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.'"

Paranoid Seattle Buses

[LionKimbro]

I was in a metro [metrokc.gov] bus and wanted to take a picture of some trees outside. The bus driver told me, "Hey, you can't take pictures in here."

I asked, "Why not?!"

He said, "I'm actually supposed to report you to the police, if you do. Terrorism."

"What are they going to do, reverse engineer the bus timetables from photographic evidence? This can't possibly make us any safer."

He replied, "Well, who's to say."

Who's to say indeed.

Absolutely absurd.

Note that busview [busview.org] will give you the location of all Metro busses in real time.

Re:Inconvienient?

[MichaelSmith]

Come on, does anyone really think that making the information a tiny bit harder to get is going to discourage real terrorists?

My ex girlfriend had this side gate on her house which was hard to open but not locked. He housemate insisted that I put a lock on it so I did. Didn't bother me because I always just stepped over the gate rather than trying to open the bloody thing. She sees a potential thief as being like herself but I think the thief is going to be more like me, ie, able to step over a 1 metre high gate.

The people who want this site changed have never heard of OCR. They just don't want to explain to their even less tech savvy boss that there is no way to make this information secure without not releasing it.

Re:Why do we need it?

[Wilson_6500]

So your travel-aide computer can automatically alert you to the fact that your planned route is blocked by a huge accident very soon after the acciden occurs?

Re:Why do we need it?

[loneconspirator]

From my experience, people often use this service to answer the question "what the heck are all those sirens???" For this purpose, a real time service is essential. In addition, it is a good public service to let the population know if that volley of emergency vehicles that careened past their homes are getting a cat out of a tree or chasing down an axe wielding maniac.

The data isn't normalized so response dispatchments to the same place can be peppered throuh the data. Mapping the data greatly simplifies understanding what's going on.

That said, the data presented was minimal, the listings we're linked into full police reports, but said "medic response", "automatic fire alarm", etc. Occasionally, one could find "haz mat spill cleanup" or "armed assult". The system also tells you if the incident is closed. Overall, a nice service to have to know what's going down in your neighborhood.

Anyway, making it inconvenient to access is a silly half retraction of the service.

Re:Unsure what to make of this

[bmo]

"It might be possible to wait for many of the emergency vehicles to be on one side of the city and then start a fire on the other side of the city."

Funny, that can be done _without_ computers _or_ 911 tracking.

These guys are just worried that someone might point to poor performance. That's all. It's entirely _cya_.

--
BMO

Re:Bandwidth

[seattle911]

First of all, I am John Eberly (I read slashdot, but have never posted) and I hosted this site for free with no advertisements. I grabbed their data every 2 minutes via cron/perl and posted it on my site. I am sure I "saved" them bandwith. Real time police and fire data is nothing new, NYC has both Police and Fire data here... http://gothamist.com/labs/map [gothamist.com]. Where do they get their data you ask? They subsribe to a server for a $100/year over the internet. I am sure glad the terrorist can't figure that out. Once I had figured out they switched their data feed to a jpeg, I did a quick 30 second google search, apt-get install gocr, etc. and I had the feed again... It was actually even slightly easier than before, not tags and extra junk to strip, just fixed width text. I am a little tired of government crying "terrorism" and implementing worthless security measures. You don't need a "fancy software program" to get the Police/Fire resources tied up, just place about 3-4 bogus phone calls. By the way, my blog has been up/down today, because have some "runaway process on a separate node" according to my VPS. My server easily withstood the 20,000 hits in 12 hours from reddit.

The worst part is if your house is burning down

[WillAffleckUW]

You can't pop down the street to the cafe and surf the net to see how many hours it will be before the fire truck you paid for with your Seattle taxes actually shows up.

Especially if you're blind or vision-disabled, as graphics won't work properly with their new system.

So, if you're a blind Seattleite, it's NOT an "improvement".

"It shouldn't be available"?

[madajb]

The kind of thinking on display here frightens the hell out of me.
"If we're not a first responder, why do we need the info in real time? "
"'ll have to start out by saying I'm amazed such information was ever available"
"Is it important to know, in real-time, where emergency crews are? "
"There is no way that 911 call information should be available at anything approaching real-time data"

This is completely ass-backwards.
There should be no need for me to prove that data, _any_ government data, should be available to me.
The government needs to prove there is a compelling reason for them not to make it available.

This sort of data serves some useful purposes and some not so useful purposes, in terms of tracking allocation of resources, seeing where hotspots are, knowing where that firetruck that just roared past you is going, and yes, pure entertainment.

The governments "counter-argument" consists of bogeymen in a closet.

The idea that anyone could come down on side of the government in this case is, to me, a sad commentary on the willingness of the populace to accept any old excuse that limits their access to the workings of their government.

-ajb

Re:Unsure what to make of this

[TapeCutter]

"The question should be "why shouldn't they have it"?

The have a default answer nowadays: Terroists.

The question is now, how is it a usefull tool to terrorists? The answer is "it's not". Terrorists are attempting to orchestrate the mayhem, this tool mearly allows them to watch the response.

A common statergy with terrorists (eg: AQ, Isreal) is to attck twice in the same spot. Once to get the target, the second time to get the responders. AFAIK, "wait 20-30min" is not a fucking secret!

Re:The worst part is if your house is burning down

[WillAffleckUW]

good point. If they disabled the ADA-required text version (which can be used for data), they're in violation of federal requirements.