Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has referred to the financial crisis of 2008 as the ‘first crisis of globalization’.  This is a great descriptive applied to the wrong problem.  Al-Qaeda was the first crisis of modern globalization.  Financial crashes have previously infected inter-connected markets, but never before has a non-state group been able to set the global security agenda.  Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden were able to do this by applying a mixture of medieval religious ideology and guerilla warfare to the dominant tools of globalization. Al-Qaeda seemingly understood the strengths, weakness and opportunities of globalization and exploited them for increasingly empty violent aims.  The use of adaptive financial tools in the form of hawala banking, co-opting the apparatus of failed states and most spectacularly both weaponizing and de-stabilizing one of the primary drivers of globalization, in the form of civil aviation, allowed al-Qaeda to strike internationally.  Al-Qaeda also virtualized itself and quickly moved into the new media space opened up by the explosion of the Internet but this also exposed its weakness as the Arab Spring has bloomed.  Information wants to be free and al-Qaeda is poisoned by freedom.  Al-Qaeda has been described as innovative and it certainly was the first movement out of the gate to exploit the conditions the world moved toward following the end of the Cold War.  However, this particular crisis should now be regarded as closed.  The United States and its western allies have formed effective tools to respond to threats such as al-Qaeda. Building new military systems and emphasizing technology, information use, surveillance systems and Special Forces have proven to be an effective doctrinal response — and are also appropriately what finally put an end to al-Qaeda’s leader.

Much commentary has been devoted to the threat of revenge attacks in the wake of Bin Laden’s death and the direction al-Qaeda will now go. However, the pace of change in the world has in some ways left al-Qaeda and its affiliates behind.  The compound in Pakistan had no telephone link or Internet connection – no attempt at sophisticated cyber operations, no flag planted in the now dominant tool of globalization, information. Bin Laden’s wars do bequeath a legacy and one, which is worth noting. The rise of non-state teams in both creating and defending global security threats is here to stay and suggests the continued prominence of corporate or non-state security in defeating threats to the global security system. Bin Laden’s greatest success is to leave a toolbox on the battlefield, which can be adapted and reused by the next group or individual who seeks global mayhem.  The twentieth centuries total war has been replaced by the semi-privatized constant war.

The great danger now is that the defenders of global security will not re-calibrate their systems quickly enough to deal with new and emerging threats as the global security terrain rapidly shifts.  Al-Qaeda affiliates do retain the ambition to act globally (certainly the threat from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb shouldn’t be currently discounted) but much of the counter-terrorist machinery established to defeat this crisis needs to be quickly re-calibrated to face new threats.  Al-Qaeda affiliates are now part of an old military doctrine and as such can be understood and defeated.  Homegrown extremists do present an internal threat, which is harder to counter within the west’s social and political structures but this will not become an existential global security threat.

The decade since 9/11 has been one of accelerating technological change roughly tracking Moore’s law and the new security threats will follow this arc rather than being vacuum-sealed in the Afghanistan of the late 1990s.  Exploiting the tools of globalization again through finance, information and the choke points of the global economy will provide the next set of global guerillas their opportunity.  Non-State security systems are going to remain in the forefront of recognizing and responding to these threats, the landscape has changed sufficiently to begin suggesting that Google and Facebook are already some of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world.  It would of course be absurd to suggest they could have conducted the raid against Bin Laden but the knowledge and expertise in these companies may be what is needed for the battle against the west’s enemies in ten years time. More money, information, and raw power now exists in private hands as a consequence of globalization – how this power is adapted and applied will likely form the backdrop to the security challenges of the future.

A simple observation now reveals this changed landscape.  Individuals, companies and national organizations face a more deadly threat to their operations from Anonymous, its loose affiliates and fellow travelers than from Al-Qaeda.  Anonymous and its eco-sphere has shown itself adept at creating destructive mayhem with information.  By adapting this dominant tool of globalization much as al-Qaeda did a generation ago Anonymous and groups like it are increasingly politicized radicalized and dangerous.  New and important threats are developing on a dark-net, behind an encrypted IRC channel, privately funded to support a violent enterprise.  The destruction of Sony’s online gaming business leaving behind the telltale ‘We are legion’ signature, neatly demonstrates the security power-shift, which has occurred. The exposure of strategic systems reliant on information, such as financial markets, to this developing threat is truly frightening.

