Guest post at Berkeley Digital Humanities - "Learning to Code, Learning to Collaborate"

A while back, I had the privilege of working with UC Berkeley's Digital Humanities Working Group. While I wasn't able to make a particularly large number of meetings, I did get some valuable feedback on a DH syllabus I was drafting and thoughts on how my projects were developing.

As my postdoc came to an end, they asked me to write a piece on collaborating with more technically-inclined scholars on cross-disciplinary projects. That post is now online here:

 http://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/blog/15/07/08/learning-code-learning-collaborate

Thanks especially to Camille Villa for reaching out!

Appendix to a Lecture on Science in the Cold War

I've been asked to give a guest lecture on US Science in the Cold War at Washington State University - Tri Cities, and there are a number of links I would like to recommend to those students if they want to follow up on particular topics. So, I'm making this post, and will link to it from lecture.

I'm aiming for general interest and supplementing examples I'm using in the lecture, rather than being thorough or academically rigorous. I'd be happy to provide specific suggested readings on other topics.

First of all, an outline and terms for the lecture:

http://www.douglasoreagan.com/storage/Outline.pdf

Suggested Readings

Audra Wolfe - Competing with the Soviets - good overall survey of this material (http://www.amazon.com/Competing-Soviets-Hopkins-Introductory-Studies-ebook/dp/B00AWA1L3S/)

Daniel Kevles - The Physicists - especially the second edition's preface on the history of the cancellation of the planned Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project in the 1990s (http://www.amazon.com/The-Physicists-History-Scientific-Community/dp/0674666569)

Loren Graham - Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (http://www.amazon.com/Science-Russia-Soviet-Union-Cambridge/dp/0521287898/)

Richard Rhodes - Making of the Atomic Bomb (http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes-ebook/dp/B008TRU7SQ/)

Hevly and Findlay (eds) - The Atomic West (http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Kathleen-Western-History-Biography/dp/0295977167/)

On anti-nuclear history, using pun-based titles:
Thomas Wellock - Critical Masses (http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Masses-Opposition-California-1958-1978/dp/0299158543/)
Brian Balogh - Chain Reaction (http://www.amazon.com/Chain-Reaction-Participation-Commercial-1945-1975/dp/052145736X/)
Hugh Gusterson - Nuclear Rites (http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Rites-Weapons-Laboratory-Cold/dp/0520213734/)

Suggested Films

The Day After Trinity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5cmmtEfh0E) - An excellent documentary about Robert Oppenheimer and the trial in which his security clearance was revoked 

Secrecy (http://www.secrecyfilm.com/) - a documentary by historian of science Peter Galison and Robb Moss about the enormous amount of classified science created each year

Peter Galison speaking about memoralizing nuclear waste, an issue of special significance to the Tri Cities area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cbNlXVRrb0

Suggested Podcasts

History of Modern Physics by Cathryn Carson (https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/history-181b-spring-2008-modern/id461116019?mt=10) - an entire course's lectures on the history of physics 

BBC's In Our Time often has great episodes on history of science topics, include an episode on nuclear science (http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iots/all)

Suggested Music

Billy Hughes & His Buckaroos - Atomic Sermon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb63FWL6R3k)

Ozie Waters - Old Man Atom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk-c-mHNBi4)

Sir Lancelot - Atomic Energy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_eY1W7Ezw4)

Golden Gate Quartet - Atom and Evil (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjlJ2F646bA)

Tom Lehrer - Wernher von Braun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro)

On Grant-writing in Graduate School

I've been asked to speak next week at an event on grant-writing, hosted by Berkeley's History Graduate Association. Since some of the students who could benefit won't be able to attend, and as a way of thinking out my comments ahead of time, I'm going to write down some basic advice here. For reference, this applies primarily to history, though the broader principles apply across academia (and beyond).

As far as credentials go, over the course of grad school - excluding the History Department fellowship that funded me by default, and the postdoctoral fellowship I'm on now - I won a dozen or more fellowships worth something like $82,000 over seven years of graduate school. You can see a list of specific ones (in case you're looking for things to apply for) on my CV: https://chemheritage.academia.edu/DouglasOReagan/CurriculumVitae

$82,000 is a lot of money, but that's pennies compared to what it wins longer-term, which brings me to my first major point of advice:

• You can't win if you don't play, and everyone likes giving to the rich. 

