Open Source Homeland

One thing that is well-noted by little noted about the recent failed toner cartridge bombings is the fact that the key element to finding the packages was the exact tracking package numbers.

So technology that we all use daily, that is deeply integrated with our favorite search engine, that allows us to see where our eBay purchases are at any given moment, is the same technology that was used to find these bombs.

Good stuff.

This thread comes up once ever three months, somewhere. It’s an outrage searching for a reason. As a practical matter, there is very little interference between government officials and casual photographers.

Whatever strum und drang there is can almost always be solved with calm, honest communication instead of getting yer backs up.

Photoblog – Is photography a crime?.

Robert Hood says: Carlos Miller tirelessly advocates for photographer rights on his blog; Photography is Not a Crime. He is particularly interested in the times when photographers intersect with what he claims are heavy-handed police tactics. I’m a reader of his blog because the topic comes up often in the photojournalism industry.

Someday we won’t consider any part of this a failure.

Social media play key role in Boulder fire – Lost Remote.

When the Boulder Sheriff’s emergency alert system failed, its emergency operations center asked that residents use Twitter and Facebook to help spread the word of mandatory evacuations, reports the Boulder Channel 1 Blog. The hashtag #boulderfire has become a lifeline of sorts for many looking for the latest information on the fire, as well as people and businesses offering to help evacuees.

Friendfeed for watchlists!

New DHS program to automate transmission of watch list data — Government Computer News.

DHS and the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), which maintains the consolidated database, are putting in place a program called DHS Watchlist Service (WLS). WLS will replace multiple data feeds from TSC to Homeland Security agencies that handle various missions such as counterterrorism, law enforcement and border security, the department’s privacy office said in an assessment of the program.

Good stuff, right here in Chicago (h/t @harper):

The Joint Threat Anticipation Center

The Joint Threat Anticipation Center was a collaborative project of the Center for International Studies and the Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation at Argonne National Laboratory

. It was funded by the Advanced Systems Concepts Office (ASCO) of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2004-08, as part of the agency’s larger Threat Anticipation Program.

The foundational objectives of the center were as follows:

• Expand and champion the art and science of anticipating threats.
• Establish a center located at the University of Chicago that will become a recognized ?center for excellence? of threat anticipation expertise, promotion, and products.
• Develop a repository at Argonne National Laboratory for models, publications, and institutional memory of threat anticipation.
• Provide the services that can assist ASCO with focused TAP activities and contacts that facilitate federal interagency participation.

As with any extended collaborative research project, these objectives evolved as the relationship between the two partners and funding agency grew and developed over four years. As concerns CIS, the Director and Associate Director identified and developed the relevant social science research and research product of the University of Chicago community, and built links between those researchers, Argonne, and DTRA to help advance the field in computational social science modeling and the anticipation of national security threats.

Read more about JTAC’s activities from 2004-2008…