Meanwhile, over in the world of journalism the battle continues for relevance and revenue. While many traditional news reporting agencies are trying blogs, iPad apps and kindle editions to stay in business a non-traditional news agency – Yahoo! – is trying something different.  Yahoo! news is one of those sub-groups within Yahoo! which has developed a dedicated following based on the quality of the product, which isn’t infected by Yahoo!’s otherwise unsteady performance.  Its recent offering is called The Upshot and is a news Blog that uses trends from search data to decide what it is going to report on.  Simply put the Upshot Blog looks at what people are searching for on the web, and writes stories covering the most popular areas of search.  The launch of the new blog was covered by the New York Times.

One way of using this idea within the Intelligence Community could be to assign analysts to topics, which are trending across community networks in the way Upshot is doing with news.  If for example a wide number of searches are being conducted on Intellink and associated systems and then an IC analyst could be assigned to write a report on the topic covering the salient issues.  While certainly, this shouldn’t be the sole driver of analytical product but it may be a way of introducing greater relevance into analytical units, such as the NCTC, which are coordinating roles over a number of agencies and therefore, should be able to see trends developing within the search patterns on its systems.

The attempt by Faisal Shahzad to detonate a car bomb in Times Square was notable not just for its failure but also the severely limited systemic impact a car-bomb could have, even when exploding in crowded urban center. Car-bombs or Vehicle-Borne IED’s have a long history (incidentally one of the first was the 1920 ‘cart and horse bomb’ in Wall Street, which killed 38 people). VBIED’s remain deadly as a tactic within an insurgency or warfare setting but with regard to modern urban terrorism the world has moved on. We are now living within a highly virtualized system and the dizzying stock-market crash on the 6th May 2010 shows how vulnerable this system is to digital failure. While the NYSE building probably remains a symbolic target for some terrorists a deadly and capable adversary would ignore this physical manifestation of the financial system and disrupt the data-centers, software and routers that make the global financial system tick.  Shahzad’s attempted car-bomb was from another age and posed no overarching risk to western societies. The same cannot be said of the vulnerable and highly unstable financial system.

Computer aided crash (proof of concept for future cyber-attack)

There has yet to be a definitive explanation of how stocks such as Proctor and Gamble plunged 47% and the normally solid Accenture plunged from a value of roughly $40 to one cent, based on no external input of information into the financial system. The SEC has issued directives in recent years boosting competition and lowering commissions, which has had the effect of fragmenting equity trading around the US and making it highly automated. This has created four leading exchanges, NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq OMX Group, Bats Global Market and Direct Edge and secondary exchanges include International Securities Exchange, Chicago Board Options Exchange, the CME Group and the Intercontinental Exchange. There are also broker-run matching systems like those run by Knight and ITG and so called ‘dark-pools’ where trades are matched privately with prices posted publicly only after trades are done. As similar picture has emerged in Europe, where rules allowing competition with established exchanges and known by the acronym “Mifid” have led to a similar explosion of types and venues.

To navigate this confusing picture traders have to rely on ‘smart order routers’ – electronic systems that seek the best price across all of the platforms. Therefore, trades are done in vast data centers – not in exchange buildings. This total automation of trading allows for the use of a variety of ‘trading algorithms’ to manage investment themes. The best known of these is a ‘Volume Algo’, which ensures throughout the day that a trader maintains his holding in a share at a pre-set percentage of that share’s overall volume, automatically adjusting buy and sell instructions to ensure that percentage remains stable whatever the market conditions. Algorithms such as this have been blamed for exacerbating the rapid price moves on May 6th. High-frequency traders are the biggest proponents of algos and they account for up to 60% of US equity trading.

The most likely cause of the collapse on May 6th was the slowing down or near stop on one side of the trading pool. So in very basic terms a large number of sell orders started backing up on one side of the system (at the speed of light) with no counter-parties taking the order on the other side of the trade. The counter-party side of the trade slowed or stopped causing this almost instant pile-up of orders. The algorithms on the other side finding no buyer for their stocks kept offering lower prices (as per their software) until they attracted a buyer. However, as no buyer’s appeared on the still slowed or stopped counter-party side prices tumbled at an alarming rate. Fingers have pointed at the NYSE for causing the slow down on one side of the trading pool as it instituted some kind of circuit breaker into the system, which caused all the other exchanges to pile-up on the other side of the trade.  There has also been a focus on one particular trade, which may have been the spark igniting the NYSE ‘circuit breaker’.  Whatever the precise cause, once events were set in train the system had in no way caught up with the new realities of automated trading and diversified exchanges.