There's a reason Harvard is at this point a hedge fund with a small sideline in education, and that's that everyone wants to be generous towards those who 'merit' it. This is America, land of the just world fallacy, and Academia, wherein the...exaggerated...idea of meritocracy is interalized and continually reinforced by selection bias. Success breeds success. You have to act like your work is great and deserving of every fellowship, whether or not you believe it, and apply for everything that remotely fits.

One grant becomes a CV line, which becomes two grants. Not in the course of two applications - it can take a dozen or more to get started, and reliability of grants never gets good. But especially if you come from somewhere prestigious like Berkeley, if you put together a half-decent grant, you're going to get some awards here or there. The people on the other end are simply operating with too little information to make truly merit-based decisions.

Beyond the direct rewards, and the longer-term snowball effect, there have been more than a few fellowships, postdocs, and jobs I have applied for that specifically request someone with grant-writing experience. That's a skill useful well beyond academia, which is a vital consideration in this day and age. Apply for everything.

Get rich, because that's how you get richer.

• You are not too busy to apply. 

As my friend Robert Harkins pointed out yesterday, so many times through our careers we would discuss this or that fellowship with our peers, only to hear "Oh I'm too busy with X to get around to applying." 

No you're not. 

That semester research paper doesn't really matter. Neither do your language course grades, your weekly response paper, your lesson planning, or anything else. No one will ever care that you did "really really well" instead of "barely over passing" in grad school, so long as your letter of recommendation writers and dissertation committee are happy with you. No one worth caring about will ever look at your transcript. Everyone will look at your CV, and everyone will care if you seem, at first glance, to be a winner.

• Done is better than good.

Relatedly, the more often you apply to things, the less time it takes to apply to the next one. I routinely send off applications for grants, awards, fellowships, postdocs, and jobs in less than 20 minutes, sometimes less than 10, because I've written so many that I can find something similar, edit the personalized sections, and send it off. If it's something that really matters to me, then sure, I'll spend more time. But you can never, ever know what a selection committee is really searching for. Spending days agonizing over the phrasing of your intro line is a waste. Spend that time applying to new things, or if you're done applying to things, get back to that research paper / lesson plan / etc. Once your application is competent (which I'll get to more below), any tweaks and improvements are as likely going against the preferences and picadillos of the selection committee as playing into them.

On that note,

• You can never ever know what a selection committee is searching for.

Your application is a prayer burnt on the altar of fickle gods. Do not burn your ewe of awkward self-congratulatory writing and resent that the gods did not reward your supplication with rain. Simply hope that the wafting scents of the burning meat and splint wines were pleasing to them, and prepare your next sacrifice. The gods do not care about you, and they act only according to their own whims, beyond the ken of mortal man. Know only that they will spurn entirely those who ignore them, and that their blessings can be great. Only through faith alone can you be funded.

• Be organized.

Here is a picture of my grants and applications folder:

In case that can't be expanded, the point is simple: Keep everything, and keep everything so you can find it at a few moments' notice years down the road. I use Dropbox, both for the security of off-site backup (crucial in a Bay Area where earthquakes could kill a hard drive with no warning, but really fire/disaster/incompetence can happen anywhere) and so I can work equally at my desktop, laptop, and even phone.

I doubt there is any mistake I've made as frequently, stupidly, and avoidably in grant-writing as forgetting to change the personalized statements - "I would love to teach at Hofstra University," I'd write to Yale. "This grant ties directly to your focus on legal history," I would write to a business history workshop travel grant committee. Organization is key to preventing this.

On that note, for here and so many parts of academia who don't seem to understand this basic feature of word processing (looking at you, rejection letter writers): Please learn how to use a mail merge. 

• Your project might still be half-baked and promising what you can't deliver. Apply anyway.

Almost no one writes a dissertation about the topic proposed in your grad school application. I sure didn't write a history of quantum physics like I proposed; and even more importantly, the committee that chose my application to Berkeley History did not expect me to seriously pursue that topic. It's a lie agreed upon.

