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November 10, 2009 

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VIEWS: DAVID STEPHENSON

[May 31 2009]

Unaccustomed as I’ve become to blogging, I thought this was important enough to do a post…

Watching the coverage of the Maersk Alabama piracy incident, it seemed to me that conventional responses are ineffective because of the extreme asymmetrical aspect of the situation and because conventional treaty-based mutual defense approaches aren’t relevant on the high seas.

I think my “networked homeland security” theory may be an appropriate model for response. Here’s why:

• these situations are fluid and fast-moving, so any response has to have the same fluidity.
• real-time, location-based information is critical.
• the response needs to be collaborative — reflecting “social data analysis,” in which a large number of individuals, each of whom make have some of the relevant information, can use Web 2.0 tools such as threaded discussions, wikis, etc. to analyze the situation.The likely result of such a collaborative analysis (and one, incidentally, in which the cast of characters will likely be different in every situation depending on who happens to be in the vicinity and/or has relevant information) is likely to be a more nuanced, comprehensive and accurate one than if only one analyst or a small group was involved.
• the exact mix of data will vary in each case: in some situations there may be live, streaming video available to document the situation; in some, still photos relayed by camera phone, and who knows what other information may or may not be available depending on variables such as location, weather and/or Internet access. As long as the relevant information is relayed in an IP- and packet-based fashion, it an be shared by an ad hoc network of those who happen to be in the region at the time.

Permit me to re-introduce myself. I used to write this blog.

March 7 2009

In fact, some of you may remember the days when I’d try to write 3-4 thoughtful posts a day. I like to think the result was pretty informative. But that was then, and this is now. Two things have happened in the six months that mean the blog is pretty much mothballed for the foreseeable future:

1. I fell hook-line-and-sinker for Twitter, which I once poo-pooed as an exercise in narcissistic navel-gazing. By contrast, I’ve found that not only is it an effective means of communicating, sometimes on pretty sophisticated topics, but also that it’s great for the kind of ad hoc emergency communication that I specialized in. Therefore, if you want to track what I’m doing, your best bet is to subscribe to my Twitter feed.
2. More important, I’m facing a really tight deadline, the end of March, to complete a book manuscript, “Democratizing Data — to transform government, workplaces, and our lives,” about what I believe is a revolutionary approach perfectly suited to the combination of circumstances we face today: total loss of faith in government and business, the need for fewer remaining workers to do more with less, and to come up with creative solutions to increasingly complex problems. I believe the democratizing data is the way:
   • making our organizations data-centric: by that I mean instead of laboriously retrieving data from organizational data bases, adding informative metadata to it with XML or KML tags, and distributing it automatically through syndication.
   • designing software (open-source is particularly well suited to this approach) so that all users will be able to automatically share the data, rather than the past practice, in which data pasted into applications was then trapped in those applications.
   • designing a seamless cycling in which workers (with varying levels of permissions based on their roles), regulators, and even the public, will have access to this data, on a real-time basis. Experience from leaders in the field have shown this can be done while respecting strict privacy and security standards.
   • The results will include:
     • giving workers the real-time, often location-based information they need to do their jobs more effectively, and to collaborate with those in other offices and programs who need to share the same data. In many cases, this will be the first time they have had access to this data
     • substituting “smart” regulation for the abysmal failures of the Bush Administration. Following the Dutch model can dramatically reduce corporate compliance costs, and improve regulation by allowing various agencies to share the same data on a real-time basis (there is some evidence such an approach might have actually avoided the excesses that led to the economic collapse).
     • rebuilding public confidence in government and business through a “don’t trust us, track us” approach to transparency that provides facts and lets the public, media and watchdog groups judge for themselves whether officials are truthful.
     • even leveraging the “crowdsourcing” phenomenon to actively involve the public as co-creators of valuable new services, as was done by the District of Columbia’s innovative “Apps for Democracy” contest.

     I’m getting great initial reaction to the approach (probably due in great part to the fact that I was originally going to co-author the book with Vivek Kundra, the charismatic DC CTO who is now likely to become the Obama Administration’s e-government director, in which case it’s likely he’d have to withdraw from the project. Whether or not Vivek is an active participant, the book reflects much of his thinking). The video above (there are 3 other sections, which you can also find on You Tube — it was a hand-held version shot by an attendee at a recent O’Reilly IgniteBoston event) will give you a good introduction to what I’m talking about, as will numerous Slideshares I’ve done.

     So that’s why I haven’t been blogging and am unlikely to resume doing so in the near future (although look for a new wiki I’ll be launching in the next week or so to test sections of the book and solicit crowd-sourcing ideas for it! See you around campus!

Spy makes it easy for authorities to monitor social media in disasters

Spy is yet another app in the ever-expanding ecosystem spawned by Twitter (and to think that critics such as I used to pooh-pooh 140-character messages as of little importance… mea culpa, mea maxima culpa), and it makes it possible for authorities in crises such as the Mumbai attacks to monitor social media including Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, blog comments (from BackType), Yahoo News, blogs, and Google Reader.

As I’ve said countless times before (and this situation underscored), in natural disasters and terrorist attacks, people can and will use the Web 2.0 apps. and sophisticated mobile devices that they use every day, so it’s incumbent on authorities to:

1. instruct us on how to use these devices (especially camera and videophones) to provide invaluable situational awareness to them (LET ME KNOW IF YOUR LOCAL AUTHORITIES HAVE GIVEN YOU ANY GUIDANCE ON THIS ISSUE. DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME: I’M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH WAITING FOR EXAMPLES…)
2. monitor the social media for said situational awareness.

Ben Hedrington (thanks Ben!) has taken care of the mechanics of #2 by creating Spy. So what’s your excuse, government agencies, for not taking action on this vital concern?

