Vital Systems Security

DemfromCT — a blogger on DailyKos — has another interesting post on school closure and pandemic preparedness. It is about many things, among more information on exercises that show that in the US school closure may not be in time to help much, and an interesting comparison with a recent minor outbreak in Hong Kong, where, apparently, parents held students home from school in a “precautionary” fashion before a decision was taken to close schools. Also interesting is the mention of the role that blogs and the internet more generally would play in a pandemic.

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.

Another troubling disease event in China. What is interesting, from an event detection perspective, is the disjuncture between the Chinese government’s official description of the event (165,000 pigs infected with a common pig virus) and international estimates. Because of China’s reluctance to release data, international officials are basing estimates not on health-related information, but on economic data–skyrocketing pork prices. “In part, the skepticism comes from the fact that pork prices have skyrocketed 85 percent in the last year — an increase that, absent other factors, suggests the losses from disease are more widespread than Beijing admits.”

Article below.

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I ran rather accidentally into two further examples of attempts to create what might be called “immanent surveillance systems” — in other words, systems that are engineered to produce information about themselves as they function, or in which the parts are self-surveilling. Both are Berkeley based. One is a project by a graduate student named R.J. Honicky in the computer science department. His dissertation project, as he describes it, is to build “a societal scale, distributed scientific instrument by integrating evironmental sensors (such as carbon monoxide) into location aware cell phones.” The basic idea is that sensors on cell phones would record environmental data and send it back via SMS (along with a geographic marker) to a centralized database. His thinking lies at an interesting conjuncture of surveillance and data management, on the one hand, and what he calls “participatory urbanism” on the other.

The other morsel was from Kris Pister, a professor of electrical engineering working on dust sensors. Here is a rather old article on the concept of using dust sensors to create energy-aware buildings. Pister also consults with a company called Dust Networks that is a (self-proclaimed, anyway) “leader in the wireless sensor networking market.” The applications include energy efficiency and, as one might imagine, defense and security.

Paul drew my attention to whoissick.org, a site in which individuals are supposed to report their own symptoms and it provides analytical tools to break down their incidence, spatial concentration, and so on. Browsing through different areas, it does not yet seem very densely populated. (My own Lower East Side, one of the more densely settled areas in the United States, only shows a smattering of “reports.”) The best thing: you can receive outbreak alerts by email. Also, check out the symptom tag cloud on the lower right. This is our web 2.0 world.

MILVAX, or vaccines.mil, is the military’s vaccination related website. It includes this crossword puzzle and a variety of other interesting stuff, like a map of regional analysts. I’m sure people like Lyle are hip to this, but I was quite impressed, given the generally sad state of web resources in this domain. That is, of course, coming from citizen weirdness like this…

NIAID unveiled today a multicenter flu research initiative.
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Here is an interesting research Project: Transformations in Global Public Health Surveillance. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s New Yorker contains an interesting and useful article on a new surveillance system for detecting radioactive material–specifically, “dirty bombs”. Stephen already posted on the unusual politics-Bush support for ‘preparedness’ rather than interdiction-here. But the infrastructure is already being put in place, and on a global scale. “The federal government has distributed more than fifteen hundred radiation detectors to overseas ports and border crossings, as well as to America’s northern and southern borders, domestic seaports, Coast Guard ships, airports, railways, mail facilities, and even some highway truck stops. More detectors are being distributed each month. NEST and the Federal Bureau of Investigation maintain a permanent team to respond to events in Washington and along the Northeast Corridor; a second team trained to dismantle nuclear weapons is based in Albuquerque, and eight other teams able to diagnose radioactive materials operate on continuous alert elsewhere in the country.” Systems are already being distributed to foreign ports as wll, for example Sri Lanka. Of course, the same problems appear as in other surveillance systems: lots of false positives. “In the United States alone, the sensors generate more than a thousand radiation alarms on an average day, all of which must be investigated.” Many scientists doubt that such a system could work or is cost-effective. Yet one surprising aspect is that the system is detecting all kinds of loose radioactive material that would otherwise remain invisible, almost like a “dual-use”! Similar things have been said about syndromic surveillance: the “false-positives” are sometimes real outbreaks of disease, just outbreaks that were previously undetected and typically considered unimportant. So there is an expansion of detection, which may or may not produce an expansion of intervention.

The recent confirmation of an outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter (Peter Pan and Great Value brands) demonstrates another weakness in U.S. disease surveillance. This CDC announcement details the process by which a food-borne disease outbreak is detected, confirmed, and tracked.

“PulseNet (the national subtyping network for foodborne disease surveillance coordinated by CDC) detected a slowly rising increase in cases of Salmonella Tennessee this fall. OutbreakNet (the national network of public health officials coordinated by CDC that investigates enteric disease outbreaks) then worked for several weeks to identify this unusual food vehicle. Public health officials from several states have isolated Salmonella from open jars of peanut butter of both Peter Pan and Great Value brand. For nine jars, the serotype has been confirmed as Tennessee and DNA fingerprinting has shown that the pattern is the outbreak strain.”
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