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I stand by what I said:
Also, my personal security guru, Bruce Schneier, says it’s foolish even to worry about hotel safety, because the chances of something happening on any particular night in any particular hotel are vanishingly small. The taxi ride to the hotel is invariably more dangerous than the hotel itself.
But if you tend to stay in targeted hotels, the advice is pretty good.
Twitter was a vital source of information in Mumbai:
News on the Bombay attacks is breaking fast on Twitter with hundreds of people using the site to update others with first-hand accounts of the carnage.
The website has a stream of comments on the attacks which is being updated by the second, often by eye-witnesses and people in the city. Although the chatter cannot be verified immediately and often reflects the chaos on the streets, it is becoming the fastest source of information for those seeking unfiltered news from the scene.
But we simply have to be smarter than this:
In the past hour, people using Twitter reported that bombings and attacks were continuing, but none of these could be confirmed. Others gave details on different locations in which hostages were being held.
And this morning, Twitter users said that Indian authorities was asking users to stop updating the site for security reasons.
One person wrote: “Police reckon tweeters giving away strategic info to terrorists via Twitter”.
I can’t stress enough: people can and will use these devices and apps in a terrorist attack, so it is imperative that officials start telling us what kind of information would be relevant from Twitter, Flickr, etc. (and, BTW, what shouldn’t be spread: one Twitter user in Mumbai tweeted me that people were sending the exact location of people still in the hotels, and could tip off the terrorists) and that they begin to monitor these networks in disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.
This fear is exactly backwards. During a terrorist attack—during any crisis situation, actually—the one thing people can do is exchange information. It helps people, calms people, and actually reduces the thing the terrorists are trying to achieve: terror. Yes, there are specific movie-plot scenarios where certain public pronouncements might help the terrorists, but those are rare. I would much rather err on the side of more information, more openness, and more communication.
Seems not to be a joke.
In the middle of a sensationalist article about risks to children and how giving them cell phones can help, there’s at least one person who gets it.
Since the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many parents feel better having a way to contact their children. But hundreds of students on cell phones during an emergency can cause problems for responders.
“There’s a huge difference between feeling safer and being safer,” says Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services.
According to Trump, students’ cell phone use during emergencies can do three things: increase the spread of rumors about the situation, expedite parental traffic at a scene that needs to be controlled and accelerate the overload of cell-phone systems in the area.
Tom Hautton, an attorney for the National School Board Association, said that cell phones in schools also can lead to classroom distractions, text-message cheating and inappropriate photographs and videos being spread around campus.
We are just naturally inclined to make irrational security decisions when it comes to our children.
The UK has made public its previously classified National Risk Register.
The National Risk Register is intended to capture the range of emergencies that might have a major impact on all, or significant parts of, the UK. It provides a national picture of the risks we face, and is designed to complement Community Risk Registers, already produced and published locally by emergency planners. The driver for this work is the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which also defines what we mean by emergencies, and what responsibilities are placed on emergency responders in order to prepare for them. Further information about the Act can be found on the UK Resilience website.
Seems like the greatest threat to national security is a flu pandemic.
Is Subivor even real?
Whether it is a train fire, a highrise building fire or worse. People should have more protection than a necktie, their shirt or paper towel to cover their mouth, nose and eyes. As you know an emergency can happen at anytime and in anyplace, leaving one vulnerable. Don’t be a sitting duck. The Subivor® Subway Emergency Kit can aid you in seeing and breathing while exiting. This all-in-one compact, portable and easy to use subway emergency kit contains some items never seen before in a kit.
This could have won my Third Movie-Plot Threat Contest.
This seems very worrisome:
Federal regulators approved a plan on Wednesday to create a nationwide emergency alert system using text messages delivered to cellphones.
The real question is whether the benefits outweigh the risks. I could certainly imagine scenarios where getting short text messages out to everyone in a particular geographic area is a good thing, but I can also imagine the hacking possibilities.
And once this system is developed for emergency use, can a bulk SMS business be far behind?
Fire Engineering magazine points out that fire alarms used to be kept locked to prevent false alarms:
Q: Prior to 1870, street corner fire alarm pull boxes were kept locked. Why were they kept locked and how did a person gain access to ‘pull the box?’
A: They were kept locked due to false alarms. Nearby shopkeepers or beat cops carried the keys.
