Tool Usage

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.