Sci-Fi National Security

The Homeland Security Department must be pretty nervous about their ability to protect our country from terrorist attacks. The latest group to be enlisted on the War on Terror^TM is a consortium of science fiction writers who have a talent to look towards the future. The supposed benefit is that their ideas might just become the next method for our adversaries to attack America.

From USAToday:

"We'll play 'What if?' with anything," says Sage Walker, an emergency medicine physician turned sci-fi writer and the only woman in the group. She says the discussions with government officials "tend to be very intense and far-ranging."

So are discussions between the writers. During a coffee break at the conference, Walker, Bear and Andrews started talking about the government's bomb-sniffing dogs. Within minutes, they had conjured up a doggie brain-scanning skullcap that could tell agents what kind of explosive material a dog had picked up.

The 9/11 Commission called the 2001 terrorist attacks a result of the government's "failure of imagination." For this group, Walker says, there's no such thing as an "unthinkable scenario."

It is nice to see people thinking about how we might combat future terrorism attacks. Counter-intelligence is a diverse business and enlisting these writers (with advanced technical degrees of course) might actually inform our government and create policy for whatever may come our way.

However, flying planes into buildings wasn't an unknown. In fact, the government knew about the plan. The President was briefed on it a month before September 11th. Instead of acting on the information George Bush sat on his ass in Crawford and did nothing. So even if these sci-fi guys conceptualize the next attack, who knows if anything will be done to prevent another tragedy?