Quote of the day: "The world was becoming borderless"

location based services

The keynote speaker at today's session of GEOINT was Gen. Anthony Zinni (Ret.), the former Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). Zinni provided "observations", taken from his years of military experience, about the state of information flow and how this was shaping military and business planning. Zinni was stationed in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down and retold the story of how he passed through "checkpoint Charlie" over to the former East Berlin side only to enter a completely different world after having been isolated from the western world for so long. But in the process, he recognized that more than physcal walls were coming down. As a corollary, he fast-forwarded to his experience of his trip down from Washington DC and observing how people were communicating wirelessly with laptops and cell phones, as is so common. Hence, he observed how people were communicating via the ether in ways that have evolved in only the last 20 years. As such he said, "The world was becoming borderless." As a consequence, he commented on the fact that just as we are able to conduct business anywhere in the world because of technology, terrorists were actively entering our borders with a different intent. The battlefield has radically changed to a borderless realm where the enemy may be closer than we think.


Posted by Joe Francica in GEOINT 06 at 14:06 Comments (2)


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At this time world is really become borderless. On one hand this is great success of 20th century. A lot of people all over the world need it to do their business. This is amazing when you can communicate with someone who is in many thousand miles far away from you. On the other hand threat of terrorism become more relevant (we can see it all over the world). What about terrorism... governments of the leading countries mustn't interfere in the internal affairs of other countries (mostly Moslem - there are people with their own traditions and we need to respect it...). At this time THIS is a real problem. But this is politics and in any case it will take place in the future.
#1 HotCat (Link) on 2006-11-15 17:13 (Reply)
All these pithy observations on borders have helped raise the anxiety level of Americans to Code Orange, or Code Red, in cases of extreme hypertension.The old saying that we have a borderless planet has been around since we started viewing images of the Earth's surface with LandSat; now that we have that as a political boundary layer in Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth, the borders, and many other features, are back on Earth, akin to a Online geographic of a Fodor's Travel Guide!Some of the technology observations predate OnStar, a GPS navigation tool available in many GM vehicles; we have a host of other wireless communications, i.e., cell phones, once considered as science fiction as communicators on Star Trek a few generations ago.Since terrorism was mentioned, in addition to the many wonders of modern technology, once upon a time some East Berliners escaped at night over the Berlin Wall by a sophisticated escape vehicle, a conveyance called the hot air balloon! They weren't seen or heard by the guards who would've shot them to death.We have a fence contract proposal along the Mexican-United States border; if only I had a portion of that fence contract. Anyway, I wouldn't believe in the work I was doing on that before, during, and after construction. You see I worked as a NASCAR guard in the early 1980s; we were assigned to guard the perimeter fence at the NASCAR tracks before the races began; we would get a maximum distance of 1/4 mile between guards, and that's when the fence jumpers would climb over the 8' chain link fence, no problem.The US has a really interesting fence proposal, construction standards and all that better than any chain link fence! With so many other ways to access the country as Gen. Anthony Zinni points out though, we'd better examine, rank, and protect these avenues of approach, which provide access and opportunity to threaten the security of the United States of America. I'm sure there are many assigned to that watch, 24/7, so most of us sleep at night.We can communicate so readily, and instantaneously, that many of us now consider newspapers day old news!
#2 Ken Sutherland on 2006-11-21 09:36 (Reply)