Geek Guard to the Rescue

Ant sends a link about the Geek Guard proposal that is floating around. Supposedly technology companies would form the backbone of a fast-response technology force. But Verizon was and is part of the problem with regard to communications, not part of the solution. A lot of technically-inclined people and groups like NYC Wireless did assist in lower Manhattan after Sept. 11, and they're still helping out businesses and people with no internet/phone connections and not even an ETA from Verizon on when Verizon might get around to hooking them up. If Verizon fulfilled their Geek Guard duties with all the rapidity that they, say, install DSL lines for competing DSL providers, they would have "rescheduled" their disaster response three times and we'd have an appointment for early November right now.

Comments

emergency response team

[Alien54]

The first question in my mind is if this would have a military feel to it, or a corporate suit?

but then I saw this:

"With congressional support, the leaders of our nation's technology companies could organize themselves, their employees, and their resources for this purpose," Wyden says. "Medium and small-sized businesses would be able to contribute once a national framework was put in place. The resources from the federal level need not be extensive; people could be designated from existing human resource pools at major" companies, Wyden says. [...] in such times of crisis, about the last thing a company is going to want to have happen is to see their top network architects rush into the nearest restroom and emerge in green fatigues with a camouflage soft-sided laptop briefcase in hand ready to "go to war" while the company's own LAN starts to buck and spit and blow chunks of data out into cyberspace.

If it is not some federally agency, then the rest of the businesses in the country are likely to not support it.

Never mind that the transportation system was also knocked out for a while.

It needs to be a federal thing, I think