Open Source Homeland

But will they have the discipline to show up for work after a disaster?

Mail carriers test ability to deliver medicine in event of attack – Boston.com
Postal carriers fanned out Sunday in the South End and West Roxbury, delivering some 23,000 empty cardboard boxes to homes in the neighborhood. The object of the drill was to determine how quickly life-saving medicine could be delivered to residents in the event terrorists staged an anthrax attack.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick released a pretty extensive homeland security strategy for the state. Ill be vetting it over the next few days, The thing that caught my eye in a preliminary story was the idea below about the centrality of the state as the coordinating body (rather than Federal or local) in the event of an emergency.

I agree with that estimation, but the only problem with that is that state government tends to think of emergency response efforts narrowly in terms of official governmental entities. They need to consider, cull, and coordinate informal response as well.

Patrick report gives security tips – The Boston Globe
The report says the most important thing the state can do is improve communications between first responders and state and local officials. Undersecretary for Homeland Security Juliette Kayyem says that while local communities have learned lessons from the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, only the state can coordinate large-scale disaster management.

Download the complete Commonwealth of Massachusetts State Homeland Security Strategy report here. (PDF, 440KB, 31 pages)

Included in a recent story on DHS-sponsored gadgets is something about the National Applications Office, “a clearinghouse for expanded output of imagery to police, border security and other law enforcement outfits”. Despite the reservations of the House of Representatives, this could have a huge trickle-down affect on sparking innovation in private industry (i.e. the non-defense contractor portion of private industry– the web-based mapping companies that are currently driving innovation). The DHS should consider opening up their geospatial data to more than just police departments and state police, but this is moving in the right direction.

Tech wonders on homeland security horizon
In other surveillance developments, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is defending a plan to make broader use of eyes in the sky that, until now, have mostly fed military and scientific needs.

“The use of geospatial information from military intelligence satellites may turn out to be a valuable tool in protecting the homeland,” Democrats on the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee wrote to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff this month.

But they voiced privacy and civil liberties concerns about the scheduled Oct. 1 launch of the National Applications Office, a clearinghouse for expanded output of imagery to police, border security and other law enforcement outfits.

“We are so concerned that, as the departments authorizing committee, we are calling for a moratorium on the program until the many constitutional, legal and organizational questions it raises are answered,” Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and colleagues wrote on Sept. 6.

We need more of this. All you need is the right language skills, some rudimentary technology, and a desire to make money.

S.C. mom scoops al-Qaida with its videos – Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists.

Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics.

Occasionally she comes across a gem, such as when she found a recent Osama bin Laden video — before al-Qaida had announced it.

“I realized, oh my gosh, I’m sitting here, I’m a fat 50-year-old mom and I’ve managed to scoop al-Qaida,” said Mansfield, who uses that name as a pseudonym because she receives death threats.

 Finally seem to be trying to engage people where they live instead of with goofball fake programs that Karen Hughes is working.

At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate – New York Times
WASHINGTON — Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the “noble resistance” in Iraq.

So Mr. Jawad, one of two Arabic-speaking members of what the State Department called its Digital Outreach Team, posted his own question: Why was it that many in the Arab world quickly condemned civilian Palestinian deaths but were mute about the endless killing of women and children by suicide bombers in Iraq?

Among those who responded was a man named Radad, evidently a Sunni Muslim, who wrote that many of the dead in Iraq were just Shiites and describing them in derogatory terms. But others who answered Mr. Jawad said that they, too, wondered why only Palestinian dead were “martyrs.”

The discussion tacked back and forth for four days, one of many such conversations prompted by scores of postings the State Department has made on about 70 Web sites since it put its two Arab-American Web monitors to work last November.

The postings, are an effort to take a more casual, varied approach to improving America’s image in the Muslim world.

Brent E. Blaschke, the project director, said the idea was to reach “swing voters,” whom he described as the silent majority of Muslims who might sympathize with Al Qaeda yet be open to information about United States government policy and American values.