More nodes same assumptions

On one level this seems to defy conventional thinking about security – more diversity greater strength – not all nodes in a network can be compromised at the same time. By having a greater number of exchanges surely the US and global financial system is more secure? However, in this case, the theory collapses quickly if thinking is switched from examining the physical to the virtual. While all of the exchanges are physically and operationally separate they all seemingly share the same software and crucially trading algorithms that all have some of the same assumptions. In this case they all assumed that because they could find no counter-party to the trade they needed to lower the price (at the speed of light). The system is therefore highly vulnerable because it relies on one set of assumptions that have been programmed into lighting fast algorithms. If a national circuit breaker could be implemented (which remains doubtful) then this could slow rapid descent but it doesn’t take away the power of the algorithms – which are always going to act in certain fundamental ways ie continue to lower the offer price if they obtain no buy order. What needs to be understood are the fundamental ways in which all the trading algorithms move in concert. All will have variances but they will all share key similarities, understanding these should lead to the design of logic circuit breakers.

New Terrorism

However, for now the system looks desperately vulnerable to both generalized and targeted cyber attack and this is the opportunity for the next generation of terrorists. There has been little discussion as to whether the events of last Thursday were prompted by malicious means but it certainly is worth mentioning. At a time when Greece was burning launching a cyber attack against this part of the US financial system would clearly have been stunningly effective. Combining political instability with a cyber attack against the US financial system would create enough doubt about the cause of a market drop for the collapse gain rapid traction. Using targeted cyber attacks to stop one side of the trade within these exchanges (which are all highly automated and networked) would, as has now been proven, cause a dramatic collapse. This could also be adapted and targeted at specific companies or asset classes to cause a collapse in price. A scenario where-by one of the exchanges slows down its trades surrounding the stock of a company the bad-actor is targeting seems both plausible and effective.

A hybrid cyber and kinetic attack could also cause similar damage – as most trades are now conducted within data-centers – it begs the question why are there armed guards outside the NYSE – of course if retains some symbolic value but security resources would be better placed outside of the data-centers where these trades are being conducted. A kinetic attack against financial data centers responsible for these trades would surely have a devastating effect.  Finding the location of these data centers is as simple as conducting a Google search.

In order for terrorism to have impact in the future it needs to shift its focus from the weapons of the 20th Century to those of the present day. Using their current tactics the Pakistan Taliban and their assorted fellow-travelers cannot fundamentally damage western society. That battle is over. However, the next era of conflict motivated by a radicalism from as yet unknown grievances, fueled by a globally networked generation Y, their cyber weapons of choice and the precise application of ultra-violence and information spin has dawned. Five days in Manhattan flashed a light on this new era.

“Today’s world differs in a fundamental way from one of classic multipolarity: there are many more power centers, and quite a few of these poles are not nation-states. Indeed, one of the cardinal features of the contemporary international system is that nation-states have lost their monopoly on power and in some domains their preeminence as well.”

-Richard Hass, Head of the Council on Foreign Relations and former head of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State, writing in 2008.

Google’s rise over the past ten years has coincided with and arguably assisted in the creation of extra-state entities, which can project enormous power globally. The equation can be simplistically stated: in an information economy, control of information equates to raw power. The Industrial Revolution fueled the British Empire, control of markets fueled the American Empire, control of information is fueling the Google empire. In the space of ten years, the Internet has gone from supporting pets.com to being the pre-eminent vehicle for projecting power. However, the continuation of the open Eco-system of information, innovation and development, which has provided the platform for this success is not assured (as has been highlighted by a variety of Internet scholars and strategic thinkers). Open systems are messy, and therefore, closed wall Internet systems may grow in popularity as consumers seek protection from some of the anarchy that reigns online. This scenario is not new. The United States is the original messy open political system and by managing to control this method of organizing society it became a super-power. China offers an alternative: a closed wall system to protect its citizens from the anarchy of open society. Google has been the champion of the open Internet. Just as American exceptionalism has driven the United States to intervene globally to uphold Jeffersonian values, Google intervenes in FCC auctions to ensure the open access to information. Of course the commercial imperative cannot be denied – the United States has financially benefited from promoting the market state, and Google financially benefits wherever there is an open (uncensored) Internet. It has been unclear whether Google would ever seek alliances with nation-states given its extra-territorial virtual nature, but that time appears to have arrived. 

