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.

Government funding for ‘Muslim MySpaces’ « I’m Simon Dickson.

Quoting from here:

The funding will facilitate an expansion of Internet based projects, radio stations and web-casts which are locally run and managed to give young people spaces and forums to share their views and discuss issues such as democracy and shared values. By encouraging young people to discuss these issues openly we will seek to undermine the influence of extremists who use the web as a propaganda tool to radicalise young British Muslims.

Please, God, let this all make a difference some day. At the very least, these projects seem the opposite of this mouthful that seems to have gone nowhere.

Logged in and Sharing Gossip, er, Intelligence – New York Times
In December, officials say, the agencies will introduce A-Space, a top-secret variant of the social networking Web sites MySpace and Facebook. The “A” stands for “analyst,” and where Facebook users swap snapshots, homework tips and gossip, intelligence analysts will be able to compare notes on satellite photos of North Korean nuclear sites, Iraqi insurgents and Chinese missiles.

A-Space will join Intellipedia, the spooks’ Wikipedia, where intelligence officers from all 16 American spy agencies pool their knowledge. Sixteen months after its creation, officials say, the top-secret version of Intellipedia has 29,255 articles, with an average of 114 new articles and more than 4,800 edits to articles added each workday.

A separate online Library of National Intelligence is to include all official intelligence reports sent out by each agency, offering Amazon.com-style suggestions: if you liked that piece on Venezuela’s oil reserves, how about this one on Russia’s? And blogs, accessible only to other spies, are proliferating behind the security fences.

“We see the Internet passing us in the fast lane,” said Mike Wertheimer, of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, who is overseeing the introduction of A-Space. “We’re playing a little catch-up.”

 The official line on the Virginia Tech report is that the University should have alerted people earlier. But the fact is that some plain-old electronic rumor-mongering and unofficial rush-to-post twittering would have done the trick, too.

Report: V. Tech could have saved lives :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Nation
Had university officials not waited more than two hours to tell the campus about the initial shootings, lives could have been saved when Seung-Hui Cho later began his massacre inside a classroom building, according to the report, released Wednesday night.

”Warning the students, faculty and staff might have made a difference,” the panel wrote. ”So the earlier and clearer the warning, the more chance an individual had of surviving.”