PREPARED STATEMENT OF MAYNARD ANDERSON In the 1985 report entitled, "Keeping the Nation's Secrets," The Stilwell Commission wrote that given the extraordinary importance of advanced technology to our nation's military capabilities, its loss to a potential adversary by espionage, theft or other unauthorized disclosure can be crucial to the military balance. That is perhaps more true today. There is a great deal of support for the assumption that national security and economic strength are indivisible. Both military and economic security will depend on effective countermeasures. United States economic competitiveness is a national security issue. However, as attempts are made to ensure proper protection to truly sensitive information and technology, the competitive position of American industry in the world market must be maintained. Care must be taken to balance control with tolerance for contributions to technology development. And, The United States produces more intellectual property than any other nation and, in the opinion of many, does the poorest job of protecting it. Efforts to acquire unclassified technology by illicit means is common partly because the risk of exposure and severe penalties to the perpetrators are much lower than conventional espionage. those who seek our protected information have generally been described as "adversaries" or potential adversaries. It is more likely that the greatest challenge to the United States technology and industrial base comes from United States friends and allies. One of the most expedient and least expensive ways for any nation to increase its industrial capability is by theft from the United States, the most lucrative target in the world. Our competitors are not unaware that the real test of success in this world of military and economic supremacy may not be who first develops technology but rather who is first to use it effectively. As an "Open Society," the United States offers invited or illegal visitors almost unlimited opportunities to take advantage of our accomplishments. Large numbers of immigrant workers along with foreign exchange students and visitors, combined with a perception Mr. HOSTETTLER. Dr. Wulf. STATEMENT OF DR. WILLIAM A. WULF, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING, THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES Mr. WULF. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee. I too, like my predecessors here, have a longer statement, which I will submit for the record. I am pleased to come to the hearing today to remind all the Members of the Committee of the important contributions that foreign-born scientists and engineers have made and continue to make to this country. We are more prosperous and more secure in large part because of them. Before proceeding, while I don't perhaps have the same credentials in intelligence that my predecessors on the panel have had, I would note that both my wife and I have been advisors to the Department of Defense for decades. We both carry Top Secret SCI clearances and my wife served for 5 years in the Pentagon as the Director of Research and Engineering, where she had responsibility for the oversight of all R&D in the Defense Department. I am convinced that security, real security, comes from a proper balance of keeping out those that would do us harm and welcoming those that would do us good. Throughout the last century, our greatest successes in creating both wealth and military ascendancy have been due in large part to the fact that we welcomed the best scientists and engineers from all over the world. No other country did that, and nowhere else has the genius for discovery and innovation flourished the way it has here. I am deeply concerned that our policy reactions to 9/11 have tipped the balance in a way that is not in the long-term interest of our Nation's security. Fifty years ago, our scientific leaders came from Europe. There were the famous names like Einstein, Fermi and Teller, without whom we would not have been the first to have the atomic bomb; von Braun, without whom we would not be ascendant in rockets and space; von Neumann, without whom we would not be world leaders in computing and information technology. Today, it isn't just Europeans that contribute to our prosperity and security. The names are those like Praveen Chaudhary, now Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory; C.N. Yang, now Nobel Laureate from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; and Elias Zerhouni, who was born in Algeria and is now the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of Ph.D. students and scientists and engineers employed in the United States, who were born abroad, increased from 24 to 37 percent. The current percentage of Ph.D. physicists is about 35 percent; for engineers, it is over 50 percent. One-fourth of the engineering faculty at U.S. universities were born abroad; between 1990 and 2004, over one-third of the Nobel Prizes awarded to U.S. citizens were to foreign-born scientists. One-third of all U.S. Ph.D.'s in science and engineering are now awarded to foreign-born graduate students. We have been skimming the best and brightest minds from around the globe and prospering because of it. We need these new Americans even more now as other countries become more technologically capable. If I have one message to convey to this Committee today, it is that it is a serious mistake to think that all important defense technologies originate in the United States, and hence, the problem is to keep our technology from being stolen by others. We talk proudly about the MIT "Rad Lab" that developed radar during World War II, but the critical technology came from the United Kingdom. At the end of World War II we were a distant third in the development of jet engines behind both Germany and Russia-the Soviet Union. The World Wide Web was invented in Switzerland, not in the United States. I could go on and on. Many U.S. corporations are now shifting their development to overseas locations, research and development to overseas locations, not just because foreign labor is cheaper; that is a common and comfortable myth. It is frequently because the quality