saddam Hussein banned the use of cell phones. That left only occasional low-level troop communications. According to a later review, Aid writes, NSA had "virtually no useful signals intelligence on a target that was one of the United States' top intelligence priorities." And the little intelligence it did have pointed away from Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. "We looked long and hard for any signs," said one retired NSA official. "We just never found a 'smoking gun' that Saddam was trying to build nukes or anything else." That, however, did not prevent the NSA director, Lieutenant Gen. Michael V. Hayden, from stamping his approval on the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate arguing that Iraq's WMDs posed a grave danger, which helped prepare the way for the devastating war.

While much of the terrain Aid covers has been explored before, the most original areas in The Secret Sentry deal with the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the NSA was forced to marry, largely unsuccessfully, its super-high-tech strategic capabilities in space with its tactical forces on the ground. Before the September 11 attacks, the agency's coverage of Afghanistan was even worse than that of Iraq. At the start of the war, the NSA's principal listening post for the region did not have a single linguist proficient in Pashto or Dari, Afghanistan's two principal languages. Agency recruiters descended on Fremont, California, home of the country's largest population of Afghan expatriates, to build up a cadre of translators—only to have most candidates rejected by the agency's overparanoid security experts. On the plus side, because of the collapse of the Taliban regime's rudimentary communications system, its leaders were forced to communicate only by satellite phones, which were very susceptible to NSA monitoring.

Other NSA tactical teams, Aid explains, collaborated on the ground with Special Forces units, including in the mountains of Tora Bora. But it was a new type of war, one the NSA was not prepared for, and both Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar easily slipped through its electronic net. Eight years later, despite billions of dollars spent by the agency and dozens of tapes released by bin Laden, the NSA is no closer to capturing him or Mullah Omar than it was at Tora Bora in 2001.

Disappointingly, the weakest section of the book, mostly summaries of old news clips, deals with what may be the most important subject: the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping and its targeting of American communications. There is no discussion, for example, of the agency's huge data-mining centers, mentioned above, currently being built in Utah and Texas, or to what extent the agency, which has long been confined to foreign and international communications, is now engaged in domestic eavesdropping.

It is a key question and we have no precise answer. By installing its intercept rooms in such locations as AT&T's main switching station in downtown San Francisco, the agency has physical access to domestic as well as international communications. Thus it is possible that the agency scans all the e-mail of both and it may also eavesdrop on the telephone calls of both for targets on its ever-growing watch lists. According to a recent Justice Department report, "As of December 31, 2008, the consolidated terrorist watchlist contained more than 1.1 million known or suspected terrorist identities."^[3]

Aid's history becomes thin as it gets closer to the present day and the archival documents dwindle, especially since he has no substantial first-person, on-the-record interviews. Beyond a brief mention, he also leaves other important aspects of the NSA's history unaddressed, including the tumultuous years in the mid-1970s when it was investigated by the Senate's Church Committee for decades of illegal spying; Trailblazer, the nearly decade-long failure to modernize the agency; and the NSA's increasingly important role in cyberwarfare and its implications in future wars.

Where does all this leave us? Aid concludes that the biggest problem facing the agency is not the fact that it's drowning in untranslated, indecipherable, and mostly unusable data, problems that the troubled new modernization plan, Turbulence, is supposed to eventually fix. "These problems may, in fact, be the tip of the iceberg," he writes. Instead, what the agency needs most, Aid says, is more power. But the type of power to which he is referring is the kind that comes from electrical substations, not statutes. "As strange as it may sound," he writes, "one of the most urgent problems facing NSA is a severe shortage of electrical power." With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas. And as it pleads for more money to construct newer and bigger power generators, Aid notes, Congress is balking.

The issue is critical because at the NSA, electrical power is political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm is the kilowatt. More electrical power ensures bigger data centers. Bigger data centers, in turn, generate a need for more access to phone calls and e-mail and, conversely, less privacy. The more data that comes in, the more reports flow out. And the more reports that flow out, the more political power for the agency.

