911 Call Tracking Site Stirs Concern

Frosty Piss writes, "This story comes from the Seattle Post-Intellegencer. For the past year, John Eberly has operated Seattle911.com, a site that until this week took real-time feeds of 911 calls from the Seattle Fire Department and plotted them on Google Maps. But on learning of Eberly's site, officials cited 'security concerns' and altered the way they display 911 calls on their Web site, changing the format from text to graphical, preventing Eberly from acquiring the raw data. (Several programmers are quoted musing how trivial it would be to work around this evasion.) Fire officials worry that allowing others to display where fire crews are on an Internet map could make things easier if terrorists were planning an attack. That logic left Eberly and others scratching their heads, as the information continues to be publicly available on the Fire Department's site. 'We're not obligated to provide this information. It's something that we did for customer service in the first place,' a Fire Department spokesperson said. So is this public information? Should the data be available to the public in real time?" The Seattle P-I story ends with a quote from Bruce Schneier: "The government is not saying, 'Hey, this data needs to be secret,' they are saying, 'This data needs to be inconvenient to get to.'"

Comments

Beware of the Leopard

[LiquidCoooled]

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a torch."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."

Unsure what to make of this

[skrew]

They're afraid of terrorists attacking a fire?

Re:Unsure what to make of this

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they're afraid of terrorists making fires that, when plotted on Google Map, make a smiley face.

Re:Why do we need it?

[Free_Meson]

EMS heckling is a big thing here. Lots of fun.

You call that a tracheotomy?

Maybe I'm spending too much time w/med students, though.

Awesome Info!

[Kid Zero]

So the educated Pyro can wait until everyone is else where, hop on the motorbike, and start five, ten fires and really tie up the fire department. Great.

You could do that to begin with, but now you can plot your course to string everyone out better and more efficently.