Google V China

A clear power realignment is emerging – it is messy and complex, and places some companies, individuals and organizations on a par with nation-states in terms of conducting foreign policy and projecting power. The two opposing factions developing from this realignment look to be those that prefer open standards politically with regard to information, against those who tend toward closed systems. The United States and Google are natural allies in this re-alignment, while China fits more easily with companies such as Comcast, AT&T and other proponents of walled-systems. The diplomatic mystery is Microsoft. While clearly a proponent of and beneficiary of closed systems in business, it has thrived in a open political system. Microsoft seems almost to lean towards China rather than the United States, but at the same time cannot be blind to the dangers of this approach and not realize its natural long-term limitations.   For now Microsoft is expertly balanced.  While Google Versus China is the first major tremor in this re-alignment, more will follow.

Google’s decision to re-examine its China policy and confront the Chinese government should illuminate the nature of the current Chinese system to any business observer: the total use of state power to pursue Chinese aims, including the persistent and ruthless use of all facets of the state intelligence machinery to gain an advantage over their business, political and military rivals. China has reportedly spent heavily on cyber-warfare and espionage capabilities. This investment is being well used. Western governments have long been aware of the nature of the Chinese threat, but it has taken the actions of Google to illuminate this same threat to western businesses with any kind of intellectual property to protect, which is surely all of them.

Samuel Huntington wrote about a post-Cold War “Clash of Civilizations.” What we are now seeing could be more accurately described as a “clash of systems”, which will define the real diplomatic, security, and political challenge of our age. If periodic terrorist plots are still the main security challenge for the United States President in twenty years, the world will be fortunate. It would also likely mean that the United States and its allies prevailed in its greater strategic fight.

Although the power of the United States is fading, its legacy as the sole super-power has left it with certain advantages which should be rapidly exploited by both its explicit traditional allies or its implicit emerging allies from extra-state groups. The United States continues to possess unrivalled military power, befitting its great power status. This shouldn’t be confused with the insurgency wars it has become embroiled in; great power warfare is a different platform. As a result of its recent history, the United States controls the world’s neutral spaces: air, sea and space. From these platforms its extra-state allies, such as Google, could aim their primary weapon – information – at the opposition. Access to a free and open Internet is the key unit of power projection in the coming battle. A fact clearly recognized by Secretary of State Clinton during her recent remarks on Internet Freedom.  Broadcasting free and open Internet service into China or Iran from these neutral spaces controlled by the US military is the correct response from the open-systems alliance. A company with reputedly the world’s best engineers and the country with the most advanced space program should be able to surmount the technical challenges involved. There are numerous precedents when free movement of information [data] have helped crash closed political and information systems: Radio Free Europe feeding news to Soviet dissidents during the Cold-War or more recently, P2P file-sharing networks upending the music industry. As well as broadcasting the free-Internet into hostile space, western Internet companies should help break-down the Great Firewall of China by supporting open-source efforts to hack it, circumvent it, re-wire it and otherwise make it as redundant as the Maginot Line. As the west continues to wring its hands about its opponents, it should look to its most powerful weapon, one which has served it well since the dawn of the enlightenment: information.

In order to realize this objective, the open-systems alliance needs to recognize it is already in a battle. Western governments, led by the US, has been under few illusions about the Chinese government’s military and intelligence apparatus, and the danger it presents for at least ten years. Google is now clearly aware of the persistent danger it faces from Chinese state power, but this message needs to be understood more widely. This is not a benign situation. Furthermore, in a multi-polar world, extra-state power centers such as Google need to embrace their changed ‘great power’ status and organize accordingly. They must develop political and diplomatic alliances, but more crucially understand that if you seek to control, store, analyze, create, or network information you should not be surprised to find yourself in the cross-hairs of the traditional practitioners of this craft: spies and their masters.

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Denmark approaches the debate about climate change will bounce to the front of the global agenda.  From a security perspective much attention will be given to the potential for protesters to make some kind of statement, even though 2009 has been the year when street activism has notably failed to adapt, or score any success.  Beyond the tactical security concerns of the event itself the real rallying cry should be the need to embrace climate change as a security metric.  The CIA has recently opened a climate change center to examine the national security implications of climate change and this work can be replicated at a corporate and non-governmental level.

There is a wealth of information available relating to climate change, what isn’t available is local or individualized synthesis to make sense of this data for an organization.  The terms, ‘increased resource competition’, ‘water scarcity’, ‘extreme weather events’ and ‘coastal flooding’ are all in the popular consciousness– but what would all this mean for governments, companies or individuals?  Given the interconnected nature of environmental systems this is tough analytical work but increasingly looks highly necessary especially when considered projects with longer time horizons. 

This map shows projected sea-level rise; the bar at the bottom is in centimeters.

