*EPF206 10/01/2002
Transcript: Powell Calls for Advanced Visa Processing System
(System must protect nation from those who would do it harm) (4130)

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has called on the scientific community to develop a system that would insure that the nation����s visa process locks out those seeking entry into the United States with intent to do harm.

In a speech delivered September 30 to the President����s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, Powell said the State Department will play an important role with the new Department of Homeland Security in the annual processing of nearly 10 million visa applications at consular offices located around the world.

Powell said a system is needed that would allow a consular officer anywhere in the world to enter a visa applicant����s basic data and have it "bounced against every possible intelligence or law enforcement database that we have ����and you get access to what you need to know to make an informed decision."

Powell said it is very important to get this information as correctly and quickly as possible "to make sure that those who (would) bring harm to our shores are kept away from our shores ����are not allowed in ���� don����t get that visa."

At the same time, Powell said, it is important that the United States remain an open, welcoming society so that people from around the world can see what America����s diversity is like, and gain an understanding of what it takes to put in place a system of openness, individual rights and tolerance.

"I want people from every nation in the world to come here and see America ����to come here to learn about America, to learn what the nature of our society is: an open, welcoming society of immigrants who have come from all over the world and created one nation."

Following is the transcript of Powell����s remarks:

(begin transcript)

Remarks before the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST)
Secretary Colin L. Powell
U.S. Department of State

Washington, DC
September 30, 2002

SECRETARY POWELL: Good morning. How are you? Please be seated.

DR. JOHN MARBURGER: Mr. Secretary, I didn't memorize all the details of your life, so I need some notes to help me along. On behalf of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, it's my great privilege to welcome our Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to our meeting.

Secretary Powell entitled his autobiography "My American Journey," which is an apt title, yet a modest one for such a remarkable life. The son of immigrants, Colin Powell grew up in the Bronx and attended New York City public schools and the City College of New York where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Geology, making him a fellow scientist.

His participation in ROTC led to a 35-year military career, during which he rose to the rank of Four-Star General and served for four years as the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military position in the Department of Defense.

Upon retiring from the military nine years ago today, congratulations, he founded America's Promise, the Alliance for Youth, a non-profit organization dedicated to building the character and competence of our nation's youth.

Secretary Powell now continues to serve the United States as the most senior cabinet officer in the federal government. Secretary Powell brings to his office a great understanding of America and its promise. He also has great regard for the role and promise of science in international affairs, as embodied in his most impressive speech to the National Academy of Sciences earlier this year.

Secretary Powell, we are all grateful that you are in your present post during these historic times and we greatly appreciate your making this PCAST meeting a small stopover on your continuing American journey.

SECRETARY POWELL: Well thank you very much, Jack, for that most kind introduction and it's a great pleasure to be here this morning with my fellow scientists. My instructors at CCNY would be astonished that I would dare claim such credit. But it is a great pleasure to be with you all this morning and Floyd, I thank you for the leadership that you are providing to PCAST, as well as the leadership provided by Jack. And I'm honored that you would spend your first anniversary day here at the State Department getting to know a little bit more about what we are doing and more importantly, why we are so interested in science and technology as part of our diplomatic efforts, as one of our diplomatic tools.

I was surprised that Jack had taken note of the fact that today is nine years to the day since I retired from the Army. I had totally forgotten that. It had totally escaped me, and it's hard to believe that nine years have gone by so rapidly. But I do thank you for taking note of that.

I think it's significant that the President decided to create this body last year. And it came into being shortly after one of the more traumatic events one could imagine and perhaps one of the more, or most traumatic events that ever befell our nation and that was, of course, the tragedy that hit us on 9/11.