According to Robert Cromie in The Great Chicago Fire (Thomas Nelson: 1994, p. 33), this may have been one reason for the slow response to the fire:
William Lee, the O’Leary’s neighbor, rushed into Goll’s drugstore, and gasped out a request for the key to the alarm box. The new boxes were attached to the walls of stores or other convenient locations. To prevent false alarms and crank calls, the boxes were locked, and the keys given to trustworthy citizens nearby.
What happened when Lee made his request is not clear. Only one fact emerges from the confusion: No alarm was registered from any box in the vicinity of the fire until it was too late to do any good.
Apparently, Lee said that Goll refused to give him the key because he’d already seen a fire engine go past; Goll said he actually did pull the alarm, twice, but if so it must not have worked.
(There’s more about what sounds like a really bad communications failure, but it’s a little too hard for me to read on the Amazon website.)
But did you know that the fire burned for over half an hour before an alarm was ever sounded? Alarm boxes were actually kept locked in those days, to prevent false alarms!
When the first alarm box was finally opened and the lever pulled, the alarm somehow did not get through. The fire dispatcher was playing a guitar for a couple of girls at the time and he kept on serenely strumming, completely unawares. After the fire had been growing and blazing for nearly an hour a watchman screamed at the dispatcher to sound an alarm, which he did, and the first three engines, two hose wagons, and two hook and ladders were sent out—but in the wrong direction!
At first the dispatcher refused to sound another alarm, hoping to avoid further confusion.
Compare this with a proposed law in New York City that will require people to get a license before they can buy chemical, biological, or radiological attack detectors:
The legislation—which was proposed by the Bloomberg administration and would be the first of its kind in the nation—would empower the police commissioner to decide whether to grant a free five-year permit to individuals and companies seeking to “possess or deploy such detectors.” Common smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors would not be covered by the law, the Police Department said. Violations of the law would be considered a misdemeanor.
Why does the administration think such a law is necessary? Richard A. Falkenrath, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, told the Council’s Public Safety Committee at a hearing today, “Our mutual goal is to prevent false alarms and unnecessary public concern by making sure that we know where these detectors are located and that they conform to standards of quality and reliability.”
The law would also require anyone using such a detector—regardless of whether they have obtained the required permit—to notify the Police Department if the detector alerted them to a biological, chemical or radiological agent. “In this way, emergency response personnel will be able to assess threats and take appropriate action based on the maximum information available,” Dr. Falkenrath said.
False positives are a problem with any detection system, and certainly putting Geiger counters in the hands of everyone will mean a lot of amateurs calling false alarms into the police. But the way to handle that isn’t to ban Geiger counters. (Just as the way to deal with false fire alarms 100 years ago wasn’t to lock the alarm boxes.) The way to deal with it is by 1) putting a system in place to quickly separate the real alarms from the false alarms, and 2) prosecuting those who maliciously sound false alarms.
We don’t want to encourage people to report everything; that’s too many false alarms. Nor do we want to discourage them from reporting things they feel are serious. In the end, it’s the job of the police to figure out what’s what. I said this in an essay last year:
…these incidents only reinforce the need to realistically assess, not automatically escalate, citizen tips. In criminal matters, law enforcement is experienced in separating legitimate tips from unsubstantiated fears, and allocating resources accordingly; we should expect no less from them when it comes to terrorism.
EDITED TO ADD (1/18): Two commenters pointed to a 1938 invention: an alarm box that locks up your arm until the fire department sets you free. Yikes.
Paul Torrens, at the Arizona State University School of Geographical Sciences, has a computer simulation that models urban panic:
“The goal of this project is to develop a reusable and behaviorally founded computer model of pedestrian movement and crowd behavior amid dense urban environments, to serve as a test-bed for experimentation,” says Torrens. “The idea is to use the model to test hypotheses, real-world plans and strategies that are not very easy, or are impossible to test in practice.”
Such as the following: 1) simulate how a crowd flees from a burning car toward a single evacuation point; 2) test out how a pathogen might be transmitted through a mobile pedestrian over a short period of time; 3) see how the existing urban grid facilitate or does not facilitate mass evacuation prior to a hurricane landfall or in the event of dirty bomb detonation; 4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death; 5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d’état—regime change through landscape architecture.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.