Of all the trends to watch in the climate change space the rise in sea levels appears to be the most important physical effect to monitor.  Given the complexity of the overall environmental system year-to-year temperature fluctuations are best ignored in favor of looking at the oceans.  Sea level rise is the best available measure of the earth’s heat balance because it comes from only two things – the melting of the glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms.  Sea level is therefore the thermometer that indicates true global warming.  This rise in sea levels is notpredicted to be uniform, with greater change in the northeastern United States than California (as shown in diagram to the left).  Understanding these local variances can be an organizational priority.

There are clearly some intriguing questions sitting out there in this space.  How will climate change, motivate or create terrorist movements?  Will MEND become the global model for localized resource insurgency focused on water rather than oil?  Will a violent environmentalist group take the place of the largely ineffective Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as climate change becomes a visceral reality?  Whatever the answers to these questions climate change should now form part of security analysts thinking – in contrast to the ineffective cat and mouse activist games at these global gatherings – the oceans rising temperature will have a measurable effect.

[Links to InTerrain data on Earth Liberation Front - Incident List Spreadsheet - Incident Map using Bing]

Spin

Destroying or attacking brands isn’t a new idea, however it is acquiring more potency with the ubiquitous use of social media and the ability to seed negative themes about brands now massively distributed — rather than concentrated in the hands of a top down media system. The company Interbrand produces an annual list of the most valuable brands and goes so far as to ascribe a dollar figure to the brand itself.  Examining the methodology for ascribing a dollar figure to the brand also illustrates how the brands are more vulnerable than ever before to being disrupted at critical points in their value chain particularly where the brand connects with the customer or potential customer.  Disconnecting customers from the brand can clearly be achieved by a targeted use of disinformation emanating from the lower reaches of the world’s wired social networks.  Most companies have experienced some version of this, one of the most long-standing examples is the disinformation campaign mounted against Starbucks, which in its various iterations claims the company refused to ‘give free coffee to western troops fighting in [insert name of war]’.  Starbucks have used the web to deny this but still the message continues to be re-worked and re-used.  It has become clear that the only way to fight an online crowd is with another online crowd but those cannot be simply manufactured but building up online supporters is as important as building loyal customers.

Much of this isn’t news but the ability to apply these principles at an individual level within any given society is becoming more pronounced.  Attacking an individual’s reputation by either hijacking their online identity or surrounding their virtual identity with damaging information is currently a relatively easy proposition.  Anyone savvy enough to know how a search engine is powered, how to manipulate social networks and how to sign-up for the myriad of free online networks and services can launch devastating reputation attacks against individuals by hijacking or smearing their personal brand.  Very little technical knowledge is required to be effective.  This is likely to become a significant trend in the near-term as digital natives play out rivalries in virtual spaces leaving employers, credit agencies and any other outside assessor bemused by how to assess the human sitting in front of them.

So what are the potential solutions to this problem?  There certainly appears to be room for services, which monitor protect and defend virtual brands – this has been happening at a company level but has not migrated down to an individual level [spinhunters appeared to be operating in this space – the blog post on reputation nightmares for CEOs is particularly instructive]. But this is all first generation attack and response planning — second generation activity in this space is potentially much more devastating.  The professionalization of hacking combined with the collection of data scraped from a variety of digital sources means that sophisticated disinformation campaigns can be aimed at any of the brands listed by Interbrand and no doubt could put a significant dent in the dollar figure ascribed to them.   A well designed and well-targeted information attack would also hamper the brands ability to respond by disrupting internal systems and surrounding key executives with a kind of micro-information war.

What is the response to this?  Can you build an early warning system?  Are there Information Warfare Minutemen?  The answers are hard to discern but finding them will form a critical part of defending individual and corporate brands.  Programs can certainly be put in place now to understand the information patterns swirling around individuals or organizations – getting and understanding a baseline of the information terrain you are currently operating within should now be a key security metric.

Book Cover of the 1929 version of 'The Crab Cannery Ship'

The most important power transfer in 50 years has just occurred in Japan with the election of Yukio Hatoyama from the Democratic Party of Japan.  While this election was certainly a seismic shift one thing certainly didn’t shift at all and that was the representation achieved by the Japanese Communist Partyand the corresponding number of seats they achieved in the Japanese House of Representatives (link to data on Japanese election results here).

