Networked Homeland Security: transforming public from pawns to partners
Wharton School Alumni Assoc. “Powerful Leadership in Perilous Times” Conference,
March 24, 2006
I will discuss a new paradigm for homeland security strategy that directly addresses many of the problems brought to light by Katrina, and one in which each of us will play a role.
It’s called Networked Homeland Security. Or, as I sometimes call it when I’m trying to get a rise out of someone who is threatened by chaos, “smart mobs for homeland security,” a term derived from a book by futurist Howard Rheingold in which he says “Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation.”
I’ve advocated networked homeland security for several years, but find that decision makers are now more willing to consider it in the wake of Katrina. As one former DHS official said, we’re more willing to consider creative approaches having seen how badly conventional ones failed.
We’ll debate the specifics of what went wrong for years, but what’s clear is that conventional thinking failed miserably during Katrina. Shamefully, Americans died needlessly as the result, and an entire region still suffers.
In one of his first postmortems, Sec. Chertoff acknowledged this failure, saying that “the unprecedented nature of the disaster makes it necessary for Washington ‘to break the mold’ and create a new mold.”
Mr. Secretary, you’re right that we need to break the mold. You’re wrong when you say that we need to create a new mold.
Molds work fine for jelly, but when it comes to fast changing, unpredictable situations, whether they be terrorist attacks or global commerce, molds constrict your ability to react quickly, to turn on a dime when one tactic fails and try something else. We need to let that jelly ooze!
Coming from New England and being a history buff, I’m reminded of an event in my area during the spring of 1775 in which a few brave men broke all the molds (and were roundly criticized for it, by their gentlemanly adveraries, for not playing by the supposed rules). This time around, I’m afraid we’re the ones marching in formation and following the “rules.” Its our opponents, be they Al Qaeda, Katrina or the looming flu pandemic, who, like the Minutemen, are networked, elusive, and quickly regroup and try something different.
This is a lesson the US military has already learned in dealing with terrorism. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, starting back in 1993, have steadily refined the concept of netwar. They write that the information revolution is “altering the nature of conflict across the spectrum.” It often gives small groups who communicate, coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in an networked manner, without a precise central command, an advantage over hierarchical forms. Logically, Arquilla and Ronfeldt say that it takes a networked defense to fight a networked offense. Their approach is now an accepted part of Pentagon strategy.
Yet, as we saw during Katrina, the other portion of our defense against terror, homeland security, doesn’t seem to have learned the netwar concept. Their approach was centralized and hierarchical, didn’t seem to sense that the circumstances on the ground required a change in tactics, and was unable to redeploy forces rapidly.
It’s time to apply the networked approach to homeland security as well. The time is right, because of the convergence of three important aspects of networks.
First is the situation we confront.
Whether the “opponent” is a terrorist group, natural disaster, or a flu pandemic, they share several characteristics: their behavior is hard to predict from past experience, they’re opportunistic, strike particularly at the most vulnerable, and, invariably, draw in the general public.
Logically, as with the netwar concept, to be effective, we need a response that has the same characteristics as these situations.
Arquilla and Ronfeldt noted in the early ‘90s that the information revolution favored networked strategies. That is even more the case today.
The second aspect of the evolution of networks arguing for a networked strategy is the nature of the communications technology that you and I increasingly use on a daily basis, from cell and camera phones to Wi-Fi laptops and GPS in our cars.
Unlike the mass media, these devices are increasingly based on Internet Protocol and are packet-based. That means the resulting networks are decentralized, self-organizing and self-healing — they don’t depend on central authorities or facilities and are less dependent on fixed infrastructure that might be damaged in a disaster.
This common format also means that information from them can be blended and combined, into new hybrid forms of rich information. And, as the growing number of Google Map “mashups” shows, communication is increasingly providing actionable information in a real-time, location-based format. That can be critical in a crisis, when it’s important for authorities to know what’s happening and where — right now — not what they’d predicted might happen in planning exercises.
Finally, unlike government communications networks that are only upgraded sporadically, these personal devices are constantly upgraded.
Each time that they are, smart entrepreneurs find new applications and services to exploit that new power. Instead of having to create a standalone emergency communications system, we can leverage those private sector solutions, with whom the public is already familiar, in a crisis.