TB case: It all comes down to human issues [Jun 7 07]

The Andrew Speaker TB case is a graphic reminder that, no matter what kinds of policies we institute to screen people at the borders, it still comes down to human factors. Just as many of the security guards interviewed by AP for the story on chinks in the DHS armor weren’t adequately trained and/or didn’t recognize a threat when they saw it, the border crossing guard at Lake Champlain who let Andrew Speaker cross “because he didn’t look sick” — even though he was clearly listed on the quarantined list — managed to obviate all those policies due to his own ignorance, lack of training, poor judgment — you name it.

And while we’re on human factors, if some stupid guy decides that he’s not bound by an explicit order and takes all sorts of devious steps in order to return to the US, just think what can happen when a cunning terrorist puts his/her mind to circumventing our policies?

It’s not unlike corporate computer security, where techs are told to ignore the “CEO” who calls in on a Sunday morning, ranting about how he has lost his password and has to get into the system because of a critical meeting Monday morning. He might be the CEO, or he might be a devious hacker: it’s better to err on the side of enforcing the laws strictly than to have the whole system collapse because of human error.

If there’s anything good to come from this situation, it’s the dumb luck that at least Mr. Speaker (who, irony of irony, is married to the daughter of a CDC TB researcher: she should have paid a little more attention at the family dinner table when dad talked about her work, and/or put her foot down when her new hubby hatched his scheme. Can this marriage be saved???) didn’t have H5N1 — this should really be a heads-up that we need a stem-to-stern review of policy, training, and decision-making when it comes to border crossing issues.

10 Homeland Security Technologies to Watch in 2007 [Dec 29 06]

1. new uses, such as storing encrypted medical and family financial records, plus detailed emergency response information, for USB thumb drives, which now cost next to nothing. My current favs: either one of the sushi drives or the stuffed croc (although, if someone's smart, they'll create one in the shape of a locket (complete with picture of the grandkids), which your tech-phobic granny can wear around her neck.
    
2. an increasing number of cell-phone-based social networking apps, such as Boost loopt, Buddy Beacon, and Mologogo joining my old fav, Dodgeball.com, capitalizing on the trend of cell-phones including GPS and cameras, to provide location-based, real-time info. While even ad-hoc groups are capable of emergent behavior (the Flight 93 passengers being exhibit A), it's more likely to occur among those who already know each other, so apps that people routinely use to link their virtual and physical social networks will be that much more valuable in a crisis.
    
3. Similarly, more neighborhood-based blogs and web sites such as Neighbors for Neighbors, JP  in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood  or the NorthWest Carrolton one in New Orleans, which use online virtual neighborhoods to strengthen bricks-and-mortar ones, again building a sense of community that can be invaluable in a crisis.
    
4. Sorry I have to be coy about this one, but it involves a product that won't be formally rolled out for several weeks, so I had to promise to not identify it at this time: a system built around "presence" applications that instantly polls all of a person's communication devices until it is able to connect (critical in a crisis, when you may not be at your desk and some infrastructure may be compromised): a secure messaging system that would allow sharing of real-time, location-based info, polling of users through simple response options that are inside the message, such as yes/no, selection lists, or fill-in text boxes (in an emergency, that could answer vital questions about whether, for example, various neighborhoods have  water supplies, electricity, or fuel), and, where the recipient has broadband access, receiving real-time video, etc.
    
5. More use of YouTube  for things other than demonstrations of explosion technologies such as combining Mentos and Coke, or racial outbursts by soon-to-be-ex-senators, such as the educational videos from the UK Home Office  or whistle-blowing such as Michael DeKort's.
    
6. Disruption-tolerant networks (DTN), mobile nets that continue to work even if there are "... broken links and long delays." They aren't quite as efficient as fixed networks, but, in a crisis, some network is better than none.
    
7. More mashups similar to Garbage Scout, that can provide helpful information both in normal times and a disaster. One candidate (hear about this on All Things Considered yesterday, in its end-of-the-year predictions for the Web), is Wikimapia, which uses a wiki combined with Google Earth to allow people to describe local landmarks, natural attractions, etc.
   
   Of course, that location-specific information can also be helpful to terrorists looking for targets, but the cat's out of the information bag, isn't it, so we'd better be exploiting the tools available to the Bad Guys, shouldn't we?
    
8. More use of wikis, similar to fluwiki, to share group wisdom before, during and after a pandemic, terror attack, or natural disaster.
    
9. Do-it-yourself tech-based activism for disaster preparation similar to the Preemptive Media Project to survey pollution levels in Manhattan, perhaps using technology hacks such as Eyebeam's, and/or Moport, an "online tool for generating and sharing mobile phone reports. The site enables people to collectively report in real-time using mobile phones or digital cameras and computers."
    
10. More states to follow South Dakota's lead with its statewide radio system, the first statewide trunked communication system to utilize digital VHF. Because it's IP-based, it can route around obstacles and uses less bandwidth. It can also carry information as well as voice, allowing all public safety officials able to talk to one another.

Disaster simulations: getting better, but still no panacea [Dec 2 06]

Zach Phillips (BTW, an alum of America's Finest Liberal Arts College) has an excellent analysis of the pros and cons of disaster simulations in the current Government Executive.

It's a subject near and dear to my heart. Partially, that's because Hal Newman and I have a joint venture, Apocalypse Noun (hey, a bad pun never hurt anyone, did it?) in which we write what we consider to be (and clients tell us are) extremely realistic, well-researched, and non-formulaic scenarios. It's also because I've suffered through some exercises (I don't think I'll ever be able to expunge one stinkeroo last April from my memory) that were definitely a waste of time and money.

Drawn from Phillips' article, here are the yin and yang of scenarios and disaster exercises:

PRO:

the results will be more valuable if you allow independent analysis: "Rigorous and independent evaluation is needed to ensure that exercises provide an accurate portrait of response capabilities and deficiencies."

similarly, the not-so-sexy after-action report is critical (something the military stresses: field commanders are required to file "lessons learned" reports after an engagement -- and those reports are factored in when they're under consideration for higher ranks). Phillips points out that "FEMA canceled much of the follow-up work - including answering questions about moving emergency evacuees from short-term housing at the Superdome - for lack of funds," after the Hurricane Pam exercise in 2004 (lack of funds seems relative, now, doesn't it, in light of the billions spent for Katrina?).

