Open Source Homeland

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.

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…

C.I.A. Revives Data-Sharing Program With Environmental Scientists – NYTimes.com.

The trove of images is “really useful,” said Norbert Untersteiner, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in polar ice and is a member of the team of spies and scientists behind the effort.

Scientists, Dr. Untersteiner said, “have no way to send out 500 people” across the top of the world to match the intelligence gains, adding that the new understandings might one day result in ice forecasts.

“That will be very important economically and logistically,” Dr. Untersteiner said, arguing that Arctic thaws will open new fisheries and sea lanes for shipping and spur the hunt for undersea oil and gas worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Napolitano: Public Needed to Fight Terror – CBS News
Americans, she says, have a role along with local law enforcement, the federal government and the international community.