Open Source Homeland

How To:FREE Air Horn Video

The people over at  reCAPTCHA? have a brilliant  idea. They seek to solve two problems at once:

• How to authenticate people who sign in to websites
• How to digitize millions of pages of books

The first problem is already solved with, among other things, CAPTCHA— those hard-to-read nonsense words we’ve all come across. The second problem can be solved with the first solutions— why not use real words, taken from real books, and round-trip those word back into the digitized books so they’re available in digital form? It takes the Mechanical Turk concept even farther.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, thats not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Here’s a pretty  extreme example of public/private data cooperation.

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online
There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

 Second City Cop is one of my favorite weblogs in the world. Tons of valuable info on what’s really going on in my town. Here’s SCC sounding off about the latest Chicago story on emergency preparedness.

By the way, has anyone gotten their updated orders on how to operate in a terror attack zone? How radio communications will operate? What will happen if a biological, chemical or nuclear device is detonated? How gang, tact or incident teams will be mobilized? Whether or not Detectives will be put in uniform and if they will be used in a support capacity for the Feds?

As usual, the gold is in the comments.

David Brooks writes today of John Robb, writer of the weblog Global Guerillas and the book “Brave New War“. Robb is former Air Force, is a tech guru, and knows of what he speaks. God bless us all.

The Insurgent Advantage - New York Times
Robb observes that today’s extremist organizations are not like the P.L.O. under Yasir Arafat. They’re not liberation armies. Instead, modern terror groups are open-source, decentralized conglomerations of small, quasi-independent groups.

There are between 70 and 100 groups that make up the Iraqi insurgency, and they are organized, Robb says, like a bazaar. It’s pointless to decapitate the head of the insurgency or disrupt its command structure, because the insurgency doesn’t have these things. Instead, it is a swarm of disparate companies that share information, learn from each other’s experiments and respond quickly to environmental signals.