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Saving Lives with Design
valdean writes "Last year, the White House declassified an August 2001 intelligence brief entitled: 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' Among other things, the brief mentions that Bin Ladin 'wanted to hijack a US aircraft.' So why was it ignored? Graphic designer Greg Storey thinks part of the reason is poor design. He set out to modify the format of the original document into a more legible one."
That would make sense if this was the first they had ever heard of bin Ladin. By the time of this memo, he had been openly at war with the U.S. for over five years, and had been slaughtering people in ever-more spectacular attacks designed for maximum civilian damage for even longer. He had demonstrated his deadliness and determination to destroy American interests around the world; they goddamn better have taken a memo like this seriously. I don't give a shit what font it is in, this is an important memo. That they missed it -- and ignored the bin Laden threat completely during most of 2001 -- is not excusable.
It sounds like he's trying to one-up Edward Tufte, who had published a well-read report on the slide presentation that led to the Columbia Disaster. I guess we could use a few more such public analyses before people will begin to realize the reach of what falls under "Interface Design" and how critical it is our functioning in the complex system we've created.
THE INTERFACE IS THE INFORMATION. If you don't have an interface, you don't have any information. Period.
Incidentally, I can think of a few reasons not to implement some of the changes that Storey suggests:
- Bolded and highlighted text may draw the eye toward material that was incorrectly analyzed; or the burdern of analysis may fall upon the reader of that (original) memo.
- The threat level may not be something that is established, but rather something that is established through decisions that come from this document
Whether these kinds of metrics are appropriate in the case of the President is unknown to me. My main here is to illustrate that Storey's ideas, though thoughtful, are perhaps a bit sensational.
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-shpoffo
kNOw Research
Just the fact the US was holding FIVE military exercises on the morning of 9/11, when the planes hit the WTC, and the fact that some of these EXERCISES involved terrorists crashing planes into buildings, should be enough to prove to you that, at the least, the US government had prior knowledge:4 /080904wargamescover.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september200
Also the US government has at least made plans, in the past, to attack its own forces, i.e. blow up a plane, bomb a ship, etc., in order to justify going to war. This has been revealed in declassified government documents. The plan was called "Operation Northwoods":
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/
Oh, and here is a short documentary "movie" on the 9/11 Pentagon hit: http://www.elchulo.net/files/pentagon.swf