Risky problems are as great today as they were when we first
set out to expose and eradicate them.

the complete RISKS archives ( risks.org).

Over those early years, there was considerable debate within the ACM Council about ACM’s role in representing real-world concerns regarding the use of computers. The discussions within the Council that inspired the establishment of the ACM Risks Forum are described at length in the message from ACM’s president at the time, Adele Goldberg, in the February 1985 issue of CACM. This was placed under the aegis of the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy (CCPP), the chairmanship of which I then inherited from Dan McCracken. ACM thereby demonstrated a genuine recognition of the importance of the social implications of our technologies.

The first RISKS issue on August 1, 1985 (see cat- less.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/1.01.html) includes a summary of Adele Goldberg’s message with an excerpt of the charter, an agenda for the future, a summary of some of the incidents known at the time culled from SEN (which grew into the Illustrative Risks index), items on the strategic defense initiative and Dave Parnas’s resignation from the antimissile defense advisory group, a pointer to Herb Lin’s analysis of that software, a minireview by Peter Denning, and a note from Jim Horning.

Five years after that, CACM Editor-in-Chief Peter Denning and others urged me to establish the monthly column that became “Inside Risks.” I am enormously indebted to the members of CCPP— which then included Denning, Parnas, Horning, Nancy Leveson, Jerry Saltzer, and others—who have served as an astute expert review panel for each succeeding would-be column and provided wise counsel on other issues as well.

The overwhelming conclusion from this body of material is that the risky problems are as great today as they were when we first set out to expose and eradicate them. Although the prevention mechanisms have improved somewhat, it is evident that we have not been advancing sufficiently rapidly in the development of mass-marketplace systems and custom applications that are sufficiently trustworthy— despite the tangible gains and research advances I noted in the first paragraph of this essay. Worse yet, various factors have outpaced those mechanisms, including increased complexity of systems, increased worldwide dependence on information technology and the ever-growing Internet, increasingly critical

applications to which that technology is being entrusted, the general ease with which antisocial acts can be committed, and the ubiquity of potential attackers. Thus, we seem to be falling farther behind as time goes by. In particular, the huge expansion in the scope and pervasiveness of the Internet is creating many challenges for our community.

One of the biggest challenges for ACM members and for the computer community as a whole is bridging the gap between research and development, and the gap between theory and practice. Clearly, we need to devote greater attention to improving development practices.

In its first 50 years, CACM has been a useful product of the Association for Computing Machinery. However, in the next 50 years, the ACM needs to become—both in spirit and in reality—something more like the Association for Computing Methods or perhaps Methodologists, stressing the vital role of people in the urgent pursuit of transforming computer system development into a true engineering discipline that makes optimal use of the advances of the past 50 years in the context of critical system applications that use the resulting systems wisely. In particular, dramatic changes are needed in developing trustworthy systems that are explicitly designed for human usability for all users, and that encourage well-informed people to take on appropriate responsibilities in environments in which it is clearly unwise to trust technology blindly. For example, see the recommendations of the National Research Council study relating to secure systems and networks, summarized in the October 2007 CACM “Inside Risks” column and the columns relating to the needs for total-system understanding, education, and consistent application of good system-oriented principles.

In 1954, Norbert Wiener wrote about the use of human beings in the context of what he foresaw as the future of computer systems. In 2008, we need to remember that although ACM seeks to improve computer-related technologies and their applications, the purpose of that technology is ultimately to improve the quality of the life for everyone on our planet. ^c

PETER G. NEUMANN ( [e-mail]) is Principal Scientist at SRI International’s Computer Science Lab in Menlo Park, CA. He also chairs the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy and is the moderator of the ACM Risks Forum.