Finally, the third component of networks — and the least understood — is the growing body of science about the sociology of group behavior made possible by networks.
In a social network, individuals are free actors, they’re not controlled by a hierarchy, but loosely linked. The power of a network increases exponentially, because of the number of subgroups that can form within the larger one.
Particularly important is research at the Santa Fe Institute and other places on “ emergent behavior.” First observed in ant hills and bee hives, we now know
humans are also capable of emergent behavior: a higher level of collective behavior — and combined intelligence — that can’t be predicted from individuals’ behavior: the group becomes a highly-capable “superorganism.” All these aspects of social networks mean the general public can be a potent and effective asset to first responders and officials in homeland security or disaster response.
Combined, these 3 elements of networks:
- the need to combat a networked enemy with a network
- the growing power of self-organizing, self-healing personal communications networks
- the understanding of the synergistic power of networks
constitute the ideal solution to the problems we saw during Katrina: the potential to turn the public from pawns to be herded about into full partners in preparation and response. And, to add some immediacy to the situation, we have the unprecedented threat of a flu pandemic. As I wrote last week in Network World, only an unprecedented use of collaborative technology and an unprecedented level of collaboration will get us through this looming crisis.
Due to our time constraints, I can’t explain precisely how this kind of system would work. If you go to my blog,, you can learn more about the technology and the sciene of emergence and how the network would come together. However, let me give you just a few examples of how such an ad hoc, networked system might work in practice, to demonstrate that it is practical today and would be ideally matched to the challenges we face.
While government debates the next generation of emergency communication, a grassroots network here in the District of Columbia, DCERN, has blanketed the region with a no-cost, self-organizing emergency communications network using $15 walkie-talkies. Even better, they’ve just merged with a national group of ham operators to create the National SOS Radio Network — which can function even when broadcasters and other expensive fixed communications systems fail.
There is a growing number of location-based, real-time information providers such as Dodgeball.com, a social networking service; XM Radio’s Emergency Alert 24/7, and, my personal favorite, GarbageScout, a Google Maps mashup that helps New York City residents find usable furniture off the street. In an emergency, all of these services could switch to providing valuable, location-based information that would eliminate the need for one-size-fits all evacuation plans such as the ones that snarled Houston traffic during Rita. Equally important, ad hoc groups could use these tools to fend for themselves on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and communicate with other ad hoc groups.
Individuals who happened to be on the scene during the lead-up to a terrorist attack or during a disaster could, with a simple interactive process, provide valuable information to authorities via a cameraphone — while the process could be designed to siphon off the trivial or hate-motivated tipsters.
Let me conclude with a warning to government: there really isn’t a choice whether to embrace this kind of networked homeland security system.
Given the power of networked communications and the science of emergent behavior, government has already effectively lost control of the flow of information during emergencies. We the people have the power at our fingertips to network — and human nature dictates that we’ll use it in an emergency. Also polls have shown that the public has lost faith since Katrina in government’s ability to protect us and, simultaneously that we’re taking more steps to prepare to help ourselves.
Here’s the bottom line: government can either capitalize on networks and treat the public as full partners in prevention and response, or we will simply take matters into our own hands and circumvent government.
In fact, that‘s already happening as we prepare for a flu pandemic.
When governments world-wide failed to plan ahead in time, an ad hoc team of volunteers took matters into their own hands and created. It quickly became the world’s most comprehensive source of information on the issue, as well as a forum for concerned individuals to help each other prepare. The fact that it’s self-organizing and anyone can post to it means that inevitably, FluWiki contains some erroneous information. However, other individuals are also empowered to correct those mistakes quickly, without having to go through a convoluted agency approval process. In a situation that is evolving as rapidly as this one, that could literally mean the difference between life and death.
Networked homeland security has the potential to overcome the public’s skepticism about government, to make the public powerful auxiliaries to first cresponders — real partners instead of pawns — and to provide the flexibility and “collective intelligence” needed to cope with fast-changing, unprecedented threats, from terrorists to disasters. Now the only question is whether government will capitalize on it — or be swept aside as the people take things into their own hands.
Thank you.
