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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.'"
I don't about the USA, but in the UK we've got problems with neds (non-educated delinquents) setting up bonfires to lure firefighters to their neighbourhood, then throwing stones at the firecrews and vehicles, all just for fun.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
There are these things called scanners....you can hear the cops in real-time
If you look at their current webpage it shows the dispatch list in jpg format.
1. use ocr software to convert to text
2. parse text
3. fuck them
4. pay your taxes for those ignorant bastards
This has nothing to do with terrorism and just a small bit with security. I'm a Firefighter/Paramedic in Northern Florida. Most large incidents are picked up by local news agencies within hours and the information widely broadcast.
Publically disseminating private emergency call information in realtime can compromise a fire scene investigation and open medical responders up to HIPAA http://http//www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/ violation lawsuits. A patient's PHI (Personal/Private Health Information) includes anything that connects their name/address/whatever to their medical condition. This is also the reason EMTs and Paramedics in our EMS company are not allowed to take photos of motor vehicle crashes because that photo then becomes part of the patients medical record and must be protected under HIPAA regulation. We know that anyone with a radio scanner can listen to live dispatches and that's why we never give names over the radio. Briefly looking at Seattles dispatch page I don't see any PHI.
My opinion is that Seattle is overreacting a bit.
Florida Highway Patrol put incidents up on their website with a delay...http://www.1stresponder.com/First Responder News delays their "live" dispatch stories about 30 minutes. As long as no personal information is given the public has a right to know what emergencies are going on in their neighborhood. Many fire departments and EMS services are struggling to keep up with these information issues but it ultimately comes down to patient privacy. Would you want the world to know that you called an ambulance because you tripped over a garden hose and did a face-plant on your patio?
Work in a downtown convenience store for about a year and you will learn how the city really works. And yes the number is tens of thousands. And yes the homeless do use ambulances for trivial reasons, many times including transportation from somewhere to the hospital.
But feel free to deny that the problem exists. After all, downtown Seattle certainly does look pretty cosmopolitan. Obviously we've solved or are solving all of our issues. But if that were true why are all business types afraid to be downtown at roughly 8:00 PM when the 'youths' come out?
There are tens of thousands of meth junkies alone in downtown Seattle. That is why petty theft, car thefts, and car breakins in Seattle are among the highest in the country. But we wouldn't want to let anyone know about them in case it damaged real estate values would we? Nor would we want people to know that the homeless go from downtown Seattle in the day to the U-district at night to search through trash. If you want to get a better count of the homeless population feel free to check the I-5 underpasses at night (if you are brave enough). Check out Green Lake. Have fun.
Country Fire Authority and Department of Sustainability and Environment are two pages I have constantly open
Well, let me give a little firefighter's instinct on this -
> I'll have to start out by saying I'm amazed such information was ever available. I'm just surprised anyone would think to post that for people.
> I have to say I'm with the government on this one. Why does anyone need to know exactly where all the 911 calls are coming from in real time?
You forget that this data is provided BY the government; the government is NOT saying they don't want this public, nor realtime; they are saying that they do not want a 3rd party to one-up their text-based webpage with a google map on a different site. Note well that the government response was NOT taking down the data; the response was to thwart the parsing of it.
So, you are not "with the government" on this one! (and, right or wrong isn't relevent; you simply do NOT agree with them.)
> I can understand why such data should be available, but why not give it a 24 hour delay? There are just SO many uses for this data for evil (where you can torch a house, when you can steal something with few cops nearby, where you can go to ambulance chase the most successfully, etc.)
Again, this isn't relevent to TFA, which discusses someone's use of the data; that the data is "realtime" has no bearing, and this "someone" is merely re-posting data that is publicly provided by the 911 center. The "use for evil" isn't even limited to a realtime feed, either. To ban any data on realtime emergency response means that there must also be a corresponding "news blackout" - after all, as an evil supervillan, I can wait for the fire dept to be stretched with 5 structure fires that drains the district (as you suggest)... or I can wait for a 5 alarm fire, a single large event that drains the district. Oddly, the 5 distinct fires won't make the news. But the big mega-fire will - with live coverage, helicopter-cams, the works, and the whole universe is going to know about it. And I can tell you... the 5 alarmer is a LOT more dangerous (from a complexity standpoint) than 5 distinct calls... if our supervillan wishes to "sneak under the radar", odds are much better during the chaos of the single, large, harder-to-manage event.
So, if this realtime data should be hidden... we likewise need a press blackout. No "live coverage" during fires, no reports of traffic accidents during our treks to work and home. Otherwise, we flatly contradict our reason for "no realtime data", I'm afraid.