This against the backdrop of over a decade of economic stagnation and a global economic crash – if the Japanese Communist Party had an opening this was certainly it.  There had been an increasing interest in the ideas surrounding the Japanese Communist Party – exemplified by the unexpected publishing success of 2008, Kanikōsen 蟹工船, (The Crab Cannery Ship).  Written in 1929 by Kobayashi Takiji, the book tells the story of a cannery ship and its workers in northern Japan: their desperation, their wretched prospects, their exploitation at the hands of the ruling class and eventually what they do about it.  Kobayashi later joined the Communist Party and was tortured to death by the police in 1933.  The book had combined total sales of 1.5 million until 2008, when it was re-printed and it sold out across Japan equaling sales of the book for its entire lifetime in one year.  This looked like a pre-cursor to a political re-alignment.  However, this has not translated either to revolutionary action or even a greater number of votes for the Communist Party of Japan.  Therefore, something else must be going on.

This ties into the start of 2009 when there were a number of predictions (mainly by European police and intelligence

Manga Version of 'The Crab Cannery Ship'

agencies) that the world was likely to see a ‘summer of rage’ and a concurrent potential revival of left-wing terrorism.  This clearly has not happened and the risk (if it ever existed) is receding as the financial system stabilizes.  The failure of communist parties and other left-leaning movements to exploit the financial crisis politically or on the street could have the opposite effect than that predicted at the start of 2008, that is a re-thinking of revolutionary action and politics away from traditional models.  There is some revolutionary theory developing in this space through the publication of the ‘Coming Insurrection’ jumping out of France and the Tarnac9 case.  This manifesto pulls together the hopelessness of the consumer age, impending environmental destruction and packages it with the flavor of an Internet manifesto.  Similarly, from a tactical standpoint the riots in Greece, should have shown the way to other western street protest movements, but these tactics involving rapidly networked information flow have not been picked up or used effectively elsewhere.  Therefore, while traditional left-wing revolution may have lost its appeal it is too early to say whether an Internet enabled revolutionary doctrine could take hold of activists’ imagination.  So far, the traditional left-wing sources of resistance have been shown to be as bankrupt as the banks, which precipitated the crisis.  It will be interesting to see what, if anything takes their place.

For now the costs are pretty high at $2,000 an hour, but as with all technology driven innovation this is likely to come down. There is also of course the option of building your own UAV’s an idea boosted by the editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson. His DIY Drone’s blog gives a wealth of information on developing your own UAV. However, renting time and perhaps more crucially, analysis from one of the entrants into this new market will no doubt become of feature of future private intelligence analysis.  As timeshare private jet companies struggle in the downturn they may want to diversify into UAV’s — fromNetJets to NetUAV’s.

Citizen as Sensor

The Spime I developed in conjunction with two of the SU students was an Intelligence tool – ‘citizen as sensor’. Taking as a start point the success that the Ushahidi project had in tracking both Kenyan post election violence and war-time activity in the Gaza strip we speculated on what an autonomous app might look like, which ran on a smart phone applying a similar theme. Using the idea of unique sound signatures our app, in its first iteration, ‘listened’ for sounds to report them back to a central database. Sounds such as gunfire, military vehicle movement or even militia on horseback provide a unique signature, which could then be used to provide a much richer intelligence picture of events on the ground. Over time other sensors could be layered into the app to monitor the environment for chemical or biological agents or to provide rapid analysis of images. As a system we conceived of this as an open environment. As a quid pro quo for participation, the citizen has the option to subscribe to areas of local interest for feedback, planning and awareness.

The technology clearly already exists for this kind of app, identifying unique sound signatures using a smart phone is present in shazam [which identifies the song playing in a particular locale] the collection of unique sound signatures is also beginning to extend in a variety of different areas includingmosquito’s. Therefore empowering global citizens to collect a richer level of local intelligence is clearly currently within reach and could be used for their own benefit.

Of course the downside of such a system would be the ability of the bad actors to also use and abuse the data. So far studies on the effectiveness of systems like Ushahidi have shown it remains effective even allowing for misinformation attempts. However, this remains a potentially insurmountable concern. Secondly is the actions of national governments who could shut down cell networks or put pressure on hardware providers to take certain applications down [this last scenario is becoming a constant with Apple’s iphone]. There are some potential solutions for this, P2P cell phone functionality seems like an obvious one, as well as the broad adoption of open platforms such as Android.

While Spime networks seem futuristic they are already here and present current opportunities to collect a richer intelligence picture than was previously possible. It takes little imagination to conceive of a DHS or even NYPD smart phone applications that monitors local conditions based on sound signatures and feeds them back to both government responders and the community of users. The future of intelligence collection may be sitting in the Apple App Store.