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

Inconvienient?

[Jarjarthejedi]

Come on, does anyone really think that making the information a tiny bit harder to get is going to discourage real terrorists? Why do so many people persist in the idea that if we make the world hard to use that bad people won't be able to use it, bad people are the ones who will invest the time to learn how to work the system. A change like this does one thing, inconvieniences those people who may have found some use for this program. It doesn't stop terrorist, it doesn't help the public, it doesn't even make a good public relations story. How long before someone rebuilds the site to grab the graphics and translate them do you think? And how long after that before the govenment makes the data in those funny letters on forums at which point they may as well not even publish it. Every time I think I've grasped the limit of stupidity it moves further and further away...

Re:Why do we need it?

[Yehooti]

If we're not a first responder, why do we need the info in real time? I'd agree with letting the information out, but delaying it for, say an hour or so. Not to make it inconvenient to get to, just not immediate info.

Re:Unsure what to make of this

[Anonymous Coward]

Terrorism risk my ass. My guess as to the real concern? The politicians are afraid that people might see how damned dangerous certain parts of town (read: slums) really are, sending property values into the crapper and perhaps launching a round of White Flight. You see, it's easier to deny a problem exists (or mask the extent) than to fix it.

All the typical poli behaviours are here on display -- denial, obfuscation, evasion and just plain old lying.

Re:Unsure what to make of this

[Matilda the Hun]

Except that they're not going to sit and wait for a bunch of fires to spontaneously sprout at the other side of the city, then run into another building with a match. If they really wanted to do that, they would *set* several fires at the other side of the city. And you don't need to track firetrucks to know that that's where they're going to be.