That very same principle applies to grant and fellowship writing, right up until someday you do have a great topic you're enthused about and truly prepared to be a world leader in uncovering. I didn't apply for some of the great funding opportunities available exclusively to pre-grad-school and first-year students (like Javits, the first go-round of the NSF GRFP, or others) because I was shy about pretending. Everyone is pretending. I really regret not applying, because those fellowships are worth a ton - and everyone is pretending, so no one really has much of an edge up on you.

• Use Interfolio.

It costs too much money and it's only mostly reliable, but it can make you SO much money in the long-term to have a few general-purpose letters of recommendation stored that you can have sent wherever you want, whenever you want. I got ~$23,000 and amazing intangible opportunities from the Miller Center fellowship, and I got it after stumbling across the application 3 days before it was due. I would never have been willing to bother my advisor (much less my second letter-writer) to write an emergency letter, but I had their letters on Interfolio. Again, an application with less-than-specific rec letters and thrown-together language is infinitely better than no application. Done is better than good. Always always always.

• Don't be shy about asking for rec letters

I know, it's awkward and stressful, like asking someone on a date. But everyone you're asking to write a rec letter is where she is because others wrote letters for her. It's her job, in both literal and karmic terms, to do the same for you, if she's able. If you start getting push-back ("You know, I might not be the best person to write, I'm not sure if I'll have time this semester," etc) that might be an indication that you're not going to get a very strong letter. If you have someone else you've cultivated, then consider backing out. But if you really need 4 rec letters for some irritating laundry list of requirements for an application (and these surely exist), and you have to impose a little on the fourth, it's probably worth it.

On that note, you really need to think consciously, continuously, and as early as possible about who your rec letter writers will be. You will need a minimum of three coming out of grad school. The ideal scenario is:
1) Your advisor, who can speak to your work, character, and potential with far more depth and insight than anyone else,
2) An established faculty member in an adjacent sub-field, who can speak to the value of your research beyond your own sub-sub-field. Ideally also can speak to your teaching ability
3) Someone outside of your university/discipline entirely, who can open new doors for you. This is very difficult to cultivate, obviously, so it's no big issue if it's not there. This third letter is generally the least important by a lot, as far as I can gather.

_________________

So, where do I find grants to apply to? There are a lot of resources, but there will also be some you're just going to have to find by googling. (This, again, is where organization is important - if you find something due 6 months from now, create a folder so you don't forget). Some resources:

• http://grad.berkeley.edu/financial/fellowships/ - Berkeley Grad Division's list of fellowships. Great listing of resources.

• H-Net - Beyond this page, you should also sign up for all H-Net lists that are relevant to your work. Put them on Daily Digest so you don't get 1,000,000,000 emails/day, have them filter to a folder so you don't get annoyed and unsubscribe, but check them at least once a week.

• The AHA - The awards and grants section is mostly beyond the log-in section, which requires being an AHA member. That's a cost that justifies itself many times over if you get a fellowship, though.

• Ask one of your advisor's students a few years ahead of you to send a list of grants and fellowships he applied to throughout his tenure. I've sent such a list to Berkeley history of science grads before - it cost me nothing (what are they going to do, plagiarize my research proposals from a half decade ago?) and helped them.

Your department graduate secretary (the infinitely capable Mabel, in our case) likely has a huge stack of paper announcements, too. Go look through them at least 1-2 times/year.

___________________

Okay, so, that's a lot of words without talking about what makes a good application. 

Well, the first point, again, is that no one knows. Seriously, a great application for one grant/fellowship/job is a hopeless application for a similarly-written announcement one listing over, and there is no way of ever getting feedback from either.

That said, there are a few points worth re-iterating. Note that most grant-writing tips, like most important lessons in History (the academic discipline) and history (the intellectual pursuit), can only really be learned from experience, and any advice tends to come across as cliches. Still, there's something to be said for hearing cliches, if only to point you towards truths you'll only digest later.

• The hardest and most important thing is to read your application from the outside.

You know everything about your project and everything about yourself. It's really, really easy to imagine that you're giving a clear (or worse, coy / clever / understated) look into this project without realizing how much you're leaving out.

Another angle to this problem is to spend a lot of time trying to be clear, to communicate, without emphasizing the even more vital imperative to be interesting. Your project isn't interesting to everyone if they would only understand it clearly. It's interesting if you can make it interesting. 

The Great 'So What' will dominate your life in academia, and this one of the absolute best things about grant-writing: it's constant practice at answering The Great 'So What' over and over and over again to new audiences.

