Det globale nabo-værn

To netværks-teoretikere har udkastet et forslag til en måde at bekæmpe global terrorisme: det globale nabo-værn (GovExec.com cia Smart Mobs):

The year is 2010. A salesman, traveling by train from Dulles International Airport to Union Station in Washington, hears a beep emanate from his mobile phone. He's startled, because the sound indicates that a chemical sensor in his briefcase detects the presence of penthrite somewhere in the train car. Penthrite, one of the world's strongest explosives, is used to manufacture a sophisticated form of C-4, the plastic explosive that Richard Reid hid in his shoes when he boarded an American Airlines flight in December 2001.

The salesman quickly scans the train car and spies a beat-up-looking backpack under a seat at the far end. He realizes that his mobile phone has gone off like this before, and nothing dire has transpired. But at the next stop, a woman boards and stands next to the backpack, and a pager-like device strapped to her waist also emits a beeping noise.

As each rider's sensor detects penthrite, it alerts an agent in the National Counterterrorism Center, the U.S. government's fusion point for all terrorism intelligence. Seeing two alarms go off, the agent calls the salesman and sends a text message to the woman, asking them to describe, independently, what they see. How big is the backpack? Where is its owner? What is he wearing? The agent then enters their observations into a powerful computer. The machine quickly churns the information and looks for meaningful patterns, which, hopefully, will reveal whether there's a real attack in the offing.

This vaguely Orwellian futuristic scenario is how two network theorists imagine a country might enlist its citizens in fighting terrorists. They call it Global Neighborhood Watch. Just as a traditional neighborhood watch deputizes people living on the same block to prevent local crime, the global watch would turn participants into mobile intelligence gatherers, feeding data from chemical sensors or simply with their own eyes into a sophisticated, governmentrun system that would create hypotheses about what that data means.

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Henrik