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.

In our work on the genealogy of vital systems security, Stephen and I have noted the importance of “imaginative enactment” as a form of VSS knowledge-production. Among other things, imaginative enactment is a method for determining infrastructural vulnerabilities in the absence of archival data on the historical incidence of what are termed “low probability, high consequence” events – such as a virulent influenza pandemic, a dirty bomb attack on a major city, a catastrophic earthquake, etc. One form of imaginative enactment that I’ve been looking at is the scenario-based exercise. These are role-playing games in which decision makers are faced with an urgent crisis sparked by an event (a terrorist attack, an outbreak of an infectious disease, etc), take action to intervene, and watch the results of their interventions unfold. In this post, I want to begin to explore the structure and history of this type of imaginative enactment – which was originally developed in the 1950s at RAND (along with everything else), and called the “political exercise.”

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One of the interesting stories coming out of these events relates to information management, and in particular to how information is communicated to victims (or potential victims) of disasters, and among various actors dealing with complex and rapidly changing situations. We have had posts in the past about risk communication, such as the new FEMA interactive flood maps that can be overlaid on Google Earth. The basic idea was that if people have a better understanding of the risks they face in moving to a certain neighborhood in a vulnerable area they will think twice. Two specific technical systems for communicating during a disaster have been mentioned repeatedly during the SoCal fires. One is so-called “Reverse 911″ in which, apparently,  a central call center makes calls to home phones in certain geographic areas to warn them about location specific hazards or evacuation and rescue information. The service is provided by a private company whose system became operational in San Diego only a month ago.

The other technology for real-time information sharing being employed is called WebEOC, made by a company in Georgia called ESi. It is described as a web 2.0 type of system that allows real time information sharing — that is spatially arranged — between many disperse points. ESi’s description of the software can be found here. This is clearly aiming at the kind of “situational awareness” that emergency managers (and war fighters) in all times and places have wanted to have. The genealogical lines must, of course, go back to the military.

Curbed, a New York urbanism and real-estate blog (there is a curbed LA as well), has a post today on a design competition in New York for innovative designs for emergency housing. Interestingly, the design competition is scenario based. Here is the description from the competition announcement:

The competition scenario focuses on a fictional neighborhood called Prospect Shore that has just been hit by a Category 3 hurricane, leaving 38,000 families without housing. Entrants are asked to design a provisional housing plan for the community that could be used by emergency planners in real life. The judging criteria recognize that traditional post-disaster housing, such as mobile homes, is not suitable for New York City’s high population density and concentrated infrastructure. The competition is being sponsored by OEM, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Architecture for Humanity – New York.

Among many things that are curious here is the suggestion that New York has needs that are different from the rest of the country (mobile homes need not apply — indeed, where would they go?) and that, therefore, specific local solutions are required.

The University of California Police Department, in cooperation with 

the City of Berkeley Police Department, is participating in Alameda 

County’s “Urban Shield” exercise from Friday, September 28 to Monday, 

October 1, 2007.  

Urban Shield, a multi-agency regional training event, will test and 

enhance the emergency preparedness and response abilities of local law 

enforcement in a wide variety of situations.  Tactical teams from 

approximately 25 departments across the country, including our own 

Negotiations and Entry Team, will be deployed around the clock to 

handle a variety of simulations and scenarios ranging from natural 

disasters to incidents of terrorism.  If you would like to learn more 

about this event, please see http://www.urbanshield.org/about.html for 

details.

Warren Hall will be the site of an “active shooter” simulation.  

Especially in light of the tragic events at Virginia Tech and other 

past incidents of campus violence, the University is committed to the 

highest level of preparation and prevention possible, and is proud to 

participate in this opportunity to provide realistic and valuable 

training to so many law enforcement agencies.  

Police personnel will begin staging equipment and preparing the 

building on the evening of Friday, September 28.  At 5:00 am on 

September 29 (Saturday) the exercise will begin.  Activity will 

include role-player movements on the first and ground floor of Warren 

Hall, the arrival and departure of personnel and vehicles in Mulford 

Hall parking lot, and some loud noises.  The scenario will repeat once 

every other hour for the entire weekend, day and night, ending before 

9:00 am on Monday, October 1.  