There's a welcomed trend, IMHO, toward sharing of the lessons learned, and evaluation of the exercises themselves:

RAND has been contracted to create a searchable Public Health Preparedness Database, covering "nearly 40 simulations of terrorist attacks and infectious disease outbreaks. Each drill is graded on five elements."

DHS has hired a contractor to evaluate its exercise program.

HHS is evaluating emergency drills for several states.

probably the most helpful resource is the "Lessons Learned Information Sharing" site, "which gives registered users access to substantial preparedness information, including after-action reports on various exercises."

equally important, the feds are attempting to create standardization for design, conduct and evaluation of exercises, through the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program. Phillips reports that "DHS, HHS and the CDC reportedly are beginning to require use of this model before funding exercises. 'If all three of them are requiring the same exercise format, that's an enormous shift,' [according to the New England Center for Emergency Preparedness' Kerry] Fosher... 'It forces people to build a standardized cohort of folks who can build exercises in their state using a common language.'"

CON:
 

There's a tendancy to -- surprise -- plan for the kind of disaster we want, i.e. one that proves we've prepared well. "'Exercises are not all created equal,' says Michael Wermuth, director of homeland security programs at the nonprofit RAND Corp. 'There are a lot of different kinds of exercises, a lot of different methodologies used to conduct exercises. There are exercises that sometimes seem to be destined to ensure success or at least a successful outcome in the exercise.'"

The annual Top Off (Top Officials) exercises continue to draw most criticism, partially because the cost is so high, and partially because they're announced months in advance, so that everyone can look their best. According to Wermuth,"'If the main purpose is to really engage what the name is supposed to indicate -- to engage top officials in sitting down and having to make hard decisions about desperate situations -- I'd say it's unnecessary to have this level of attention, this scale of an exercise and particularly the expenditure of many, many millions of dollars.'" And, when the chips were down, the supposed lessons learned from the large-scale exercises clearly weren't applied.

frequently, the exercises seem assembled cookie-cutter style: "'If you're a consultant, it's pretty easy to go anywhere with these templates on [Microsoft] Word and scratch out 'Boise, Idaho,' and put in 'Orlando, Fla.,' " says Eric Noji... director of the Pandemic Avian Influenza Preparedness program at the Uniformed Services University."

the most valuable lessons are learned from actual emergencies: if you're an emergency manager and aren't combing the post-mortems from Katrina and other emergencies of all types, both here and abroad, shame on you!
 

Phillips concludes that perhaps the most important benefit of the simulations is the opportunity for emergency planners to connect names and faces before The Big One hits:

"Those relationships are paramount, because the official plan often gets jettisoned in the heat of a disaster, Noji says. Of the 82 disasters he was involved in, he never saw the formal plan used. 'I was the disaster director at [Johns Hopkins University Hospital], and I didn't even know it,' he says. 'These things are the size of phone books.'"

That squares with my experience, and is an important factor in fostering the "emergent behavior" my networked homeland security strategy argues is needed in a crisis where circumstances unfold that no one could have predicted or practiced for in advance. While effective emergent behavior can be found even among perfect strangers (i.e., the Flight 93 passengers), research has shown that it's more likely among groups who have worked together in advance.

BOTTOM LINE: disaster exercises are necessary, and are improving over time, but no one can rest easy even if they've learned lessons and applied them: disasters have a nasty habit of evolving according to their own dynamics.

Technorati tags: homeland security Katrina Hurricane Katrina DHS FEMA Department of Homeland Security New Orleans War on Terror antiterrorism smart mobs social networks public safety networked homeland security government IT collaboration avian flu pandemic public health business continuity disaster planning mesh eGovernment E-Government egov

et al.: my Boston Globe op-ed sparks discussion of virtual regionalism [Nov 16 06]--Always like to play the agent provocateur: my Boston Globe op-ed on how Gov.-elect Deval Patrick can and must make creative use of the web a critical tool in simultaneously delivering on his promises for things ranging from increased local aid (BTW, flinty Scot that I am, I'd argue that the dollar amount of local aid doesn't necessarily have to be increased if the effect of the current aid was increased through a combination of reduced costs of doing business by local government, seamless delivery of that aid, and increased efficiency of operation on the state's side. I'm sure that argument will have the likelihood of a snowball in hell of prevailing ....) seems to be kicking up some comment and discussion:

I got a nice email right after it ran from my old boss Michael Dukakis, so at least past governors read it, and from a number of state legislators.

One of my favorite commentators on the nitty-gritty of governing, syndicated columnist Neal Peirce, was intrigued by my call for "virtual regionalism" to overcome the inherent problems of New England's home-rule tradition. Peirce wrote me, "It does seem most likely that carrots and sticks to bypass home rule, rather than some frontal assault, have by far and away the best chance of success." One of my personal government IT gods, Phil Windley, Utah's CIO under now-HHS Sec. Mike Leavitt, also mentioned the "virtual regionalism" concept in his Technometria blog (BTW, I love Phil's ominous slogan: "Organizations get the IT they deserve"!).
 

there's a lively thread right now on the BlueMassGroup blog about the op-ed, with a number of contributors mentioning their gripes with the current state of e-gov in the Commonwealth and suggestions for the future.
 

one state staffer, Director Christian Jacqz of the Mass. Office of Geographic and Environmental Information, pointed out to me that the Commonwealth is taking the lead in one area of innovation: its web mapping services were honored as an "Exemplary System in Government" in the 2005 URISA competition's Enterprise Systems category. The services are available to communities, regional planning authorities, and state agencies, and the tech support include a wiki (kewl: 50 extra points, guys and gals!). It supports kml (the language for Google mashups) with a mapping engine called Geoserver as well as a richer and more sophisticated xml-based protocol put out by the Open Geospatial Consortium (didn't know about them -- neat!) -- add another 50 points each for xml and open source! Among other uses, Jacqz says MassGIS lets communities and state agencies build their own map-enabled web sites to display locations of interest (e.g., closest state office offering a given service) and also to collect data (such as exact facility locations from knowledgeable individuals, plotted on top of imagery -- that sounds particularly relevant to homeland security in terms of critical infrastructure protection). He also told me that commercial on-line mapping applications use MassGIS' orthophotos (e.g., what Google calls "satellite" images) and the office is also working with Navteq in a public-private partership to improve the completeness of the digital road map and the "hit rate" on geocoding.
 