is better overseas. Again, real security depends upon a very careful balance, in this case, a balance of openness and secrecy. Walling ourselves off from others, from the otherwise open exchange of basic scientific information, is a recipe for being surprised and disadvantaged. To be sure, 9/11 and globalization have both changed the balance point. The balance point for the Cold War was a different one than for today. We need to fundamentally rethink our policies. However, in my opinion, several recent policy changes related to visas, to the treatment of international visitors, to this new issue of deemed exports and so on have had a chilling effect. It has already been mentioned that the applications of international students to attend U.S. colleges and universities has declined. Scientists have chosen to hold conferences in other countries. U.S. businesses have had to shift critical meetings to locations outside our borders. In the meantime, foreign companies, universities and governments are marketing themselves as friendlier places to do business or to get an education. In the race to attract top international talent, we are losing ground. At the same time, science and technology are growing rapidly in other parts of the world. Over 70 percent of the papers published by the American Physical Society's world leading journal, The Physical Review, come from abroad-70 percent! We do not own all of the science and technology information in the world. It is illustrated by a figure in my written testimony, the number of first degrees in science and engineering awarded per year in Asia is now almost three times greater than in North America. Permit me to turn to this issue of export controls for a minute. They were instituted in 1949 to keep weapons technology out of the hands of potential adversaries. In 1994, the disclosure of information about a controlled technology to certain foreign nationals even in the United States has been "deemed" to be an export of that technology itself. And recent reports from the inspectors general of the U.S. Department of Commerce and State have suggested that the implementation of the rules governing deemed exports should be tightened. For example, they have suggested that the exemption for basic research should be altered and possibly eliminated and that the definition of access to controlled technology should be broadened. The university community is rightly concerned that a literal inter pretation of the IG's suggestions would essentially preclude foreign graduate students from participating in research and would require an impossibly complex system to enforce. Given that over 55 percent of the Ph.D. students in engineering in the United States are foreign born, the effect could be catastrophic. Either universities would have to exclude these students, or they would have to stop doing research on potentially defenserelated topics, which, of course, includes most of the fastest-moving new technologies. Neither of these alternatives strengthens the United States, they weaken it. One might ask if these policy changes will improve our security, I would point out that the United States is not the only researchcapable country. China and India, for example, have recognized the value of research universities to their economic development and are investing heavily in them. By putting up barriers to the exchange of information about basic research, we wall ourselves off from the results in these countries and slow our own progress. At the same time, the information we are "protecting" is often readily available from other sources. And finally, in a country with an estimated 10 million illegal aliens, one must wonder whether onerous visa policies or demeaning practices at border crossings will deter the committed trained spy or terrorist from entering the country. The 2001 Hart-Rudman Commission, which in February of 2001 predicted a catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States, and which then proposed the Department of Homeland Security, said, and I quote, "The inadequacies of our system of research and education pose a greater threat to the United States national security over the next quarter century than any potential conventional war we might imagine." Their essential point is that further damaging our system of research and education, including its relation to foreign-born scholars, is a very dangerous strategy. The United States still benefits from educating and employing a large fraction of the world's best scientists and engineers. We have great research universities that remain attractive to the world's best and brightest. We are envied for our non-hierarchical tradition that allows young scientists with new ideas to play leading roles in research. We have progressed because we fostered a tradition of free exchange of ideas and information and embraced a tradition of welcoming talented people from elsewhere in the world. But that advantage is eroding under current and proposed policies. The international image of the United States was one of a welcoming "land of opportunity." We are in the process, however, of destroying that image, and replacing it with one of a xenophobic, hostile nation. We are in the process of making it more likely that the world's best and brightest will take their talents elsewhere. The policies that superficially appear to make us more secure are, in fact, having precisely the opposite effect. Protecting Americans from threats must obviously be a high priority. But as I said earlier, real security will be achieved only by a proper balance of excluding those that would do us harm and welcoming those that would do us good by a proper balance of openness and secrecy. With selected, thoughtful changes to U.S. policies, we can achieve both goals, making our homeland safer and our economy stronger. I would like to close with another quote from the Hart-Rudman report, "Second only to a weapon of mass destruction detonated in an American city, we can think of nothing more dangerous than a failure to manage properly science, technology and education for the common good over the next quarter century." Thank you for the opportunity to testify. |