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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."
Did you not hear all about phone systems and long-distance phone networks getting clogged with calls? If it's anything like here in Canada, when phone systems are backed up, priority can only be obtained for connections by emergency services. On a dedicated network, using a web-based chatline is a simple (and simple is beautiful) way for the banks to conference call with the treasury and whatnot without worrying about phone problems. The whole point is that the banks are legitimately worried about becoming targets, this makes sense.
New slang when you notice the stripes, the dirt in your fries.
I was pretty impressed that my net connection was running perfectly the whole time and various news sites seemed to be coping. I was talking on Skype no problem, but the land and mobile phones were taking a few tries to get through. Even so there were plenty of pictures from camera phones getting on the net.
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The police shut down all phones and cell phones. The early news reports were questioning if cell phones were used to detonate the bombs.
Plus, if you have a group of terrorists, and they all have pre-paid cell phones, it is a good way to coordinate.
On the other side, it must suck if you are hurt and need help, and your cell phone does not work. No, not at the site of the bombing because the police will be there, but if you are somewhere else, and have a heart attack or get hit by a car.
Maybe they should have kept it a secret a while longer.
There are no secrets. If you want to know what a country has or might do, just get together 10 of your super bright friends and spend 2 years thinking about what systems a country might have. I bet you would figure most of it out. Before you label that idea stupid, ask yourself 2 questions. What does the CIA do? Hire 1000 smart people who read newspapers, listen to gossip, look at satellite images, and they think and try and figure things out. #2, I bet Al Queda has been spending many years thinking these exact same questions.
All you need to know is that everything created by the other side was done by human minds. Chances are they are using logic. So if you think about it long enough, you can figure it out.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
The London Stock Exchange called a Fast market, in reaction to the initial high volatility and volume caused by the situation (possibly over this secure channel).
As a result of the Fast Market call, banks are requested to turn off programmed trading systems. This removes the danger that computer trading triggers will be tripped and cause catastrophic selling - leading to a crash.
Seems like everything was handled pretty well. The London equity market stabilised quickly, and actually returned to peaks of 2 weeks before within the same day. I'm sure that the reason behind this was a feeling that the attack - although bad - could have been a whole lot worse.