Nice job, folks -- and my apologies for the broad-brush slap at Massachusetts' web strategy or lack thereof -- there are definitely some pockets of excellence that should be supported and applauded!

Guess so: it looks as if The Establishment, in this case, CSIS, is getting the word -- long understood by readers of this blog -- that innovative technologies and applications such as wikis or tags can be critical ways of not only sharing information, but actually transforming the work of rebuilding countries after disasters or war.

Their new report, Wikis, Webs, and Networks: Creating Connections for Conflict-Prone Settings introduces policy makers to the many ways that these new technologies can be used in dealing with what they term "collapsed and fragile states," especially since they are prone to problems with communication and connectivity. In particular, they can be critical to applying lessons learned from one problem in dealing with the next (as I blogged about the tsunami wiki and those that followed it), or communication among many international governments and agencies that are involved. The report's lofty goal is to use better connectivity "... to enable local populations to prevent and mitigate conflict and help rebuild their country."

The report is based on 4 principles that can improve connectivity in conflict prone areas -- and otherwise. It's worth repeating them:
 

I'd never heard of Mark Lombardi, nor seen any of his art, until reading a Boston Globe Arts Section special on 9/11+5, in which the paper's new art critic, Ken Johnson picked it as his choice as all the paper's critics "discuss the single work they believe captures the world as we live in it now, five years later."

Wow.

Considering the fact that he committed suicide in 2000, and thus never even experienced 9/11, Lombardi, IMHO, certainly anticipated the tangled web in which we find ourselves today (anyone wondering why the prominent Saudis were allowed to fly out of the US during the time when all civilian air travel was hypothetically grounded after 9/11 need only look at this small portion of a Lombardi drawing that shows how few degrees of separation there are between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden!). Had he lived, I'm certain his, not Valdis Krebs', would have been THE go-to visualization of the terrorists' network (no slight to Krebs: he just lacks Lombardi's visual flair.

I've now learned that Lombardi, an art historian by training, didn't become an artist until he was in his 40s (sad to say, given my professional interest in social networks, he and I were probably at Syracuse University at the same time, he as an undergrad, and I as a grad student. Even though I visited the art school's gallery frequently, we didn't connect, and that I profoundly regret), and was a fascinating blend of artist and investigative journalist. As his New York Times obit explains:

"He liked to say that his drawings were probably best understood by the newspaper reporters who had covered the scandals he diagrammed.

"Sometimes measuring as much as 10 feet across, these drawings nonetheless had tremendous visual verve, delicately tracing the convoluted unfoldings of contemporary morality tales like the savings and loan scandal, Whitewater, Iran-contra and the Vatican bank scandal.

"The small circles in his drawings identified the main players -- individuals, corporations and governments -- along a time line. The arcing lines showed personal and professional links, conflicts of interest, malfeasance and fraud.

"Solid lines traced influence, dotted lines traced assets and wavy lines traced frozen assets. Final denouements like court judgment, bankruptcy and death were noted in red.

"Mr. Lombardi, who was born in Syracuse in 1951, received a bachelor's degree in art history from Syracuse University. After graduating from college he moved to Houston, where he worked briefly as an assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

"Mr. Lombardi ran a small gallery while making abstract paintings on the side. He began making his drawings in 1993, inspired by a doodled diagram he had made while talking on the phone to a banker friend about the savings and loan scandal.

"Reading several newspapers a day, he culled his information entirely from published sources, keeping track of the articles with a card file that eventually held over 12,000 cards."

As Ken Johnson wrote:

"Ever since the United States invaded Iraq in what seemed to many a puzzlingly indirect reaction to Al Qaeda's 9/11 terrorist attacks, questions about the Bush administration's real motivations have been a matter of debate and speculation. Was the purpose really to spread freedom and democracy, or were there other unacknowledged plans? Many people who knew Lombardi and his work have wished he were still around to connect the dots. But that misses the larger point of his art.

"Part of the experience of Lombardi's drawing is a kind of narrative thrill, not unlike that of novels by Thomas Pynchon and John le Carre. Discovering the shadowy interconnectedness of what you would have thought were totally unrelated people and agencies can induce paranoia, but it is also curiously satisfying; the world starts to make a kind of cosmic sense. Lombardi's works are near-perfect weddings of aesthetic form and worldly content. (my emphasis)

"The drawings leave out a lot of information, and they raise as many questions as they answer. Their broad, untouched areas of white paper are metaphorical as well as literal: You have to fill in the blanks for yourself. So the viewer is thrown into a philosophical quandary: Is the truth out there, a discoverable empirical order? Or do we project the truth by means of our own stories and fantasies and according to our aesthetic predilections onto an otherwise chaotic reality?

"After 9/11, that philosophical quandary took on a more than theoretical urgency. Lombardi did not predict the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or the US invasion of Iraq, though you get the feeling that had he lived he would not have been surprised by either. What he left for the future was an exemplary method for making sense of the bewildering and scary new world so tragically ushered in by the events of Sept. 11, 2001."

You can say that again!

Lombardo's work speaks to me on two levels: selfishly, as Hal Newman of Team EMS and I prepare to launch our social network mapping service to companies, it's a reaffirmation of how a social network map can illustrate connections far better than a dry narrative. As a world citizen, it's a reminder that, even if George W. Bush forgets it, we are all interconnected already and we'd damn well better find solutions to complex issues that reinforce those ties for mutual advantage rather than to pursue short-sighted politicies that fray them.

