Open Source Homeland

I missed this when it came out earlier this Spring. Awesome wikipedia vandalism down at the bottom two demands.

Adam Yahiye Gadahn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
On May 29, 2007 Gadahn again made headlines when another video “Al-Qaeda Video Warning to US by American Adam Gadahn” was released on the internet. In this video Adam Gadahn listed six actions that Bush and America must take in order to prevent future terrorist attacks.

“Pull every last one of your soldiers, spies, security advisors, trainers, attachés , … out of every Muslim land from Afghanistan to Zanzibar …”
End “all support and aid, military, political, economic, or otherwise, to the 56-plus apostate regimes of the Muslim world, and abandon them to their well-deserved fate … ”
“End all support, moral, military, economic, political, or otherwise, to the bastard state of Israel, and ban your citizens, Zionist Jews, Zionist Christians, and the rest from traveling to occupied Palestine or settling there. Even one penny of aid will be considered sufficient justification to continue the fight.”
“… impose a blanket ban on all broadcasts to our region …”
“Free all Muslim captives from your prisons, detention facilities, and concentration camps, regardless of whether they have been recipients of what you call a fair trial or not.”
“Make Paul McCartney and Kenny G. stop performing and recording.”
“Make Ali G. Supreme Leader of the western world.”

Gadahn warned

“…your failure to heed our demands and the demands of reason means that you and your people will – Allah willing – experience things which will make you forget all about the horrors of September 11th, Afghanistan and Iraq and Virginia Tech”.

 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.”

God bless the dead at Virginia Tech and the people who love them. Some thoughts:

• Text messaging is the best possible communication tool in the event of a fast-moving emergency. Email is good, but text messaging is better— immediate push, more mobile to get info where it’s needed, and the devices are ubiquitous
• Loosely coupled, unofficial communication that is based on official info is the best. Many blame the University for not putting out an email alert until two hours after the first incident. They should have sent an email earlier, but it’s easy to understand why they might think twice before sounding the alarm based on what they knew at the time
• However, the essential info— that 2 people were shot in a dorm and that the killer was on the loose— was probably discernible from the police scanners. If a local scanner aficionado had access to a text alert system, they could have notified hundreds or thousands of people in one swoop, without the strictures that University and police officials work under. Those people can notify hundreds of other people, especially in a confined area like a classroom
• A system like this would lead to more “false positives”— alerts that ending up being unnecessary— but if the system is opt-in, you only get what you signed up for. If enough people are in the system, you’ll get enough coverage to make it effective