Letters to the editor Sept. 10

Neighbors and allies

Like many people in the Flathead Valley, I was on my way to work on Sept. 11, 2001, listening John Michaels on The BEAR reporting a crazy story about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers in New York City. 

Upon arriving at Flathead High School and making my way to my classroom on the second floor, I noticed small groups of staff and students gathering in rooms where there were TV’s with cable. By the beginning of first period, I found myself standing at the back of a classroom holding hands with students and teachers watching the South Tower fall. The gasps and quiet sobs of kids and adults alike were deafening. The looks of terror and absolute confusion in those children’s eyes will never be forgotten.

Sept. 12, 2001, miraculously dawned. The day after the 9/11 attacks, NATO invoked Article 5. All 18 of the United States’ allies stated they would support American’s response to the attacks. Hundreds of international crew members were deployed through Operation Eagle Assist to patrol and protect American skies. 

Among those trustworthy allies was our neighbor to the north — Canada. Hundreds of flights carrying thousands of passengers flying into the U.S. were diverted to Canadian airports (Operation Yellow Ribbon). Towns and cities opened their homes, gymnasiums, churches, warehouses to feed, protect and care for those passengers for days, even weeks. More importantly, they did it with such grace and humble kindness that we often forget how fortunate we are to have such close and dear neighbors.

President John F. Kennedy said when he addressed the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa in 1961, “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies.”

God Bless America. God Bless Canada.

— Kristyn Morin, Kalispell

Women needed in tech

The Meta lawsuit settlement: This isn’t a failure of technology, it is the failure to ask the right questions early.

At Code Girls United, we believe we need voices in the room before products are built and deployed not after a lawsuit, a tragedy or penalties. And I mean people with different experiences: more women, mothers, caregivers, educators and people who spend significant time with children.

I’m not suggesting every woman will automatically build better technology. But caregiving experiences often change the questions you think to ask:

Who will this affect? What happens when a child uses it? What could an adult do with this feature to harm a child? What happens to the child who doesn’t have a parent monitoring their account? Are we designing for the most vulnerable user, or simply the average user? Can protections be built in from the beginning rather than added after something goes wrong?

Those questions require critical thinking. They require people willing to challenge assumptions, slow down and consider consequences that may not be visible from inside a traditional technology pipeline. We need those perspectives before the product ships.

That is one reason Code Girls United matters. We are developing a generation of women who can walk into technology rooms and ask the questions that might otherwise never be asked. We want girls who can be engineers and critical thinkers, developers and advocates, builders who understand the consequences of what they build especially in the world of AI.

The people designing technology make choices and the people invited into the room influence those choices. We shouldn’t have to wait for another lawsuit or billion-dollar penalty to ask whether we built something safely. Put the right voices in the room. Ask the hard questions. Build the protections in from the beginning.

— Marianne Smith, Kalispell