Ten 21st century disaster preparation tips the officials won't tell you [Aug 28 06]--The advent of 21st century personal communications devices and services, particularly camera phones with GPS capability, GPS devices in your car, P2P software such as mesh networking, or social networking services, mean that it's now feasible to have two-way sharing of real-time, location-based information that could save your life in a crisis.

You won't find these tips about how to capitalize on those devices and applications on Ready.gov, or other federal, state, and/or local preparedness sites. In some cases it's because the services described below are private sector ones that government agencies can't endorse. More likely, most government agencies are clueless that these services exist (for example, it wasn't until I told them about DCERN that DHS officials realized it existed, even though it operates literally in their own backyard).

So here are ten 21st century disaster and preparedness tips from Stephenson Strategies that you won't see on the official lists of things to do to prepare for a disaster or terrorist attack, but that you and your neighbors should implement NOW, so that you'll be prepared to act intelligently and calmly if you find yourselves on your own:

1. now that thumb drives cost less than $10 ($7.95 at Staples this week), put your family's medical records (if you can get them from your physician in digital form) and other vital documents on them and attach it to your keychain so you'll have them with you at all times (encrypt them with TrueCrypt for safety).
   
    
2. buy a pair of family-radio (FRS) walkie-talkies (under $20 at discount stores) for emergency communications. Use them to set up a volunteer, self-organizing community emergency communications network similar to the DCERN one in Washington DC
   
    
3. add your FRS emergency network to National SOS radio, which links local FRS networkswith ham operators for a comprehensive, low-power emergency communications network.
   
    
4. subscribe to the XML feeds from the National Hurricane Center so you'll get real-time information on hurricanes.
   
    
5. buy a solar charger for your laptop so that you'll have a portable electric supply with you at all times.
   
    
6. download the free CUWin mesh network software and burn it to CDs to share with your neighbors, so you can create a self-organizing, self-healing mesh network with neighbors even if your Internet access is lost in an emergency.
   
    
7. if Sirius (NYC, Ch. 148; Boston/Philly, 149; LA, 150; Chicago/St. Louis, 151; Balt/DC, 152; Atlanta/Miami, 153; Dallas-Ft.Worth/Houston, 154; Detroit,Pittsburgh, 155; SF/Seattle, 156; Orlando/Tampa-St. Pete, 158) or XM Satellite Radio (Boston, Ch. 210; NYC, 211; Philly, 212; Baltimore, 213; DC, 214;  Pittsburgh, 215; Detroit, 216; Chicago, 217; St. Louis, 218; Minneapolis, 219; Seattle, 220, SF, 221; LA, 222; San Diego, 223; Phoenix, 224; Dallas/Ft. Worth, 225; Houston, 226; Atlanta, 227; Tampa, 228; Orlando, 229; Miami, 230) provide real-time, location-based weather and traffic channels for your area, subscribe. XM has a special emergency channel, 247, that's activated in an emergency.
   
    
8. Use the structure and information of the KatrinaHelp wiki as the starting point to establish a self-help wiki before the hurricane hits, and add to it as the situation evolves
   
    
9. Get all your family and friends to join Pheeder. In a crisis, you'd only have to send a single phone message to let them know you're alright (Dodgeball.com can do the same thing via SMS message, but only serves a few cities at this point.
   
    
10. After a disaster, cobble together a Google mashup similar to Garbage Scout, using your cameraphone, to alert authorities to where there are elderly/disabled persons who need extra help.

Networked Homeland Security: cheaper, more flexible – and inevitable [Aug 20 06]--News that at least 3 loosely-networked cells were involved in the thwarted UK plane bombings should be a wake-up call to the U.S.: we could face the same networked threat here.

A 1996 study, The Advent of Netwar, showed terrorist groups are loosely linked instead of hierarchical, so the Defense Department's anti-terrorist strategy now matches that threat. As the study said, "Logically, fighting a networked enemy requires the US to form networks to fight networks, and decentralizing operational decision-making authority."

However, Katrina showed DHS was inflexible, lacked redundancy, reacted slowly to changing conditions, and, when chain of command was interrupted, individual components couldn't adapt and become self-directed. So why does the Department of Homeland Security still emphasize top-down, command-and-control strategy at home a year later, especially if, as the Administration argues, we may face the same terrorist groups here (plus natural disasters exhibiting the same unpredictability and disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable)?

Convergence of 3 social and technological network trends: networked enemies, the new science of networked social behavior, and widespread adoption of networked personal communication, make a networked anti-terror and disaster strategy as or more relevant at home, particularly to productively involve the public.

The science of networked behavior is the least understood of these trends. Studies of ant and bee behavior discovered more sophisticated synergistic behavior by a colony or hive "emerges" than is predictable from individual organisms' abilities. Now, management consultants say we can and must foster the same phenomenon in human society, stimulating flexibility, robustness, and self-organizing – 3 qualities missing in Katrina and terrorism prevention planning.

Remember 9/11. The only effective response was the epitome of emergent behavior: total strangers spontaneously coalesced on Flight 93. Similarly, individuals came together via the Internet during Katrina, providing invaluable and reliable information and services to victims while government was impotent.

The final factor is the rapid spread of increasingly networked (especially peer-to-peer) personal communications devices, including camera phones, GPS devices, and 'mesh' laptop networks linking automatically (even without an Internet connection).

Human nature dictates that people can and will use them in a disaster. Those who knew to send text (not voice) messages could still communicate in Manhattan and New Orleans during the disasters: text uses little bandwidth and routes around disruptions. People already spontaneously send cameraphone photos of crimes to police in time to apprehend suspects. Some new real-time traffic alert systems rely on digital reports from users' cars at an accident scene.

However, having many individuals with communication devices does not assure emergent behavior: they must interact. Collaborative software programs, such as wikis, and social networking services foster interaction, and people are already familiar with them, so they could instantly switch to sharing emergency information in a crisis.

Networked homeland security is feasible today, cheaper and quicker to deploy using existing technology than dedicated government emergency communications systems. By facilitating those qualities needed in a crisis -- flexibility, robustness, and self-organizing -- it would transform the general public from victims, waiting for aid that may never come, into self-reliant components of the response.

