Network of danger zones

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The director of national intelligence's chief concerns about the future can be summed up with a word and a stat: petabytes and 15 percent.

The National Security Agency, one of 16 intelligence agencies under DNI John Negroponte, estimates by next year, the Internet will carry 647 petabytes of data each day. "That's 647 followed by 15 zeros," says Mr. Negroponte, "and by way of comparison, the holdings of the entire Library of Congress (130 million items, including 30 million books that occupy 530 miles of book shelves) represent only 0.02 petabytes."

The Internet is also the jihadis' network. "At Internet cafes," Mr. Negroponte told a blue-ribbon audience at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center, "young jihadis, armed with laptops and DVD players, are constantly aiming to further extremist ideology and... replicate training via the Internet."

The 15 percent the DNI believes should alarm the United States is the percentage of undergraduates who receive their degrees in natural science or engineering -- compared with 50 percent in China, 67 percent in Singapore, 38 percent in South Korea and 47 percent in France.

America is losing its competitiveness in science and technology. The DNI recommends we read "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," put out by the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. In the U.S., 34 percent of doctoral degrees in natural sciences and 56 percent of engineering Ph.D.s are awarded -- to foreign-born students.

This year there are 2 billion cell phones in use worldwide. In two years time, there will be 3 billion -- or half the world's population. Thus the technological revolution advances geometrically -- and the U.S. continues to lose market share. In 1990, the U.S. had a positive trade balance for high-tech products of some $30 billion. In 2003, it became a negative balance of $30 billion, a gap that keeps widening.

In other words, said Mr. Negroponte, "We are confronting adversaries who are achieving exponential improvements in their operations through widely available cutting-edge technology in which their R&D costs are any CEO's dream -- zero."

U.S. national security is at risk, Mr. Negroponte argues, "unless we take steps to deal with it right away." The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act created a director of science and technology in the DNI's office. It also established the director of a National Science and Technology Committee, including all the chief science officers from the entire intelligence community.

There are still critical mission gaps. Mr. Negroponte listed three:

(1) Locating terrorists.