stack/hopr

Tackling Terrorism: the Factories of Fear

Battlefield Mumbai now seems to be getting back to businessland Mumbai.

Everyone knows what happened. TV, newspapers and the Internet is filled with the excruciating (and often conflicting) details. I don’t want to write about what happened. I am proposing a workable solution. It’s a dual layer solution. One layer tries to prevent such mishaps and the other deals with it live.

I. Collective Observation

We have the Internet, mobile phones and a billion people to use all this. A website can be setup where people can post information about unusual observations. The major concern here is trust. Such a system will obviously be misused. And I don’t see a point in registration (i.e. people register with their names, address) based system. It just gets in the way. In fact, the approach should be exactly the opposite.

Let anybody post any information they come across. We need only the basic data: information, place and time. Let the people post it on the site or via sms. It’ll be totally anonymous. Now, how do we make meaning in this information? Answer: AI.

Today, text processing and pattern matching algorithms are very smart. (See Google). They can hunt for unusual patterns in huge amount of data. And get smarter as they do this. These algorithms work really well on large amount of data. So, if a suspicious activity is being reported by 1 or 2 users, it may not matter. But, if considerable number (this can be tuned) of people start reporting similar information and also via sms, we know we have something fishy. Now, local authorities can be informed to investigate further.

Algorithms can be fine tuned as follows:

1. Location
Obviuosly, cities are the soft target. But, cities are also the places with dense population, good Internet connectivity and mobile phone penetration. So, the chances of gathering good intelligence in cities are appropriately higher.

2. Borders / Seas
Borders and coastal region are porous and that’s where the bad guys come in from. Even sporadic messages from these regions could be treated seriously.

3. Time
While terrorist smuggle their weapons during the night, they generally attack the cities in working hours. This time factor can be used to filter out information.

Potential issues:

1. Terrorists attacking this site with excessive information or other attacks
Terrorists are small in number. And excessive information from few sources can be tracked easily. Hence, if anybody tries to attack this site, it’s a good news. Not only, we can track the miscreants, it’s much better than losing human lives.

2. Public usage
People will only use this if it is dead simple. So, free numbers for sms, something along the lines of 100 can be arranged. If people want to talk, we can have automated voice lines converting speech to text. And these facilities can be advertised in public places so that people keep it mind.

II. Media Mask

The product of terror is not deaths, it’s fear. They kill 100 and a billion are living in fear. And gues who’s marketing this product?: Media.
To shut down this fear factory, we need to hit where it hurts. We’ve seen how to block it’s supply chain and people. Let’s see how to block it’s marketing and finances.

We can’t shut down the media. But, they can be definitely regulated when terror strikes. Solution would go something like this. As soon as, a terrorist operation is in progress, we allow only 2 TV channels to broadcast news about it. One government channel and one private channel. Govt channel have been reporting news as they are since they don’t have silly corporate goals. And a private channel with track record for decency should be involved to maintain transparency.

This way can spread the required information, but keep mass fear at bay. This applies the most to TV channels, since the fear inflicted in these panic hours can last lifelong.

Terrorist organizations are like any other organization. They have goals, they have people and they have their finances. Once, their financiers realize that they are not effective at producing fear, their money supply will be cut. Their activities would slowly cease as they struggle for resources. They can’t make it full scale war, since they are not country and lack resources, will and strategy for a war.

These solutions are too simple to believe, but often answers to complex problems are very simple. Fighting terror is a teamwork between the people, the government and the intelligence. Bullet for bullet will only leave the whole world dead.

Like Isaac Asimov wrote: violence is the last resort of the incompetent.