So why doesn't the government embrace networked homeland security? In part, it probably is because officials fear they would no longer control information flow, or people's response.

However, given networked personal communication devices and the science of emergent behavior, government probably has already effectively lost control of information flow in a disaster. It can either capitalize on this phenomenon, finding innovative ways to treat the public as full partners in both anti-terror and disaster preparation and response -- or we will simply take matters into our own hands.
 

Networked Homeland Security: transforming the public from pawns to partners [Jun 17 06]--I will discuss a new paradigm for homeland security strategy that directly addresses many of the problems brought to light by Katrina, and one in which each of us will play a role.

It's called Networked Homeland Security. Or, as I sometimes call it when I'm trying to get a rise out of someone who is threatened by chaos, "smart mobs for homeland security," a term derived from a book by futurist Howard Rheingold in which he says "Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation."

I've advocated networked homeland security for several years, but find that decision makers are now more willing to consider it in the wake of Katrina. As one former DHS official said, we're more willing to consider creative approaches having seen how badly conventional ones failed.

We'll  debate the specifics of what went wrong for years, but what's clear is that conventional thinking failed miserably during Katrina. Shamefully, Americans died needlessly as the result, and an entire region still suffers.

In one of his first postmortems, Sec. Chertoff acknowledged this failure, saying that "the unprecedented nature of the disaster makes it necessary for Washington 'to break the mold' and create a new mold."

Mr. Secretary, you're right that we need to break the mold. You're wrong when you say that we need to create a new mold.

Molds work fine for jelly, but when it comes to fast changing, unpredictable situations, whether they be terrorist attacks or global commerce, molds constrict your ability to react quickly, to turn on a dime when one tactic fails and try something else. We need to let that jelly ooze!

Coming from New England and being a history buff, I'm reminded of an event in my area during the spring of 1775 in which a few brave men broke all the molds (and were roundly criticized for it, by their gentlemanly adveraries, for not playing by the supposed rules). This time around, I'm afraid we're the ones marching in formation and following the "rules." Its our opponents, be they Al Qaeda, Katrina or the looming flu pandemic, who, like the Minutemen, are networked, elusive, and quickly regroup and try something different.

This is a lesson the US military has already learned in dealing with terrorism. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, starting back in 1993, have steadily refined the concept of netwar. They write that the information revolution is "altering the nature of conflict across the spectrum." It often gives small groups who communicate, coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in an networked manner, without a precise central command, an advantage over hierarchical forms. Logically, Arquilla and Ronfeldt say that it takes a networked defense to fight a networked offense. Their approach is now an accepted part of Pentagon strategy.

Yet, as we saw during Katrina, the other portion of our defense against terror, homeland security, doesn[base ']t seem to have learned the netwar concept.  Their approach was centralized and hierarchical, didn't seem to sense that the circumstances on the ground required a change in tactics, and was unable to redeploy forces rapidly.

It's time to apply the networked approach to homeland security as well. The time is right, because of the convergence of three important aspects of networks.

First is the situation we confront. Whether the "opponent" is a terrorist group, natural disaster, or a flu pandemic, they share several characteristics: their behavior is hard to predict from past experience, they're opportunistic, strike particularly at the most vulnerable, and, invariably, draw in the general public.  
Logically, as with the netwar concept, to be effective, we need a response that has the same characteristics as these situations.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt noted in the early '90s that the information revolution favored networked strategies. That is even more the case today. The second aspect of the evolution of networks arguing for a networked strategy is the nature of the communications technology that you and I increasingly use on a daily basis, from cell and camera phones to Wi-Fi laptops and GPS in our cars. Unlike the mass media, these devices are increasingly based on Internet Protocol and are packet-based. That means the resulting networks are decentralized, self-organizing and self-healing -- they don't depend on central authorities or facilities and are less dependent on fixed infrastructure that might be damaged in a disaster.

This common format also means that information from them can be blended and combined, into new hybrid forms of rich information. And, as the growing number of Google Map "mashups" shows, communication is increasingly providing actionable information in a real-time, location-based format. That can be critical in a crisis, when it's vital for authorities to know what's happening and where -- right now -- not what they'd predicted might happen in planning exercises.

Finally, unlike government communications networks that are only upgraded sporadically, these personal devices are constantly upgraded. Each time that they are, smart entrepreneurs find new applications and services to exploit that new power. Instead of having to create a stand-alone emergency communications system, we can leverage those private sector solutions, with whom the public is already familiar, in a crisis.

Finally, the third component of networks -- and the least understood -- is the growing body of science about the sociology of group behavior made possible by networks. In a social network, individuals are free actors, they're not controlled by a hierarchy, but loosely linked. And, the power of a network increases exponentially, because of the number of subgroups that can form within the larger one. Particularly important is research at the Santa Fe Institute and other places on "emergent behavior." First observed in ant hills and bee hives, we now know humans are also capable of emergent behavior:  a higher level of collective behavior -- and combined intelligence -- that can't be predicted from individuals' behavior: the group becomes a highly-capable "superorganism."  All these aspects of social networks mean the general public can be a potent and effective asset that in homeland security or disaster response.

Combined, these 3 elements of networks:
 

• the need to combat a networked enemy with a network
• the growing power of self-organizing, self-healing personal communications networks
• the understanding of the synergistic power of networks

• While government debates the next generation of emergency communication, a grassroots network here in the District of Columbia, DCERN, has blanketed the region with a no-cost, self-organizing emergency communications network using $15 walkie-talkies. Even better, they've just merged with a national group of ham operators to create the National SOS Radio Network -- which can function even when broadcasters and other expensive fixed communications systems fail.
   
• There is a growing number of location-based, real-time information providers such as Dodgeball.com, a social networking service; XM Radio's Emergency Alert 24/7, and, my personal favorite, GarbageScout, a Google Maps mashup that helps New York City residents find usable furniture off the street.  In an emergency, all of these services could switch to providing valuable, location-based information that would eliminate the need for one-size-fits all evacuation plans such as the ones that snarled Houston traffic during Rita. Equally important, ad hoc groups could use these tools to fend for themselves on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and communicate with other ad hoc groups.
   
