Open Source Homeland

I’m not sure what it is, but there’s obviously something very fishy about what’s going on with this story. The entire story is written in the “my story went to press before I could get confirmation on a whole bunch of facts that I am trying to telegraph to you, but failing, because it’s complicated and I can’t get enough of the context out of my sources” style.

Congress Probes Emergency Network - TIME
The winning D block bidder, in exchange for use of the public safety spectrum, would build the network and make a profit by selling access to wireless service providers. But about two weeks before the auction was to begin, Frontline announced it was “closed for business.” No other bidders emerged to pledge the minimum $1.33 billion needed to win the public safety block.

The FCC has opened an investigation into a claim that OBriens involvement as adviser for the public safety trust discouraged bidders from participating. OBrien has denied the allegations. Frontline says it did not bid because it couldnt raise the money. If the FCC wants to make the public-private emergency network plan work, it will have to devise a new plan that would be attractive to a deep-pocketed investor.

We’ve all seen the Captivate Network in high-rise office buildings all over the country. This post over on ScreenWerk got me thinking about the possibilities for emergency broadcasting to those screens in municipalities. In situations where people are still encouraged to use the elevator (i.e. the danger is nearby but not in the building) it could provide a valuable, consistent communication platform.

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.

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.