A lot of people question why realtime data would be relevent in the first place... and I can tell from the tone of your post, your gut is crawling with the potential for abuse.
But, the data already readily available. It goes across the radio as a dispatch, and for $20 you can listen in. And as mentioned earlier, larger events are on the TV and radio. Of your examples (which are good)... putting this data on the internet enables *nothing*, any more than removing it from the internet *prevents* anything. You can't think of a single reason someone would need this data... I must ask, can you think of one action that removing this data is going to thwart? Just one? Don't feel bad if you can't... I can't, either.
For a 911 center, posting the data would be wonderful. It enables all of the value-adds with no labor on your part - radio station traffic reports, news agencies, even TomTom updates. You can facilitate all that crap, and even have some control over the wording of the information (which is huge, believe me). Or, you can force these same parties to scrape radio traffic for audio snippets, and then deal with the Absolute Joy of them paraphrasing 2nd-hand information that is completely without context. As a 911 center, you can choose one or the other. And, it doesn't seem to be a tough choice. Banning such data to "businesses" is downright silly... since all that does is create an artificial barrier to entry for the hobbiest / amateur-developer-who-wants-to-start-something. And believe me, the bulk of the GOOD fire-service software comes from such pe
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Just for everyone information, my server was down earlier due to a rogue node on my VPS server (great timing by my host), not slashdotting. Here is my blog post on this issue that started some of this http://blog.eberly.org/2006/10/12/worlds-worst-use -of-a-jpeg
Here are the comments at Reddit.
http://reddit.com/info/lxbt/comments
Reddit sent over 30k hits in a short period to my server and it handled it fine, it just seems every Saturday somebody on my server gobbles up all the resources. I really will never recommend VPS from this host to anyone.
I use it to stay away from the seen. I heard a lot of sirens in my area 3 months ago, checked my site and saw that is was a major gas leak (12" natural gas line ruptured). I called my girlfriend and sister who were on their way home and told them to stay at work/school. Seattle911.com guy, John Eberly by the way here is the one line way to get the data. curl "www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/sfdIncide ntList.jpg" | djpeg -pnm -gray | gocr -
That's all. It's entirely _cya_.
... it's ours. We paid for it, and if one of us wants to present a view of that data that is more useful than the view they chose to present ... that's tough.
I'm sure that's part of it, but it's more a matter of Control Your Ass, meaning they want to control our asses insofar as we are accessing what they consider to be "their" information. It's not
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I didn't have any ads on seattle911.com. I lost money on the site, I just published it for others benefit.
I actually contacted the SFD about my site when I first put it together and they liked it. They had no problem with it, but were unwilling to link directly to seattle911.com because they could not ensure the integrity of the data. I responded that I totally understund their viewpoint. I grabbed their data every X minutes and some people visited my site. So, every visitor to my site used my bandwidth that I paid for, not the governments. (It makes you wonder why I wasted money on this). Now, the city would like to prevent sites like mine and the visually impaired by providing a jpeg instead of text. Well, this doesn't prevent me from using the data (curl/gocr, etc) and it requires 8 times more bandwidth to serve the jpegs. Not to mention the time for the developers and the software expense (I sure hope they didn't buy software to convert jpeg to text, but I wouldn't be surprised). All of which, must be paid by the taxpayers of Seattle. I personally wish they would spend more money on firemen salary and equipment and less of paper-pushers.
This is why I think you're full of shit. First off, "trivial reasons
First off, "youths" are not the same as homeless people. Sure, some of the suits might be frightened by a black kid in baggy clothes, but if they are they're just being ridiculous. I've walked through downtown, and Belltown, and Pioneer Square, and Capitol Hill, and the U District, at 8 pm, 10 pm, midnight, and never once felt unsafe. Just because there's some kids trying to look gangster doesn't correlate to "tens of thousands of homeless people" in the slightest.
Meth junkies != homeless. And what are you suggesting, that this is a massive coverup by the local government to protect property values?? Like I said, you'd notice "tens of thousands" of homeless just by walking around. You're full of shit, and you can't even stick to one claim when you're trying to make a point. The fact that you interchange "homeless" with "meth addicts" with "youths" makes it very clear that you're a raving lunatic.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
...Please look up RCW 42.56.030 and read it. You can look it up at http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/
Its been Washington State law since 1977.
Good question.
I want to give the City of Seattle time to react since most of the press about this was published over the weekend. If I implement the "work around" on my site right away, it doesn't help the majority of people who go directly to the source, and don't use my site.
I hope that the city will reverse their original knee-jerk decision and put up the text feed again. We all need to get practical with our security concerns.