• (a) It might be marketing buzzword nonsense, but you need to imagine yourself as a brand, as being on a hot forward trajectory, then write from that perspective

People like to see a narrative in your research - "I started at X, discovered this interesting thing, and now I want to work on Y because it's so important to Z, Q, and R" is a common one. This isn't always explicit, but it's the reason it's so much easier to fall down than rise up in academia's prestige game. It applies on smaller scales for grant-writing, too. Don't spend a lot of time and energy thinking on this one, but keep it in the back of your head when framing Proposal Narratives and Project Summaries. If you're not you, is it honestly very clear exactly who you are, and what you bring to this project that makes you the right purpose to pursue it? Again, modesty will not be rewarded.

• Tailor your grant-writing to the stated goals of the application.

Yeah, this is both kind of obvious and kind of contradicts the comments above about grant-writing being shouting into a pitch-black room and hoping you don't wake any grues, but the more you can guess at the positions of your readers the better. Some foundations have money from some rich guy who really likes the idea of 'leadership,' or whatever, and as much as they might want to fund a sterling by-the-book historian, they're going to need someone who can make the donor happy when he reads a paragraph about (or has a 30-second conversation with) you. Find a way to explicitly  - NOT just implicitly - tie your topic to leadership (or whatever). (I've seen this exact scenario multiple times, from the many very well-funded Stanton Nuclear Studies fellowships, to a funded fellowship on immigration elsewhere, to schools finding creative uses for very generous multi-million dollar endowments originally designated for 'yoga.' ) Other places really want you to write op-eds and get your (and their) name out there, or organize a conference, or write a nice letter afterwards describing the impact of their funding that they can include in their newsletter. Make your project explicitly serve their needs.

Most selection committees also have some kind of disciplinary bias, and will feel subtly alienated if the historiography you reference is completely foreign to them, and much warmer if they see you're tapped into similar fields. Again, hard to predict, but this is where informal networks come into play. Ask around to find others who have won this award and ask if you can read the application - again, a big advantage of going to a place like Berkeley.

Miller Center talk

A small note for any who might be interested in hearing about my work in a shorter, more accessible format (and/or want more than my interview on the HistoriCal Outreach podcast) - I thought I would link to my presentation at the Miller Center for Public Affairs National Fellows conference in the spring. It's available (in video and audio) here:  http://millercenter.org/events/2014/cross-border-transformations-war-and-revolution-in-international-history

The Miller Center is a real treasure at the University of Virginia, and each year they award fellowships to PhD students in History and Politics studying aspects of US history with policy implications. The fellows are expected to be in their final year of dissertation writing, and are encouraged but not required to be in residence. Charlottesville is tremendous, so residence was absolutely the right choice for me, but obviously some have family or other obligations. Anyone who might be interested should really check out the program here, including the new fellowships dedicated to:

1) Business history - in conjunction with the Darden School of Business, recently ranked the #3 business school in the world by The Economist, and the Hagley Museum, which is also a tremendous resource for business scholars; and
2) Legal history - in conjunction with UVA's Law School, also one of the best in the nation; and
3) Technology and Democracy, funded by the Albert T. Monell Foundation. This is the specific fellowship I had.

There are also the ~10-12 general purpose fellowships, so any late-stage graduate students working in US-related fields with policy implications should really give it a look.

Be sure to poke around from that original link to see the other fellows' really exciting presentations. The fellowship also comes with help recruiting a "dream mentor" from among any faculty who might be useful for your work to comment on your dissertation chapters, and those mentors were also on the panels offering commentary. So, not just grad students presenting their/our work, but also some actual discussion putting things in context. After a near-decade studying a topic, it can be tricky for grad students to see the world as someone who hasn't been an expert in that topic, so these mentors' talks are probably even more useful for any broader publics.

Social Science Funding for National Defense

In November 2008, Staff Sgt Paula Loyd gave her life defending the nation in Afghanistan, using the skills the nation needed most, the skills for which the military sought her out: the skills of a social scientist. We don't tend to think of social science as being critical to national security, and mocking social sciences and 'area studies' has become a pastime for Republican lawmakers, who just last week advanced legislation to gut the social science section of the National Science Foundation. Yet for better and for worse, more than Congress or even social science professors themselves may realize, the Cold War built the social sciences into the very foundations of US power. Defunding them is not just a problem for ivory tower academics, but a direct shot at our nation's security - and even those of us with ambiguous feelings about that truth ought to use it in the political struggle for defending (indeed, increasing) social science funding.

Sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences might not have an 'atom bomb' in their pocket like nuclear physicists, but there is no secret (at least to historians) that the social sciences have deep ties to the intelligence community. At the birth of the US intelligence community, Ivy League professors dominated the brand-new Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA. The OSS was actually one of the first major centers of interdisciplinary 'area studies,' bringing in dozens of historians and social scientists dubbed the "chairborne division."

Office of Strategic Services (OSS) recruits. Photo from National Park Service

Later, sociologists and anthropologists traveling the world for field research were enlisted to report to the intelligence community about local conditions and politics, and CIA funding through front organizations founded area studies and language departments throughout American universities. Some of this collaboration has been fairly heinous, such as when CIA psychologists in the 1950s and 60s tested hallucinogenic drugs on unsuspecting patients in hope of countering communist 'mind control,' resulting in at least one suicide, while other work has had more positive outcomes, like psychologists' ongoing work to treat PTSD and reduce soldier suicide rates.

Sociologists and economists created policy for aiding developing nations' economies as a diplomatic weapon of the Cold War (albeit with sometimes very unfortunate consequences). Anthropologists, media studies scholars, and others joined in the military-funded 'Project Camelot' in the 1960s to study psychological warfare, propaganda, and counter-insurgency, a project reflected in the Minerva Research Institute created in 2008 by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to develop area studies knowledge for defense purposes.

Even policymakers who sleep through history lessons should know the value of social scientists to national security, as it has only been a few years since social scientists embedded into ground forces in Afghanistan helped the Army calm tension, translate culture and language, and build allies in local villages. The so-called Human Terrain Teams , of which Staff Sgt. Loyd was a member (and only one of several casualties), were there to solve a basic problem of nation-building via military occupation: as the chief of the HTT program commented in 2007, "We're great at killing people and breaking things. But...this is a competition for the support of the population. So we've got to understand how the society is hardwired."

 

Image from Wired.com piece on Human Terrain Teams

Of course, not all social science is going to have direct applications to industry or military aims, but then neither does a great deal of natural science research. In defending the expense of a high-energy physics laboratory, physicist Robert Wilson once argued that "it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending." Wilson could have added that despite the vast majority of postwar science funding coming from the DOD or Atomic Energy Commission budgets, these agencies often funded 'pure science' on the premise that building up scientific manpower would prevent shortages of experts when the nation needed them. Both of these justifications apply to the social sciences in spades.

I deeply disagree with judging science by direct impact statements and making studies' titles immune to Congressional cherry-picking, and focusing on military applications fundamentally misses most of what makes science of any kind worth funding. Yet even if we choose to play that game, the social sciences have been every bit as active (or compromised, depending on your viewpoint) as the natural sciences in pursuing military research and advancing American power. If we want a better defended nation – a nation that understands and can find diplomatic peace with Russia, for example – we cannot afford to think of the social sciences as a luxury. We need social scientists like Staff Sgt. Loyd, even if the grisly price we pay to support them is funding other excellent research chosen by the top scientists in these fields.

_______________
Suggested reading (in no particular order):

• Christopher Simpson, Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War. New York: New Press, 1998.
• Allan Needell, "Project Troy and the Cold War annexation of the social sciences." In Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War. Edited by Christopher Simpson. New York, NY: New Press, 1998, pp. 3-38.
• Tim Mueller, Rockefeller Foundation, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the Cold War
• Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and "Nation Building" in the Kennedy Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
• Stuart Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 
• Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
• Roger Geiger, "Science, Universities, and National Defense, 1945-1970" Osiris 7 (1992) p.26-48
• Roger L. Geiger, "Milking the Sacred Cow: Research and the Quest for Useful Knowledge in the American University Since 1920," Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 13, No. 3/4 (Summer - Autumn, 1988), pp. 332-348
• Roger Geiger, "American Foundations and Academic Social Science, 1945-1960," Minerva 26/3, 1989.
• Naomi Oreskes, "Laissez-tomber: Military patronage and women’s work in mid-20th-century oceanography." Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 30 (2000): 373-392.
• Mark Solovey, "Project Camelot and the 1960s Epistemological Revolution: Rethinking the Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus," Social Studies of Science 31 (April 2001): 171-206
• Parsons, Talcott, "Social Science: A Basic National Resource", in Klausner, Samuel Z. and Lidz, Victor, M. (eds), The Nationalization of the Social Sciences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986)
• Also from this book: Klausner, Samuel Z., "The Bid to Nationalize the Social Sciences"

