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]

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.

Re:Unsure what to make of this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Unsure what to make of this

[seattle911]

I didn't have any ads on seattle911.com. I lost money on the site, I just published it for others benefit.

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:I don't get get it.

[SmurfButcher Bob]

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

I am John Eberly

[seattle911]

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.