Rather than give the NSA more money for more power—electrical and political—some have instead suggested just pulling the plug. "NSA can point to things they have obtained that have been useful," Aid quotes former senior State Department official Herbert Levin, a longtime customer of the agency, "but whether they're worth the billions that are spent, is a genuine question in my mind."

Based on the NSA's history of often being on the wrong end of a surprise and a tendency to mistakenly get the country into, rather than out of, wars, it seems to have a rather disastrous cost-benefit ratio. Were it a corporation, it would likely have gone belly-up years ago. The September 11 attacks are a case in point. For more than a year and a half the NSA was eavesdropping on two of the lead hijackers, knowing they had been sent by bin Laden, while they were in the US preparing for the attacks. The terrorists even chose as their command center a motel in Laurel, Maryland, almost within eyesight of the director's office. Yet the agency never once sought an easy-to-obtain FISA warrant to pinpoint their locations, or even informed the CIA or FBI of their presence.

But pulling the plug, or even allowing the lights to dim, seems unlikely given President Obama's hawkish policies in Afghanistan. However, if the war there turns out to be the train wreck many predict, then Obama may decide to take a much closer look at the spy world's most lavish spender. It is a prospect that has some in the Library of Babel very nervous. "It was a great ride while it lasted," said one.

Notes

^[1]The MITRE Corporation, "Data Analysis Challenges" (December 2008), p. 13.

^[2]David Leppard, "Internet Firms Resist Ministers' Plan to Spy on Every E-mail," The Sunday Times , August 2, 2009.

^[3]"The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Terrorist Watchlist Nomination Practices," US Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Audit Division, Audit Report 09-25, May 2009.

Washington Times - Yemen's capital running out of water

Image by Ahron de Leeuw via Flickr

Heather Murdock THE WASHINGTON TIMES

SAN'A, Yemen | Five years ago, Hussein Saleh al-Ayni's well was full.

He grew onions, garlic and other vegetables in his garden and sold them for $30 a day.

Now, a slight breeze blows beige dust where crops once grew. An old tire and a yellow bottle of cooking oil poke out of the mud at the bottom of the well. Mr. al-Ayni drives a motorcycle taxi and supports his wife and two children on about $5 a day.

"I just make enough for daily food," he said.

Water shortages can be felt in every corner of Yemen's capital. Gardens are dry, and water trucks crisscross the city to deliver to households that can afford it. Those who cannot send women and children to line up at mosque spigots.

With well levels dropping as much as 65 feet a year, many Yemenis and outside specialists predict that San'a will become the first capital city to run out of groundwater. The shortages pose a special challenge in an impoverished nation that is already fighting two insurgencies and al Qaeda.

"The problem is not in the future," said Saleh Aziz, a Yemeni farmer who heads the Hamdan Water Association. "We are suffering now."

Ten years ago, there was 20 percent more rainfall in San'a — 9.84 inches per year compared to 7.87 inches now, according to a water resource specialist at San'a University, Abdullah Al-Numan.

Other parts of Yemen receive less than a third of the water they received a decade ago, dropping from 11.81 inches a year on average to 3.93 inches, he said.

When rain does come, the timing is unpredictable and the concentration so heavy that the water's value is lost, he said. In some areas, the entire yearly rainfall can now happen in a matter of days. Last year 58 people were killed and 20,000 people fled their homes in October floods.

The drought extends into East Africa and is the worst in the region since 2000, according to the Economist magazine. Yemen is among about 50 countries, mostly in the Middle East and Africa, that are facing water shortages owing largely to population increase and climate change. One in six people on the planet do not have enough clean water to drink. By 2025, the United Nations predicts, about two-thirds of the world's population will live in areas where water is scarce.

In Yemen, most homes do not have running water and about a third of the population of 22 million has no access to safe, clean water, according to the U.N.

International efforts to slow the crisis in Yemen have failed, according to Ramon Scoble, a water-resource specialist for the German development agency GTZ.