Podcast Interview on HistoriCal Outreach

For anyone interested in my research, I just had a great time talking about my work at a broad level on the HistoriCal Outeach podcast. My interview is available here:
http://historicaloutreach.blogspot.com/2014/03/episode-2-technology-transfer-and.html

Or on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/historical-outreach/id836920201

Op-ed: The Tie between Cyber-espionage and Immigration Reform

The following is an op-ed I wrote a while back that never found a home. Rather than let it go to waste, I thought I'd put it here.
________________________________

Last week, the White House released a new framework for cybersecurity, aiming to keep American businesses from losing intellectual property to industrial spies and hackers. This has been a theme within this administration, as just months ago, former head of the NSA and US Cyber Command General Keith Alexander, dubbed cybercrime against American businesses the "greatest transfer of wealth in history." Yet if we learned from America's own past efforts at spying on industrial technology, we might focus our energies in protecting America's edge in science and technology on a very different political issue: immigration reform.

Another attempt at the "greatest attempt at technology transfer in history" took place just after World War II, when the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union sent teams of investigators to scour occupied Germany for trade secrets, scientific advances, patents, and documents of all kinds. These teams of scientists and engineers from every industry copied blueprints, interviewed technicians, microfilmed patent applications, and seized prototypes – all the kinds of written information a Chinese or Russian hacker might hope to get from a company's file server today. With the full power of the military government behind them, full access to all kinds of records, and several years to operate, surely there could be no circumstances better suited to stealing technologies. Despite all that, the actual gains from these investigations were far less than the planners in Washington, London, Paris and Moscow hoped and anticipated, and far less than Germans at the time feared.

The trick is that technology doesn't live just in documents, data, and blueprints, and it can rarely be transferred from one context to another using just those tools. Technologies live in societies, and in the people in those societies – those people with what's often called 'know-how' or 'tacit knowledge.' One British policymaker remarked on the key lessons learned from years of efforts in Germany: "In practice...no amount of 'given' information can ever be a substitute for the information obtained in the hard school of practical experience." One of the problems faced by US agents hunting for secrets was "these engineers come out of Germany full of things they want to report but have a great deal of difficulty expressing it in words. We may have to send a skilled copy man from an advertising agency to London in order to turn their reports into clear, explicit English." Whether that day's Don Draper could do the job or not, the problem was that some knowledge – even about technical things like chemical processes, building efficient machine tools, and medical techniques to save lives – is just very difficult to put into words.

If America is serious about maintaining its technological edge – and considering that high technology products and intellectual property are some of our top exports, we certainly ought to be – then keeping talented people in America, and recruiting talent from abroad, is every bit as important to national interest as keeping foreign hackers out. The lowest hanging fruit there is raising the cap in H1B visas, which go to foreign workers who American businesses want when they cannot find anyone at home to do the job, but this is just one part of immigration reform that is urgently needed. America is home to many of the world's best universities, attracting thousands of the very brightest minds from around the world, many of whom want to stay and build businesses and innovate right here – right up until we kick them out, at which point they leave to found competition and create jobs elsewhere in an ever-more-global economy. Meanwhile, government budget cuts via sequestration are putting such a squeeze on US science that many of our citizen scientists, too, are looking overseas for opportunities.

Indeed, the postwar investigators succeeded most famously when people were the targets rather than documents: for example, the famous case of the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, one of the leading minds behind NASA's early successes. Keeping innovators in America and protecting our computers from foreign invasion are not mutually exclusive goals, of course. But if America wants to invent and innovate its way to a stronger economy, the greatest defense against technologies and jobs flowing overseas isn't in the NSA or the DOD. It's in our universities and (God help us all) in Congress' ability to craft long-term immigration policies that help keep technological 'know-how' at the service of American business.