• Individuals who happened to be on the scene during the lead-up to a terrorist attack or during a disaster could, with a simple interactive process, provide valuable information to authorities via a cameraphone -- while the process could be designed to siphon off the trivial or hate-motivated tipsters.

Let me conclude with a warning to government: there really isn't a choice whether to embrace this kind of networked homeland security system. Given the power of networked communications and the science of emergent behavior, government has already effectively lost control of the flow of information during emergencies. We the people have the power at our fingertips to network -- and human nature dictates that we'll use it in an emergency. Also polls have shown that the public has lost faith since Katrina in government's ability to protect us and, simultaneously that we're taking more steps to prepare to help ourselves. Bottom line: government can either capitalize on networks and treat the public as full partners in prevention and response, or we will simply take matters into our own hands and circumvent government.

In fact, that's already happening as we prepare for a flu pandemic.

When governments worldwide failed to plan ahead in time, an ad hoc team of volunteers took matters into their own hands and created FluWiki. It quickly became the world's most comprehensive source of information on the issue, as well as a forum for concerned individuals to help each other prepare. The fact that it's self-organizing and anyone can post to it means that inevitably, FluWiki contains some erroneous information. However, other individuals are also empowered to correct those mistakes quickly, without having to go through a convoluted agency approval process. In a situation that is evolving as rapidly as this one, that could literally mean the difference between life and death.

Networked homeland security has the potential to overcome the public's skepticism about government, to make the public powerful auxiliaries to first cresponders -- real partners instead of pawns -- and to provide the flexibility and "collective intelligence" needed to cope with fast-changing, unprecedented threats, from terrorists to disasters. Now the only question is whether government will capitalize on it -- or be swept aside as the people take things into their own hands.

Cybersecurity Strategy: from Hierarchies to Smart Swarms : address to the Boston University Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security [April 10, 2006]--Thanks for the kind introduction.  But let me tell you a little more about myself: not out of egotism, but because people like you and people like me don't always get a chance to talk to each other.  I think that one of the vital functions of the Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security can and must be to bring us together for mutual benefit.

What I have to say about my background may leave you thinking that you're attending the wrong conference. Bear with me -- I think you'll see why how I think and what I've done, and the types of insights that people similar to me bring to the cybersecurity issue, may alert you to some aspects of it that are typically not the focus of traditional security programs -- but which I argue must be as we face networked enemies in a networked age.

Now for those three things about me that may make you look at your challenges differently.

•     The first is that I'm an environmentalist.
•     The second thing is that I am a political liberal.
•     The third thing is that I'm right-brained and intuitive.

I'm not alone in this skepticism: a 2004 Harris poll showed that:

•  87% indicated that they had asked a company to remove their information from a marketing database.
• 65% had declined to register at an e-commerce site because of privacy concerns.

One of the ways that manifests itself relating to cybersecurity is in my outrage that President Bush, on one hand, trumps the Constitution by unilaterally authorizing domestic wiretaps without going to the FISA Court for authorization. As we found out last week, on the other hand, he can unilaterally  declassify information in order to leak it for political reasons.

That, combined with my suspicion that one of America's most recognizable politicians, Sen. Ted Kennedy,  was put on the No-Fly list, and had a heck of a time getting off, has eroded my confidence in the objectivity and protections in government data collection and mining.

Again, I'm not alone. in a January ABC/Washington Post poll:

• 64% believed that federal agencies were intruding on Americans' privacy rights in investigating terrorism.
• 44% were worried that the Bush administration would go too far in compromising constitutional rights in order to investigate terrorism.

Even worse, in the eyes of the general public, these incidents are cumulative. The real differences between improper use of personal financial data by industry and governmental data by security agencies are blurred if not forgotten. One breach becomes the same as another, and everyone gets tarred with the same brush. Is that fair? No, but you must deal with it.           

Now, for the third thing about me that relates to your mission.  I was attracted to the homeland security field after 9/11 for reasons quite different from most of you. 

I  want the people who analyze data that might be relevant to national security and critical infrastructure protection  to be like you: detail-oriented, methodical -- and willing to keep at it day in and day out, year after year.

By contrast, I'm not a demon for process, procedure and accuracy. What attracted me to this field was the concerns raised soon after the terrorist attacks about "failure to connect the dots," to find patterns between seemingly unrelated information, find holistic solutions to complex problems that interweave many seemingly dissimilar threads.  That's something that, because of my right-brained, intuitive approach, is second nature for me. In fact, I had connected the dots for Fortune 50 companies during many years as a private sector crisis consultant. I suspect that, just as what you do day in day out is black magic to me, you might find what I do to be of little or no interest -- or just plain mysterious.

So why are the differing ways that I suspect you and I process information relevant to your challenges?  Four years ago, after speaking at a homeland security conference in DC, I found myself sitting at lunch  with 8-10 veteran civilian DoD analysts. At some point during the lunch -- don't ask me why: maybe the chicken was bad -- their conversation turned to Myers-Briggs personality profiles.

It was not surprising to me at all to find that, with only minor variations, these men and women were almost all the same Myers-Briggs profile: Introverted, Logical, Thinking, and Judging, or (ILTJ) -- ideal personality types for analysts and detail-oriented challenges. I suspect that many of you, if you've had a Myers-Briggs, found that your own thinking styles were similar to theirs.

By contrast, it's no wonder that the physical and cyber security fields don't have many people like me -- the ILTJ's polar opposites: ENFPs: Extroverts, iNtuitive, Emotional and Perceiving. One description of ENFPs will give you an idea of the problem:  "ENFPs may find it difficult to work within the constraints of an institution, especially in following rules, regulations, and standard operating procedures. More frequently, institutional procedures and policies are target to be challenged and bent by the will of an ENFP".

Because we face challenges unlike any we've faced in the past. We must respond in different ways, ways that will require the ILTJs and ENFPs, the political liberals and conservatives, the security skeptics and the security hard-liners.

