Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

FEMA

Condi Caught by Emerging Participatory Panopticon

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Condi Returns to D.C. After Bloggers and ‘Post’ Expose Vacation
This story is an interesting one because it shows what a citizenry empowered with almost omni-present communication tools can do to share information and build a coherent picture of one person’s movement over time creating the participatory panopticon. I wonder how much citizen surveillance of government officials and their actions will become the norm. Here is the original Gawker page – where all the intelligence was gathered.
Hopefully as CatherineAustinFitts has said again and again..

Our democracy depends on honest leaders who promote transparency and accountability in the management of our resources. How do we protect such leaders from being terrorized by corrupt special interests that play dirty?

The only way is with real accountability of the action of government officials and transparency of where money and rescues flow.
Just in case Condi was wondering if her help would be needed. This disaster is WAS NOT UNPREDICTABLE – in-fact it was anticipated and she would likely be needed in her role as secretary of state to get help from other countries.

On Thursday, September 1 on Good Morning America George W. Bush said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” This is a flat, baldfaced lie. In early 2001 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) identified the three most likely megadisasters that would strain the country’s ability to respond: a terrorist attack in New York City, an earthquake in Southern California, and a hurricane hitting New Orleans. The levees in New Orleans have been breached before. The Mississippi River flood of 1927 did so. Every disaster planning exercise involving New Orleans has assumed that part of the tragedy would be breached levees, a flooded city, and human beings trapped with no food, water, or sanitary facilities. A few minutes of searching the Internet will turn up literally dozens of studies showing that a hurricane of category 3 or more hitting the lower Mississippi would breach the flood protection levees. Breached levees were no surprise and to say that they were is a lie

Ms. Rice should have been on the phone to countries who’s help we could well use not to cope with the situation faced by the south. This references the letter from my last post.

The Mississippi Delta region is the natural ecological home of a long list of infectious microbial diseases. It is America’s tropical region, more akin ecologically to Haiti or parts of Africa than to Boston or Los Angeles. The most massive Yellow Fever epidemics in the Americas all swept, in the 19th Century, up the Mississippi from the delta region.
It is perhaps ironic that the only real experience with this scale of insect control for the last two decades has been in developing countries: the CDC and State health folks should be reaching out to PAHO and the insect control expertises of Africa and the Caribbean right now. If we cannot manage to get ahead of the insects, there could very well be a disease crisis ahead.

Can open sourceintelligence and societal information sharing help us as a society get around the need to have ‘government officials’ who are responsible but instead give us the power collectively organize ourselves.

Mama we are coming to get you…NOT

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I have been watching the unfolding of the Katrina disaster. It makes my stomach churn to learn about how badly FEMA and other federal agencies bumbled this whole thing. We clearly have major human well being and community well being issues to deal with here. This interview of the head of Jefferson County is just heart wrenching (the blog title comes from this interview).
Here is a first hand account of a man’s son who was contracted by FEMA as a truck driver to get releif supplies to the affected areas.
Reading this I think that self organizing networks who had done some scenario planning exercises and have network tools for sharing real information from on the ground would have been hand to coordinate real relief. Perhaps a case study in the network failures and successes in the aftermath is a topic for MeshForum in May.
Live Blogging from the area.
Tales from a refugee camp…

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation
Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were
friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how
many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the
several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able
to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these
questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates
complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told
me “as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only
information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to
be here at night.”
There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up
any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on
buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special
needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for
possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

Reading this article I learned that the functional literacy rate New Orleans is about 40%. That means they can read a little but can’t fill out a job application, read a food label or read a simple story to a child. Makes me wonder how are we going to build an identity system that the functionally illiterate can use??
Van Jones a rising leader in the African American Community writes this great article about the responsibility of the Bush Administration for the disaster.
He also wrote this piece about “looting” and “finding” and race. It seems that how one is identified by race and class makes a difference to the media interpretation of actions in a catastrophic situation. Just to be clear I am not a big fan of identity politics in its raw form. Having said that I am also acutely aware that race and class are cultural forces in our society and that there is a role for considering how people with common a common identity – belonging to an ethnic group or making a certain income or having a particular sexual orientation or even gender affects ones experience in the world in systemic way.