Slashdot Mirror
Bank E-Communications Aid During London Bombings
davidwr writes "Reuters and eWeek report on how the British Banks' emergency chatroom and web site helped them cope with Thursday's terrorist bombing." From the article: "The Bank of England, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority switched on a secure section of their Financial Sector Continuity Web site to talk to major banks in the City of London's financial hub about how they were coping. A Bank of England spokeswoman said this was the first time the secure site had been used in an actual crisis situation since its creation in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York."
...well, it ain't that "secret" anymore now is it ?
In all honesty, I think the real power of such a channel only comes to light in a contingency that directly hits regular communication lines like telephone etc. In that case, an extra "hidden" link could actually have value.
Now, it was primarily a human tragedy where communication was not directly at risk.
Maybe they should have kept it a secret a while longer.
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Basically, based on 9/11, BushCo has demanded and received great power. They claimed they needed these new powers to fight "the terrorists". Instead, they mostly ignored the terrorists and applied the military parts of the power to Iraq, and applied the political power to increasing their control of America.
The results? BushCo has greatly increased their political power in America, so that part is a "success", as they see it. Most of the world is increasingly polarized against America. UBL is about where he was before, though Al Qaeda is now estimated to have grown from a few hundred hard-core fanatics on 9/11 (of 2001) to tens of thousands of fanatics. In addition, BushCo has created a vast pool of revenge seekers and other potential recruits. Al Qaeda can apparently attack at will, and we just have to be greatful for trivialities, such as no chemical weapons--this time.
Iraq was in bad shape under Saddam, but now it is a total disaster zone. If BushCo left tomorrow it would be a total loss, with thousands of lives and billions of dollars gone. BushCo claims those losses now have to be considered an investment, and we have to keep pouring more good lives and good money down the the drain. And meanwhile, their own companies continue to make enormous profits on the entire fiasco. In particular, their oil interests make increasing profits as the price of oil skyrockets. Their military companies profit on new bombs. Their construction companies will profit again on cleaning up Iraq, assuming we ever get to that stage.
Finally, to close the loop, much of that money is being piped to the Saudis and other Islamic extremists, who then leak some of it to Al Qaeda, thus helping them commit fresh atrocities such as the latest attacks in London, thus justifying more political power for BushCo.
Excuse me, but the robust banking network is *NOT* important.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
"In the wake of 9/11..." is all too often used to start a paragraph which boils down to "...government spent a ton of money doing absolutely nothing for security while simultaneously doing far more harm to a free and democratic way of life than the terrorists ever could."
I'm pleased to see that at least in one case, someone actually gets it. You can't stop the terrorists. Random bad stuff happens in life, and the best thing for it is to be as prepared as you can. Communications is the single best way to spend money in preparation for insert-bad-stuff-here. Be it terrorism, natural disaster, industrial accident, or what have you, better communications saves lives. As has been said many times by everyone whose job doesn't involve spending billions of dollars, more money should not be spent on trying to prevent disasters, it should be spent on ways to clean up after them. Billions in airport screening is a complete waste of money because it just forces someone to bomb a mall or movie theater instead - billions in police training, EMT and EMS training, hospitals and clinics, etc. is money that will reap rewards no matter what happens next.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
can we drop the funny comments (and, for that matter, anything about people worrying about money). people died. it was only yesterday.
thanks.
andy
london
The web might have redundancies, but most ISPs don't have the capacity to handle all their customers at once, and most websites will get slashdotted in minutes.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I don't see the relevance here. The terrorists, whoever they are, attacked mass transit. Most people are not using their 'net' connection during their commute. Most people on the street are going to attempt to use a cell phone or payphone to call, not VOIP.