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Morning Lineup – December 2

2 comments

Did you catch FossilMedic’s posting the other day (HERE) about the real-time reporting of the Mumbai massacre?  If you haven’t, take time to go through it this morning.  He was talking about the flood of information from the ongoing terrorist attack that was being disseminated worldwide as it was happening.

On-scene reports, photos, videos and even Google maps showing where the terrorists were located.  Amazing, but really not so surprising if you consider how we’ve been using the internet lately.  But Mike wonders if we’re really using the internet as well as we could.

He suggested that all these command posts that are being built for fire and rescue services around the country, both for larger departments and for regional uses, should have a space set aside for what he whimsically calls the Internet Intelligence Officer (IIO).  This would be a dedicated desk where an internet-savvy officer could collate all reportings, images, etc., and forward the appropriate information to the command desk.  With that you could be getting instant reporting of any changes in the situations, new events, crowd problems, you name it.

[photopress:field_communication_unit_a.jpg,full,centered]
This field communications unit is already equipped to
receive broadband internet service via satellite.

This is really an expansion of a similar suggestion that we’ve made earlier about having your communications center capable of grabbing incoming cellphone pictures and relaying them to responding units on major calls.  Every department, no matter how small, has at least one guy who is “wired” in to the workings of the internet and knows how to seek out the live-action Twitter and Flickr boards.  Find out who he is NOW and learn from him.

Governmental agencies are notorious for being slow to adapt to new concepts.  But with the right attitude from your Chief, you can start getting your department moving into this very new information age that is arriving rapidly. 

We also have to make sure that this equipment is ready, so let’s get it checked out.  I’ll make sure there’s plenty of coffee.

[photopress:buckle_up_lights_1_2_3_4_5_6_7_8.jpg,full,alignleft]

Posted by on December 2, 2008 • Filed under: morning lineup
  • Dal90

    It is a very interesting idea.

    I suspect the best place for this type of real-time intelligence gathering is at a national level similiar to Chemtrec.

    Oh, there may be local specialists at the dispatch center or field comms level who interact with the national group. But rather then one person surfing in the wilderness, call up one central center that has a large on-duty staff and even more then can call in to work (or have them log in from home) and ask for intelligence on the incident.

    Another model I just thought of is to virtualize the whole operation. I’m thinking of the Internet Storm Center (http://isc.sans.org/ — a security site) which has a handler on duty 24×7. I believe they’re all volunteer, and if something major starts to trip alarms they can contact other handlers for assistance.

    In this case, send out the alert you need help gathering social networking intelligence on a specific incident and let the people on-call from various places around the country work together to collate and post the information. They’d be assisted by some central software to help manage the flow of information, and a core set of tools to rapidly search the various sources.

    You know, that could be a fun project. I wonder if Google would be willing to drop some bling to bankroll it :)

  • Dal90

    It is a very interesting idea.

    I suspect the best place for this type of real-time intelligence gathering is at a national level similiar to Chemtrec.

    Oh, there may be local specialists at the dispatch center or field comms level who interact with the national group. But rather then one person surfing in the wilderness, call up one central center that has a large on-duty staff and even more then can call in to work (or have them log in from home) and ask for intelligence on the incident.

    Another model I just thought of is to virtualize the whole operation. I’m thinking of the Internet Storm Center (http://isc.sans.org/ — a security site) which has a handler on duty 24×7. I believe they’re all volunteer, and if something major starts to trip alarms they can contact other handlers for assistance.

    In this case, send out the alert you need help gathering social networking intelligence on a specific incident and let the people on-call from various places around the country work together to collate and post the information. They’d be assisted by some central software to help manage the flow of information, and a core set of tools to rapidly search the various sources.

    You know, that could be a fun project. I wonder if Google would be willing to drop some bling to bankroll it :)