Thank you for your assistance with this important initiative.

Nathan Brostrom

Vice Chancellor–Administration

My forays into the wired world are paying off: Now I’m only a year or two behind the curve. Check out this fascinating story picked up by Time (and NPR). It reports on the dastardly named “Corrupted Blood”, an intentionally released virus (and resultant epidemic) which wrought a fair amount of damage in the virtual “World of Warcraft”. Apparently the disease, originally designed to affect higher-level cave-dwellers (nevermind the oxymoron), ended up spreading unexpectedly to the world’s virtual cities — where the common folk live. Tellingly, the game’s own administrators had trouble controlling the virus once released.

In addition to all the buzz this generated in the gamer world, it’s also led to some pieces in scholarly journals, including this one (article info only; you’ll need an institutional subscription to access it, I think). Of particular interest is that the virtual gaming world might be a space to test out all those interesting theories that cannot be feasibly tested in the real world during a massive ID outbreak, like: will people comply with public health and infection control measures? Will communities panic? In fact, more broadly stated: Just how will people behave when a catastrophic Mondo virus comes crashing down on them? Of course, disaster researchers have said for decades that data derived from research on community behavior is pretty compelling, and clear: People generally don’t panic. People are generally compliant. Be that as it may, it is interesting to think about — and be slightly concerned about — the possibility that overly Red Bull-ed, highly testosteroned, über-gamers might form the sample out of which more general findings about community behavior in times of an apocalyptic viral meltdown will be extrapolated. Nevertheless, I find it intriguing to think about just what kind of knowledge — new, unexpected knowledge — can and will be produced as these kinds of imaginative enactments and scenarios take shape down the road.

Come to think of it, I find it equally intriguing to think about the ethical positions (and implications) associated with the intentional release of a harmful ‘pathogen’ in virtual space. Can we profit from the virtual deaths of thousands? Millions? Yes. Should we? That’s a wee bit trickier. How do we do it? Informed Consent?

“World Without Oil” is an alternative reality game–not a video game or a “world” but more like a cross between a writing contest and a role-playing game. It asks participants to imagine what an oil shock would look like, and what living without oil will do to their lives, in real time, as the “oil shock” scenario unfolds. Thus it shares something with the scenario stylings of our vital systems friends, but one that is going directly to the people–albeit probably to preteens, hipster bloggers and youtube users first. What makes it so interesting is that it is actually very technically thin: just a web site where you submit links to content you create on your website, blog, video or by telephone. The site “masters” grade the content and choose the winners–presumably with the aim ofcollecting  a set of scenarios that might otherwise be difficult to generate. I’m skeptical that this particular game will get interesting, but the real issue is that it is pure genius.  I’m sure there will be others…

DHS, please take note.

In “The Catastrophic Harm Precautionary Principle,” legal theorist Cass Sunstein asks how to make regulatory decisions under conditions of uncertainty, in which probabilistic calculation cannot guide rational decision. He is especially interested in environmental issues such as climate change, but also links his argument to other catastrophic threats including avian flu and terrorism. Basically, he wants to show how the precautionary principle can be operationalized within a technocratic context guided by cost-benefit analysis. In his scheme, the rational application of such a principle would militate toward regulatory intervention in the present against the uncertain threat of a worst-case climate change scenario in the future. The argument is interesting for our purposes because it challenges the Beckian hypothesis that uncertain but potentially catastrophic threats are not amenable to the tools of technocratic calculation.

I have been looking a bit into the problem of enactment and war games. In so doing, a couple of interesting links came up, including to a couple first-order practitioners of war gaming, James F. Dunnigan and Kenneth Watman and to an article by James Der Derian at the Watson Institute that is worth a read. In our article on “Distributed Preparedness” Andy and I put forward the idea that imaginative enactment is one of the key techniques of a future oriented (rather than archive-oriented) form of knowledge about collective life. The war game story is clearly an important part of the genealogy of imaginative enactment. Civil defense was one point of transfer from military to civilian affairs. Certainly there are others.

As an aside, Der Derian’s website is very much worth checking out as an effort to produce some online space for security discussions.