CITMO 2005 – Scenario & Objectives
(v.01.21)

The theme for CITMO 2005 is Information Technology and Terrorism - The Impact of Emerging Commercial Capabilities. CITMO 2005 will focus on the implications of emerging information technologies and on identifying ways to collaborate to assure that this technology, while adding to the quality of life, must at the same time support the war against terrorism. Since the governments, military and commercial sectors are major players in the war on terrorism, it is essential that each sector understands how to make the best use of the new and emerging technologies while denying critical capabilities to terrorist organizations. It is obvious that cooperation among the military and commercial sectors and across the nations will be necessary to reach this understanding so that appropriate actions can be taken in the commercial marketplace to steer technology in ways that are most productive and supportive of peace, stability, and prosperity.

We have all seen well publicized failures to stem the tide of terrorism over the past few years. What is less publicized are the many successes achieved daily through government and commercial sectors’ collaboration. CITMO 2005 wishes to build on these successes and find ways to apply emerging IT and focus R&D funding for new IT that enable decision makers to get the "right information at the right time to make the right decisions to apply the right resources to eliminate the right threat" before it has an opportunity to be one of those well publicized terrorist successes. Networking and communications technologies are important to connect us all together.

The issue for IT is how we fuse and distribute sensitive information in a multi-security network to support the right decision makers in a timely manner with trustworthy/ dependable information and protect the sources should that be necessary. These are real challenges for IT in accomplishing goals set out in the invitation letter and made more complex by a continuously changing set of disparate partners working across the network, anyone of which could potentially be a hacker or terrorist themselves. We must also consider how we link disparate organizations and many interested, but not necessarily coalition/allied nations/groups together to achieve common goals in the "war on terrorism". This is the ultimate cyber ad hoc network because it is forever shifting depending on the whim of the terrorist...in other words it is not necessarily predictable ahead of time...there is not a single threat that a coalition or allied group can focus on.

Issues such as parties/platforms quickly entering or leaving the network, multi-level security, and trust, all come to mind as issues that are both technical and policy related and must co-evolve in years to come so that we get the right technology and policy ultimately in place to achieve our common goal to reduce the threat of terrorism.

Objectives:

CITMO 2005 will explore ways to develop recommendations for:
1) A set of appropriate technologies, which are available today
2) R&D that could support development of IT and which could overcome obvious gaps
3) A strategy to coevolve the policy and IT in near-term toward achieving common goals