Open Source Homeland

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 CTA has announced that Chicago police will soon be able to tap into the buses on the street and see what’s going on inside them. This kind of idea sounds great on the surface, but you can see that’s overly tight and a little unpractical. Second City Cop points out that the cameras are useful after the fact and notes some practical issues in viewing the feeds in the car.

Seems to me that if a cop is driving near a bus and wants to see what’s going on inside, they’d board the bus.

Tech Upgrades Allow Police To Tap Into CTA Cameras – News Story – WMAQ | Chicago
CHICAGO — Chicago police will soon be able to see what is happening on a Chicago Transit Authority bus without getting on board, NBC5 reported on Thursday.

New computer upgrades will allow officers to electronically tap into video cameras already installed on city buses.

Video images viewed in real time will let police dispatchers issue immediate alerts about criminal activity.
Last month, after a gunman opened fire on a CTA bus, killing 16-year-old Julian High School student Blair Holt, and police looked at videotapes to identify a suspect.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative is fantastic. The kind of thing that can change everything. Mesh network, crank power, no-glare screen for outdoors. The kind of machine that can provide a ton of use in a no-electricity, post-disaster environment.

Pentagram has a look at the new user interface for the device– called “Sugar”:

Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaaki Okada are working on the design of the laptop interface for the One Laptop Per Child project, the initiative to put $100 laptops in the hands of children around the world. The project is being led by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding director of the MIT Media Lab, and the designers are working in close collaboration with the OLPC development team, including president Walter Bender and designer Eben Eliason. Production on the laptops is scheduled for mid-2007.

Called Sugar, the interface uses a highly abstracted spatial navigation metaphor, an extension of the familiar desktop metaphor, for easy, intuitive navigation that makes the most of the laptop’s networking capabilities. Children can move through four levels of view—Home, Friends, Neighborhood, and Activity—and connect with others in the network “mesh” formed by users.