In Tech We Trust

The article got off to a bad start. In writing about a pretty cool new DARPA project, IEEE Spectrum referenced a military incident involving Israel and Syria in which Syria's radars apparently failed to function as intended, then brought up the spectre of chip-level hardware sabotage. Their basis for this theory, over, say, the fact that Israel has some pretty good fighters and special forces units? Military analysts, perhaps, or off-the-record conversations with chip makers? No, it was entirely based on "military and technology bloggers," of course.

Many of my professors refuse to allow Wikipedia as a source when writing a research paper. While this is sometimes an annoyance, I can see their point -- Wikipedia strives to always be a secondary source for information, which means that either the information in it has a reference to an authoritative source, or it's potentially unfounded. Apparently journalists need a similar restriction on using blogs in their work -- either put in the effort to track down a legitimate source (many bloggers are highly respected experts; many orders of magnitude more are not) or just don't write it.

Anyhow, once I got past my initial irritation with the author -- and my amusement at the mistaken assertion that "the universe has existed for about 4 × 1017 seconds" or just over an hour -- the article was quite interesting. The basic premise is that we in the information age tend to put blind trust in the building blocks of our technology to work the way they claim to; the Department of Defense, realizing that this might be an okay for an iPod, but not for a stealth bomber, is sponsoring Trust in Integrated Circuits, a research program looking for ways to verify the functionality of the microscopic electronics that make up the brains of virtually any modern gadget.

Personally, I'm nowhere near smart enough to participate in this type of exercise; like most geeks, I have a general understanding of how chips are supposed to work, but wouldn't know where to begin looking when they don't, except to sniff around for a faint smell of ozone. However, it appears that Raytheon, one of the two or three top employers of (smart) graduates from my department, is among the most likely contenders for the research dollars that come with this program. I'm always amused when I ask my friends that have started working there what they do -- every single one of them has responded with "Oh, I'm writing (or debugging) code for radar systems." I'm convinced that during orientation, they've been told to use this instead of the more traditional line "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you". After all, while I realize that "it takes a lot of people to write radar code" (the response I got from one person when I pointed this out) people at every other company I've talked to -- GD, Google, IBM, Lockheed, Microsoft -- tend to give varied answers, but apparently Raytheon is REALLY into radars.

Anyhow, here's to hoping they can use some of that radar code to sniff out bad chips, because let me tell you, if one day my iPod gets shut down remotely, the terrorists will have won. Big time.