And a lot has happened to our nation since then. We have pursued an evil enemy, in Afghanistan we have destroyed the Taliban, we have put al-Qaida on the run, we are chasing down al-Qaida in so many ways, sometimes it's in a very exciting way when you see a battle or you hear our wonderful young men and women in uniform chasing the enemy into a cave or finding someone on the battlefield that they can engage, but more often than not, the successful fights against al-Qaida and against terrorism takes place in a much quieter environment. It might be the use of scientific tools, it might be the use of computers, it might be the ability to bring large amounts of data together to find one little nugget that tells you there is someone in a particular country who is connected to someone else in another country and they are linked, as a result of their phone conversations or are linked, as a result of e-mails going back and forth or linked as a result of all of the financial transactions they've been involved in or linked because we can determine their travel patterns -- because we are using the power of science and technology in this campaign against terrorism.

That's why the work that you are doing is not just blue-sky and thinking about what might occur in the next 10 to 20 years, which is good, it's good to do that, but it's important also that you have been given the charge of focusing on the here and now and how to help us in this campaign against terrorism, but also how to help us to protect our nation against terrorism and against terrorists as we go after them. This is of particular importance to me and particular relevance to me as Secretary of State since in the new Homeland Security arrangement that we are creating, my department will be working with the new Department of Homeland Security with respect to how people get into our country from other nations. The new Secretary of Homeland Security will be providing the policy guidance and the direction as to who should be allowed into the United States and under what set of circumstances, and the State Department, through our consular officers around the world receive applications for visas at almost 300 offices.

And here you have these far-flung offices around the world with something in the neighborhood of 8 or 9 or 10 million people a year coming to one of these offices and asking for permission to enter the United States via a visa.

These offices are manned by wonderful, dedicated, talented young Americans, usually starting out in the first stages of their State Department Foreign Service career. And what they need more than anything else is a system that supports them. And we have to reach that point in the development of such a system, and I would ask your advice on this as you hear more about it in the course of the day here, so that one of my consular officers anywhere in the world can go to a terminal and put in the basic data and have it come back and make sure that it is bounced against every possible intelligence or law enforcement database that we have here, and how do we make sure that all of those databases are integrated so you only have to do it once -- and you get access to what you need to know to make an informed decision.

This is very important for us as a nation to get this done correctly and as quickly as possible. Because we have two, sometimes-competing objectives: one, the overriding objective is to protect our nation against those who would do it harm and to make sure that those who bring harm to our shores are kept away from our shores, are kept away from our borders, are not allowed in -- don't get that visa.

The other thing that we have to balance against this, the other objective, is to make sure that we remain America, an open, welcoming country. We want people to come here. I want people from every nation in the world to come here and see America, come here for education, come here to go to our health-care system, come here to visit our attractions, come here to learn about America, to learn what the nature of our society is: an open, welcoming society of immigrants who have come from all over the world and created one nation. See what our diversity is like and how we deal with the challenges of diversity, and perhaps when you go back to your land you will go back with some understanding of what it takes to put in place a system of openness, of individual rights, a system of tolerance, a system of allowing anybody from any background from any land in the world that has come, this person has come to the United States to become an American, so we want to be open, we want to be welcoming, but at the same time, we have to protect ourselves. And our first line of protection of offense and openness are my terrific consular officers who are at the furthest edges of this system.

And so I'm working hard to make sure, and I ask you to think about this, to make sure, that they have the best systems that can bring them information back here quickly, to be checked against integrated databases, and this is not just a technical problem, it's a policy problem, it's a problem of bureaucratic challenge that we have to resolve and we will resolve this under the leadership of the new Secretary for Homeland Security.

So many other things that we have to do as part of this process. Should we change the nature of our documentations? Should we use biometrics? Should we find other ways to identify people so that their identity cannot be modified or lost and how do we track them once they are in the country and how do we put in place systems that will allow us to do this in a dignified way so that people who are visiting the United States don't think they are being harassed, but understand the reasons that we are asking them to let us know where they are and what they are studying and what they might be doing within our country and to make sure that this is a system that people will see as reasonable and not harassing. And we're hard at work on this, and we need your help, and I hope it'll be a source of some conversation in the course of the day.

