Vital Systems Security

It’s hallucinatory Friday in VSS land — and that must mean DARPA. Wired has an article about a $1.3 million contract to Lockheed for an “Integrated Crises Early Warning System.” They are seeing this, it seems, as a kind of “situational awareness” — but one that has less to do with enemy positions and more with, well, the social. ” David Honey, who is the head of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office is quoted in the article as saying that “Commanders will always need to have an accurate picture of enemy positions, as well as friendly units and allies. But increasingly it’s social, cultural, political and economic information, foreign language capabilities and other clues – that are proving essential.” And who better for that than Lockheed?

Interestingly, the article points out, there is a history of similar efforts. For example, an integrated crisis warning system that was funded by the agency in the 1970s, and some other more recent efforts, including the ACUMEN (Anticipatory Culture-Based Modeling Environment) model, from which the diagram above is taken.

But actually it was something else in the article that really caught my eye. Wired makes a joke about “forecasting riots” — like the weather, ha ha. But in fact, as we have been finding out in our work on the Office of Emergency Preparedness, in the late 1960s and early 1970s it does seem that models of riots and models for things like natural hazards occupied a common space — or, more accurately, they were modeled using similar techniques. Hopefully we will have more to say about this when we start moving through the mountain of material that Onur and Brian brought back from the archives.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 2:47 pm and is filed under catastrophe models, early warning systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.