SET THEM FREE...
This photograph in a fascinating article on the architectural history of US Embassies caught my eye, seeming vaguely familiar. Turns out the architect Edward Durell who designed this for our New Delhi embassy in India in 1954, later designed the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC. He was inspired in the original design by the Taj Mahal. What an amazingly open, and welcoming design! At the time, the embassy was apparently considered a meaningful sign of US commitment to India.
Wonder what he'd think of a US Embassy in any major city of the world today. I was in Berlin recently and had occasion to stay at a hotel overlooking our embassy there. It looked as if Checkpoint Charlie had been moved from its original location and multiplied by several layers around the embassy. It took waiting in long lines and lots of time for anyone to visit the embassy.
Obviously this is all very necessary given the times we live in...given today's realities, it's hard to believe that we didn't even feel the need for perimeter walls around our embassies until 1959, following some angry demonstrations at the embassy in La Paz, Bolivia. We now spend hundreds of millions per major embassy around the world on security. Simple tasks of getting a visa, or information about business or education opportunities in America, are now a major ordeal for most of the foreign world, that believe it or not, still friendly towards us.
Contrast this to a recent visit to the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan to get a visa. The building is on the west side highway, right against a major street. Getting in involved waiting in a short line, going by a guy with a scanner, and the barest of security screens to pass through. A breeze to go in and and get information on tourism or business opportunities in the next big frontier for mass market capitalism, communist style..
All this has personal significance for me especially, because as an Indian high school student growing up in Kuwait, I vividly remember visiting the US embassy regularly as a seventeen year old. In fact, had it not been for a friendly, interested and caring education counselor at the embassy, who guided me through the decision process for US Colleges and addressed my parents' concerns of sending their oldest son so far away by himself, I would likely not have come to America, and become first generation American. The embassy had a wall and security booth, but it was a breeze to visit, even back in 1977.
Given this growing disconnect between the need to be approachable and the need to protect our people in embassies abroad, I wonder if we should apply the architecture of one our most profound inventions, the Internet, to our embassies abroad. We have seen what freeing up computing from monolithic, unfriendly computer centers, housed in special facilities, and protected by IT personnel, into computing and web services accessed from any device on the Internet is doing to our productivity and economic growth.
What if we applied the distributed internet-network architecture idea to a US Embassy? Spread out the various functions in smaller offices around a city. Create high-tech information booths in the plazas, malls, and avenues of major cities, where anyone can come in, and speak to US consular offices via IP videophones. Documents could be passed back and forth via scanners, faxes, and automated fedex facilities. Indeed, we could "in-source" the consular officers safely in the US in large call centers, manned 24/7 to meet the needs of foreign nationals anywhere.
For those who mean to do us harm, the potential targets would be dramatically minimized, and made less meaningful and less symbolic. What glory is there in blowing up an iMac powered Embassy booth? We could have it up and running again in a jiffy from the local Apple Store.
We could take it further, making the information booths connected to a website where US citizens here could communicate with potential students, business partners and tourists about the virtues of their parts of America. This communication could be done through web forums, IM Chats and video conferencing, all powered by Internet technology.
All this may be a bit fanciful, but it may be time to come out of the bunker and let cyberspace be our shield.
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