As part of this effort that we have to make sure that our officers and our far-flung consular facilities can access back here quickly and not just send paper cables, but do it electronically is because it's part of a revolution we're trying to push throughout the State Department that we all become more computer-literate. We all understand the power of the Internet. I have a lot of fun with my staff. I'm not too bad at it. I'm fair. I learned it from my grandchildren. But I have two computers on my desk going all day long and I have access to a small number of correspondents via e-mail, and then I have access to the entire State Department System. And I'm trying to not just put computers on desks, but to make sure that those computers are being used. How many corporate offices have you all walked into and there in the CEO's or the Chairman's office is that wonderful computer with a coffee mug on top of it and a blank screen? I want to make sure that as we spend $200,000,000 a year on this effort, it really gets used. And so we all have to practice what we preach. And I like to have amusing times with my staff by asking them about things I've seen in the net that they didn't know I could've gotten to, or as I help my Public Affairs Officer redesign our home-net, our State Department net, the day doesn't go by that I don't harass Richard Boucher about what's on our website.

I noticed when I first became Secretary of State that everyday on our website there was either a picture of me or Richard Boucher. And then what was really troubling was that more often, it was a picture of Richard Boucher than me. Because he is the public face to the rest of the world, that's the State Department. And so I said, "Richard, I don't want to see you or me on the opening page anymore. We're missing an opportunity." We get about a million hits a month on that site, or something in that order. And I said, "So why do I want a million hits looking at me or looking at you. Let's mix it up. Let's put consular officers doing their job, or an ambassador doing his job. Let's get whimsical, let's get serendipitous about it, let's make it attractive. Let's get it to the point short of being improper where people want to go see what's on the State Department website every morning."

And we're trying to mix it up. We're trying to use this as a powerful tool. I told my staff: "I no longer have any encyclopedias, any dictionaries, or any reference materials anywhere in my office, whatsoever, I don't need them. I've stopped using all reference materials because you don't need it. All you need is a search engine.

Now, I occasionally get in trouble by making reference to particular proprietary products. I won't do so here. But I have a search engine on my screen all day long so that if I need to know anything about anything or anybody, or whatever, I just throw it in the search engine and it's faster than me reaching for a dictionary or reaching for an encyclopedia, or reaching for a reference book. So I just threw them all out. I'm trying to create an atmosphere that says science and technology has fundamentally changed the way in which we must operate as a Department, as a group of people, and I want you all to get with it. And slowly but surely we're doing it and we are well on our way to having an Internet, Intra-net Capable System on every desk in the State Department over the next several years, which will allow us to do this unclassified and classified, bringing us into the 21st Century World.

It's not just what we do for Homeland Security and what we do for our internal management that's important with respect to science and technology issues. It gets to the heart of what the State Department does and that is foreign policy, that is helping people around the world, helping people around the world to create a better life for themselves and for their children, especially helping those nations that we call developing.

It's fascinating to be the Secretary of State now, having been a soldier for all the years that Jack made reference to, where I've studied war or prepared for war and then the enemy I was preparing for is no longer there -- the Soviet Union. And to come back as Secretary of State and discover that most of those nations that used to be behind the iron curtain or the bamboo curtain are now all showing up in my office. And they want to sit and they want to talk about democracy and economic development, they really don't want to talk about some of the old geo-strategic and political issues that we used to talk about in the old days. They want to talk about democracy, economic development and how can we create jobs for our people?

If it's a former country of the Soviet Union or a developing country in Africa or in Central or South America, it's all the same, how do we get into this world of "globalization." Now that's a word that sometimes gets a lot of emotions going, but it all means one thing. How do we get jobs for our people? How do we trade? Lend us aid, but we need that aid in order to create conditions so we can trade, because most of the money is in trade, not aid. Most of the money that can help us develop and stop being just a developing nation but reach a level will ultimately come from trading with somebody. Well, how do you trade with somebody? Well, I have to have something somebody wants and I have to make something that somebody wants and I have to have people who can make something that somebody wants, which means I have to have people who are educated. And one of the great challenges for all of these developing nations is to try to educate their populations as quickly as possible for the 21st century economy, which places a demand on education.