Think about the current security threat. It's not a group of programmers in a 1960's-style Soviet gulag working in lockstep to break our codes because their very lives depend on it. Instead, it's:

• a motley crew of teenage hackers in bedroom communities whose motivation is the intellectual challenge of cracking a system
• organized crime rings in Eastern Europe
• Islamic fundamentalists with an ideological zeal to bring the Great Satan to its knees.
• and many others

The Pentagon realized the transformative role of networks in the 1990's, due to the work of  two Rand Corporation researchers, John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. In 1993, they coined the term "netwar."

Arquilla and Ronfeld wrote that the information revolution is "altering the nature of conflict across the spectrum." Communications technology gave small groups who communicate, coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in a networked manner, without a precise central command, an advantage over hierarchical forms. Logically, Arquilla and Ronfeldt said that it takes a networked defense to fight a networked offense. Their approach is now an accepted part of Pentagon strategy.

The second aspect of the evolution of networks arguing for a networked cybersecurity strategy is the nature of the communications technology that you and I increasingly use on a daily basis, from cell and camera phones to Wi-Fi laptops and GPS in our cars. These devices are increasingly IP- and packet-based. That means the resulting networks are decentralized, self-organizing and self-healing -- they don't depend on central authorities or facilities.  It also means that they are increasingly ubiquitous, combining more types of information into a unified whole, and therefore a more inviting target to hackers and terrorists, because disrupting them will affect every aspect of our lives. And, the more disparate elements are interwoven into the network, the more opportunities, especially at the fringes, present themselves for disruption, hence the growing concern about cell phone viruses, PIN thefts, and related threats outside the firewall that can trigger problems behind the firewall.   
The final networked component, and the one that I hope becomes a key strategic focus of the Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security, is networked behavior.

I argue that the key to robust security in a networked age is networked thinking, and that's where melding the diverse talents, insights and priorities of the intuitive and intellectual, liberal and conservative, must come into play.

We must replace the old hierarchical, topdown model with a  bottoms-up one dominated by smart swarms.
 

In case you haven't heard the term, it is the outgrowth of research at the Santa Fe Institute -- home of much of the pioneering work on chaos and complexity theory --  on  emergent behavior, first observed in lowly ant hills and bee hives, and now found in human society as well. 
 

Emergent behavior is a phenomenon in which a higher-level of behavior and thinking spontaneously emerges from the acts of a large number of individual actors -- action that is more than the sum of its parts.
 

I'm happy to report that emergent behavior is already playing a critical role in cybersecurity.
 

We saw a dramatic example of this phenomenon just last week. 
 

Coverity (a firm that does automatic analysis of code to quickly identify defects that might cause catastrophic crashes), Symantec, and Stanford have a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to analyze defects in open source products such as Linux, Apache, and my SQL. Why? Because these programs are so widely used today, so flaws in their code might be exploited by cyberterrorists. 
 

Last week, as the program got up to speed, Coverity released initial results that were dramatic proof of smart swarms' virtues:

• In the first seven days after it was publicly announced, more than 200 open source developers registered to gain secure access to the online defect database that Coverity had compiled.
• This smart swarm of independent developers fixed more than 900 defects during the first week, more than 5 bug fixes per hour.
• Samba, a widely used open source program used to connect Linux and Windows networks, showed the fastest developer response, reducing software defects from 216 to 18 in the first seven days!
• Perhaps the most dramatic example was the Amanda backup and recovery software project. During that week, its developers eliminated all software defects that Coverity had found. In fact, they quickly released a major version, 2.5, to mark the fact that 0 outstanding defects remain.  

The evidence is incontrovertible: Smart swarms improve cybersecurity.

In the new security paradigm, not only will we use smart swarms to improve the security products themselves, but the resulting software will also encourage smart swarms when they are applied, as well.

It's too bad that Charles Jennings of Swan Island Networks couldn't be here to describe in depth the work they've done in this regard. It ain't no coincidence that one of the company's two primary products is called SWARM: Jennings is very much a pioneer in applying emergent behavior to software.

SWARM®  is an over-the-Internet communication system that allows a central authority to maintain persistent control over highly sensitive information, rich media (text, audio, video, dynamic mapping, etc.) and alerts while distributing it to trusted users on a real-time basis. SWARM also introduces robust security features for non-repudiation and security monitoring -- all within a dynamic, components-based security framework.

Perhaps most innovative is a unique "poison pill" content erasure feature -- not unlike the Mission Impossible self-destructing tapes, making it ideal for coordinators during an emergency to, for example, give short-term, limited access to classified information to individuals who don't have security clearance but who must have that data at that precise moment to cope with a situation. The issuing authority can impose limits on whom, if anyone, the recipient can share the information with, and how long they can possess it -- at which point the data vanishes.

Each SWARM  includes a closed-loop, highly secure "last mile" connection to a unique community of known users, making it easy for individual swarms to federate with each other, and to exchange information in standard data formats.

Fighting terrorism or disasters requires rapidly evolving collaborative action among players who may, under normal circumstances, be separated by organizational, jurisdictional, and IT boundaries. SWARM can actually provoke higher-level, smart swarm behavior by enhancing communication pathways among members of these ad hoc, yet trusted, communities of users. It does this by adhering to a few simple rules about information access and targeting, by integrating rich feedback loops from individual members, and by issuing new software releases every 90 days, co-evolving with  its users.

Building the kind of smart swarm approach to cybersecurity that I've described won't be easy. We right- and left-brained people see the world, and our jobs, in fundamentally different ways. We process information differently, and we speak differently. We don't always understand each other.

Yet, I argue that we have no choice but to collaborate and overcome our differences. The nature of the networked enemy we face requires the best of both of us: your attention to structure and detail, and our attention to how those dots fit together. The threats will change constantly, as will the tools both we and our opponents will use. Only through a flexible, dynamic and robust networked strategy will we be able to counter the flexible, dynamic and robust network enemy we face.

I, for one, look forward to the challenge, and to working with you.

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