Immediately following Tony Brown was The McLaughlin Group, which I hadn't seen in years. I must say the tone of the show is a little different than I remember. In any event, I saw an interesting connection between the two shows even though they didn't share anything in terms of overall subject matter.

During Tony Brown's Journal I likened IT expertise to steel and rubber production during the first half of the 20th century. In that period, stateside manufacturing capacity in certain key industries - such as steel, rubber, and oil - was considered a national security issue. The rubber conservation campaigns of World War II testify to the strategic importance of even the least glamourous industries.

Today, as we move more and more of our programming projects off-shore, as we hire more IT personnel on H1-B visas, as we abandon more and more computer component markets in order to focus on higher-margin systems, we are building foreign dependencies into critical U.S. systems -- both military and civilian.

I'm not preaching isolationism. My point isn't about how much work is done by foreign nations, but rather how much of the resulting infrastructure depends upon foreign nations. The U.S. has reached the point where the President needs to look around periodically and ask whether we have the native expertise and capacity to maintain the minimal IT systems that run our country.

Frankly, our current President doesn't seem to be doing that. The cover of a recent issue of Inter@ctive Week featured President Bush with the headline: "It's the DIGITAL economy, Mr. President - will the Net ever be a Bush Team priority?" Unlike President Clinton, President Bush has no cabinet-level committee to evaluate IT in America.

At the risk of repeating the obvious, I think that's a mistake. While we spend our entire surplus on Missile Defense, the much more likely and devastating threats of biological and cyber-terrorism are almost completely ignored. Over 300,000 Microsoft IIS web servers were infected by the Code Red worm (including Microsoft's own servers). Think what would have happened if the author of that worm had a grudge against the U.S. That's why when McLaughlin closed discussion on Bush's military budget by asking his panelists for the largest threat facing the U.S. the former CIA Director said our dependence on high-tech information systems. Of course you heard that from BDPA first!