If you want to do remote servicing for a computer operation, as we've seen in some parts of the world -- India, one of the great offshore places for software development as well as answering queries and what-not, if you want that kind of good job in your country, you have to have people who can perform that kind of work.

Or how do you take a nation that has not had this educational foundation to work from for its whole history? How do you educate that population quickly? You can't do it one little schoolhouse at a time any longer. You've got to figure out ways to use science and technology, to use the broadband revolution that you all will be talking about in the course of your stay here. Use the broadband revolution to be able to take this information out as quickly as you can to the greatest distances you can, to jump start education, to bring people up.

How do you tell a number of countries who are just trying to get into the 21st century how to do it when they are running literacy rates that are perhaps 40 or 50 percent? They can't even get started. They are strictly at the subsistence level. And so as you talk about Broadband and as you talk about the other issues that you will talk about in the course of, not just this meeting today, but of all of your work, always be thinking about these developing nations who have been told democracy works, who have been told that market economics work, who have been told that the individual rights of men and women should always be taken into consideration, who have been told all of these true things -- it's true. But what I find from so many of them is, yeah, they elected us on that basis, but what they want is jobs and they are going to vote us out of office unless we get the jobs. And jobs mean education, infrastructure development, the creation of a research and development base within these developing countries so that they can start to participate in this world that is waiting for them. And if we don't do that, we won't get to that level of sustainable development that is so important.

At a remarkable conference in Johannesburg a couple of weeks ago, which was very successful, it talked about public-private partnerships, it talked about helping developing nations, it talked about clean water, it talked about a number of other things. And it is such an opportunity for us as the most developed nation, most powerful, richest nation on the face of the earth, to invest in these nations to get them started. But to do it right, and to take maximum opportunity of the tools we have available, we need an aggressive science and technology approach to this. We need an aggressive way of educating them and dealing with some of their fundamental structural problems.

Clean water. Convincing them that biotechnology is not an evil. It is not something that the first world is coming in to impose upon the third world, that there are ways to get greater productivity out of your land. There are ways to make sure that you can feed your people. Don't be afraid of this science and technology. Welcome it. But you'd be surprised what a difficult challenge that is. You'll be talking about energy but focusing on energy efficiency here in the United States as part of your work.

But I will hope you will also be thinking about energy in overseas nations as well, because once you've educated your population, one of the greatest deficits that you find overseas is lack of energy -- the kind of energy necessary to create industries that can participate in this 21st century economy. So these are exciting times for us here in the State Department. We have many challenges before us, we have challenges of war and peace, we have crises such as the type we see in the Middle East or with Iraq. We try to manage other challenging situations such as the tension between India and Pakistan, or the problems that exist today in Cote d'Ivoire and other places. But I always make sure that we spend part of our day not just on the crisis of the moment, but thinking about this future that's out there that can be so bright for so many millions upon millions of people who want to believe, who want to believe in democracy, who want to believe in the free market system, who want to believe, who want to believe that if they move in that direction and if they treat their citizens with dignity and give to them the rights that all God's children should have, a better life awaits them.

Diplomacy will help achieve that objective. Aid will help, but science and technology has a role to play. Science and technology - so that all that we have learned and all the skills that we have acquired can be used to help people who are in poverty, who face disease such as HIV/AIDS, one of the great catastrophes facing the whole world right

Education, how do we use education to help with HIV/AIDS? To use what I talked about earlier with respect to education, to take the message of how to protect yourself from this disease. If we had anti-retroviral drugs that could go throughout the area, how would we get it out to the people and would we educate people to use these drugs? All of this can be dealt with with the proper application of science and technology and with the kind of public-private partnerships that I hope you'll also be talking about. And so I want to just close by thanking you for your willingness to take on these duties as members of the President's Council. I want to thank you for your one year of service so far. I hope that you will enjoy your time here at the State Department with my colleagues who will now brief you on some of the things we've got going on. And if, in any way, I can be helpful during the course of your meeting today, please let me know. It's my pleasure to see so many old friends around the table, and I won't even get started, but there are many. And once again, thank you for serving the American people in this way. Thank you.

(end transcript)

(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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