Howard Rheingold
From BeyondVoting
Smartmobbing Urban Catastrophe
By Howard Rheingold
The potential value of smart mob technologies in disaster relief and
recovery, and the known vulnerabilities of existing infrastructure are
both being ignored in basic ways. Worse, essential financial
enterprises and communications control systems have been rebuilt with
little thought to distribution of control and redundancy now to prevent
failure in the future.
From Manhattan on 9-11 to Asia after the 2005 tsunami, self-organized responses by both official responders and citizens using mobile telephones and Internet communications have proved to be highly useful.
At the same time, communication infrastructure failures after
earthquakes and terrorist attacks multiplied the lethality of the
triggering events. Yet neither incumbent private communications
providers nor government agencies appear to have heeded key advice of
expert panels that were set up in the wake of the disasters.
I was shocked to learn these disturbing charges when I asked urban
planner and wireless technology activist Anthony Townsend what he's
been doing lately. Townsend, the NYU professor of urban planning and
co-founder of NYC Wireless profiled here in 2003, has spent the last
year looking at how communications practices and technologies are used
in disasters. He's been taking a global and holistic approach, studying
how cities (and the people and organizations in them) prepare for, cope
with and rebuild after large disasters. He and his colleague, Mitchell
Moss, present compelling arguments that the Internet and mobile phones
have already proved to be crucial tools in making cities respond more
resiliently to crises. In a sense, these researchers argue that the
same technologies we use to manage mini-crises in our daily lives, and
occasionally use for ad-hoc political organizing, also have big
advantages when things go drastically wrong.
Funded by a federal grant, Townsend and Moss of NYU's Center for
Catastrophe Preparedness and Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service
have published a report that is both hopeful and frightening.
"Telecommunications Infrastructure in Disasters: Preparing Cities for
Crisis Communications" meticulously documents and analyzes the way
communications infrastructures fail in crisis, how they are used during
the immediate disaster relief effort and their role in long-term urban
recovery. Townsend and Moss not only highlight vulnerabilities, they
point out the ways that the existing Internet infrastructure, together
with the mobile communication devices that billions of people already
carry, could be strengthened and prepared for immediate use in the
aftermath of crisis. And they remind us that the amateur radio network
-- which long predates mobile phones and the Internet -- remains one of
the most important first-response infrastructures world-wide.
The Kobe and Loma Prieta earthquakes, 9-11 and the Asian tsunami
provided grim but valuable data about where and why communications
infrastructures fail. Communication infrastructures fail in disaster
because damage to centralized, non-redundant, switching stations causes
systemic damage, because sudden network congestion swamps surviving
systems, because of physical damage to landlines, antennae and cables.
Measures such as distributing and adding redundancy to control
functions of critical emergency and financial communications systems,
deploying VOIP capability, multiplying wireless Internet support and
providing many-to-many SMS capability for early responders and relief
workers would all pay for themselves many times over in case of a
future disaster. According to Townsend and Moss, American cities are
investing an estimated $50 to $100 billion in emergency response
preparedness by 2009, with $17.2 billion allocated for emergency
communications networks. However, actual implementation of public
programs are often influenced by forces stronger than the need to
prepare for the future by heeding lessons from the past.
The conclusions reached by Townsend and Moss about crisis
infrastructure failures, all footnoted carefully, are stark and
unequivocal: "Despite pressure from state public service commissions,
incumbent carriers have successfully resisted efforts at public
oversight of network reliability. A Presidential Advisory Committee
charged with studying the financial industry's telecommunications
preparedness offered little more than an endorsement of the current
meager efforts and found no role for government in developing,
enforcing, or monitoring standards. Finally, recent administrative
decisions on network reliability are working to undermine the public's
ability to monitor the state of infrastructure operations. For example,
in August 2004, citing security concerns, the FCC has stopped providing
the public access to network outage data."
Townsend and Moss quote Columbia professor Eli Noam and Kobe
University's Harumasa Sato's argument that "the basic lesson from Kobe
is that the usual approach of disaster communications, traditionally
based on military-style public safety agencies that are operating in a
top-down manner and share information with 'civilians' only on a
'need-to-know' basis, should be replaced. Instead, we should set up an
open-access emergency system -- open to inputs from a wide variety of
public and private participants and with open to access to that
information. Not only would such a system be more efficient as a tool
of information and organization, but it would also be more resilient to
the shocks of disaster."
The spontaneous relief efforts that citizens patched together with
mobile phones, SMS and blogs in the wake of the tsunami offer clues to
low-cost, highly-resilient infrastructure improvements in the future.
More research is required to design more effective response systems,
the authors recommend -- and point out several specific places to
start: "How are ad hoc communications structures developed in
disasters? What can they teach us about improving design for official
systems? How does the growing body of research on social network
structures, and the way new communications pathways are forming on the
Internet, inform the design of future emergency communications systems?
How do new communications technologies perform in comparison to older,
more established ones during disasters? What can be done to improve
their resiliency?"
Noting that the Department of Homeland Security has called amateur
radio operators the "first responders of the first responders," the
authors point out that "there are no programs or funding sources
dedicated to modernizing the services provided by hams in disaster
response efforts," and call for examination of the "regulatory and
technical barriers to innovations in data communications in amateur
radio, especially disaster communications."
Do we have to wait for more needless suffering before warnings like are heard and heeded?
