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Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Keeping your Mouth Shut

Anybody who reads me knows i'm not a big fan of government security. I think that the government security in many areas has created a crises in faith in the government. Something like 70% of people think the government knows more about UFOs than it is telling us. Whatever you believe about UFOs has nothing to do with it -- such numbers indicate a problem in a democracy. A problem caused by too much secrecy.

I'm also not a big fan of keeping your mouth shut. A free and open press are vitally necessary to the health of the democracy.

But these lunatics who are running stories about how to launch better terrorist attacks?

One word.

Dumb.

After 9-11, many governments asked people to be more creative in anticipating terrorist attacks. I remember sitting down and having a mind exercise on how I would conduct a terorist attack.

It didn't take me too long to come up with a whole bunch of new ideas. Most of which are unstoppable. But did I write these down? Did I publish a book? Nope.

It wasn't the right thing to do.

I support the right of free speech even in cases like this where I disagree, but I also have the right to call such speech dangerous, dumb, and un-helpful.

Instead, maybe we should be thinking up ways to help prevent such attacks. I would suggest that a rules-based terrorism computer response unit (TCRU) be built. Such a system could contain millions of different possible terrorist attack scenarios and be able to give instantaneous analysis to leaders during an actual attack. There are too many twists and turns for even experts to keep up with during an actual event -- a computerized system could make recommendations and identify key trends more efficiently. The humans then would have better information to make decisions with. Ideas such as mine and other people's could be fed into the TCRU so that this informaiton (and suggested counter-measures) would be immediatly available. This might not be as easy as it first seems! Several scenarios might have contradictory repsonses, and dealing with the combinations will require advanced porgamming techniques.

At least it's an idea. A positive idea.

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