The United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and the World Bank pump tens of millions of dollars into Yemeni water projects each year. But a lack of government will and capability, coupled with a population that is largely uneducated about water issues and resistant to change, have crippled efforts to build a sustainable water system, he said.

In the capital, Mr. Scoble estimates that the population consumes 10 to 20 times the water replenished by rainfall.

"There are families out there that are literally drinking sewage here in San'a," he said.

The future looks even bleaker. Yemen's population is expected to double in the next 20 years. Climate change could mean even less rainfall for a country afflicted with drought for years.

Three current armed conflicts in Yemen, while not directly caused by water shortages, are a sign of the times, Mr. Scoble said. Government forces are battling a Shi'ite Muslim insurgency in the north, secessionists in the south and al Qaeda adherents in the ungoverned countryside.

Water protests are also turning violent. In late August, one person was killed and three were injured in a riot after water access was cut in several districts in the southern port city of Aden.

Besides the growing population and diminished rainfall, rapid urbanization, traditional farming practices and plain old waste are to blame for the crisis, according to Saleh al-Dubby, director of the San'a Basin Water Management Project, which is funded by the World Bank.

As villages dry out, people flock to the cities, further taxing already strained resources. And because city planners cannot keep up with the influx, families dig their own toilets, polluting the groundwater.

Those who remain in arid rural areas buy water from trucks. Farmers say the price of water has tripled in the past four years, and the quality of life in Yemen, already one of the world's poorest countries, is dropping as fast as the water table.

But it is difficult to convince farmers to adopt modern irrigation systems, Mr. al-Dubby said. Farmers, accustomed to flooding their fields many times a year, have a hard time believing that drip-irrigation systems will grow their crops.

"If I am a farmer, I can't imagine that will be enough for my plants," he said.

The most profitable crop in Yemen - khat, a mildly narcotic leaf that is wildly popular here — consumes about a third of the country's water supply, maybe more.

Most Yemeni men spend hours a day chewing the leaves, which saps productivity in every sector, including the government, Mr. Scoble said. The national addiction also makes farmers and government officials reluctant to change.

"We're in Yemen, and almost everything is 'insh'allah, bukra' ["God willing, tomorrow"], except [khat] o'clock," he wrote in an e-mail.

Yahiya al-Hubaishi, a khat farmer, picked leaves off his trees and added them to the tennis-ball sized wad in his cheek. Mr. al-Hubaishi, who also grows grapes and tomatoes in a rocky valley on the outskirts of the capital, said he floods his fields about 13 times a year and that no one has suggested he abandon this traditional method of irrigation.

"The water will not finish," he said. "There is still rain."

But experts say the groundwater will disappear if these practices continue. Even if Yemen could afford to build desalination plants, that would not provide enough water to support agriculture, the mainstay of an overwhelming majority of Yemenis.

Increasing unemployment could boost al Qaeda recruitment in the country of Osama bin Laden's father's birth and produce a host of other ills, from mass migration to food shortages to crippling women's rights.

Johan Kuylenstierna, a specialist on water issues for the U.N., notes that millions of women and girls in water-scarce countries walk for hours a day to fetch water. They carry it home balanced on their heads in 45-pound jerry cans, sometimes climbing mountains late at night.

Girls miss school to collect water and often drop out when they reach puberty because there are no gender-specific toilets, or no toilets at all, he said. Women with no bathrooms go to the outskirts of villages for privacy and are often victims of rape or other attacks.

"You're outside alone, unprotected," Mr. Kuylenstierna said. "You are a very easy target."

Malik al-Amari, who drives a water truck in San'a, moved to the city from a distant village that is now close to uninhabitable. Five years ago, a pump drew water from a local well 24 hours a day. Now, the pump runs dry after two hours, he said.

But villagers are still not conserving water, Mr. al-Amari said, as he leaned against his pink-and-blue-painted metal water truck. He glanced at a crowd of noisy children climbing on his truck, and crossed his arms.

"I'm scared for the whole country," he said.