Frontline 2.0

Community policing may be on a comeback trail under the Obama administration after receiving a short shrift in the post 9/11 period.

University of Texas criminology professor Ben Brown says there is a natural convergence between the much discussed intelligence based policing and a community based approach.

He says that police force forces could build greater trust in US Hispanic communities, for instance, as violence has the potential of spilling over from Mexico and the war on drugs continues.

Furthermore, urban police departments do not have the money in these times of budget constraint to hire enough analysts to make sense of the accumulated information sitting in elaborate data banks.

"It is one thing to record hours and hours of conversation each day [through wire tapping]. It is another thing to have somebody listen and make sense out of it," says the professor.

Brown is the author of a critical 2007 paper that took Washington and George Bush to task for curtailing federal expenditures for community policing.

Community policing does entail more cops on the beat. After the 9/11 terrorism attacks, he reports, the federal money directed to local police departments for the purpose of hiring of new officers went from roughly a billion dollars a year in the late 1990s to less than $200-million in fiscal 2003.

Furthermore, Brown continues, community policing began as a major police reform in the 1970s in places like New York City where the emphasis was on building a closer relationship with citizens, identifying and eliminating the causes of crime in a neighborhood and a greater degree of problem solving in the community to build local trust

The idea, which seems like a no-brainer, is that police officers can do a better job of fighting crime and terrorism if they can gather good intelligence from just being in regular communication with local citizens.

While not all police departments bought into George Bush's inspired combative policing tactics which included an enforcement of immigration regulations and the targeting of people of Middle Eastern origin, sufficient numbers of urban police forces did get onboard with new purchases of technology and greater use of SWAT teams.

Law enforcement officials in some cases themselves "clamored" for facial recognition software, computer programs which can scan millions of email messages and biometric identification -- while an industry stood by ready to provide the solutions, Brown says.

"There is little evidence to suggest that the decrease in support for community policing or the increased use of aggressive tactics and invasive technology will either reduce the threat of terrorism or be an effective means of controlling crime and disorder."

Brown offers evidence that co-operative citizens and the police's willingness to share information can make a difference in a criminal investigation. 

He cites the example of John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo who terrorized Washington DC and evaded capture for weeks despite police road blocks and the application of technology including surveillance conducted with military aircraft.

"The key to their arrest was cooperation between law enforcement and the citizenry. Specifically, police officials informed reporters that Muhammad and Malvo were suspects in the sniper investigation.  Although the officials withheld a description of the 1990 Chevrolet Caprice the suspects were driving, reporters culled the information from police scanners and broadcast it. Consequently, two cooperative citizens heard the information on the radio, spotted the vehicle at a rest-stop, and called 911."

Using international examples, Brown points to the British in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and Israel in the 1980s and 90s as examples of how ignoring the social and political causes for unrest within an alienated population be they Ulster Catholics or Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, invariably leads to more violence. He notes that the authorities' reliance on counter terrorism, combative policing and approved torture, can be a recipe for failure.

It all comes down to money, adds Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief and the author of Breaking Ranks - A Top Cop's Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing.

He has heard anecdotally that American law enforcement may be shifting back to community policing.

But it was the previous US presidential administration that created the climate for militarized policing in the first place and so it will be incumbent upon Washington to direct the change, says Stamper.

"[After] 911, the federal government through Homeland Security started doling out huge sums to local enforcement to upgrade their homeland security capacity."

Photo by Beth Rankin. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

Photo: George Monbiot

Every newspaper should have someone like George Monbiot on hand. He's the affable and intelligent UK based Guardian columnist (and the author of Heat - How to stop the planet burning) who keeps readers up to date on the depressing ramp up of human instigated climate change. Furthermore, he often provides a political context to the powerful international denial lobby including its ties to the fossil fuels industry which underpin a number of think tanks. And our rightfully furious George is willing to call for resignations when it makes sense - as he did with a few leading lights at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who've placed their political ambitions ahead of the safety of the planet.

The UK it should be added is one of the few countries in the world where policies of adaptation and mitigation are built into the functions and considerations of every government agency and department at the national and local level. Climate change is not just the prerogative of the environment ministry there. Montbiot comes out of a culture where all of the three major political parties are heading into a spring election agreed that the overheating of the Earth's atmosphere by fossil fuels emissions has catastrophic consequences for future generations.

That kind of consensus does not exist on this side of the pond. Canada, where I live and work, has been reconfigured into a petro-state living off the sales of dirty oil that is belched from the noxious Alberta tar sands and then exported into energy addicted American market. One leading scientist I spoke to dares not express his opinion publicly of late because he is hoping that Ottawa will reverse its recent decision to curtail funding for academic research into the long term trends in weather and atmospheric patterns.

Climate change denial is the official Canadian government policy and it is reflected here in both the news coverage in the corporate driven media and in the prominence given to the two leading skeptics of climate science, columnists and pundits Margaret Wente and Rex Murphy. I have no doubt these two media machers perform their jobs without the benefit of the assistance of a lobby.

My complaint is that that there is nobody in my country like George Monbiot with an equivalent public perch to counter the nay sayers on global warming. The few scientists willing to stick their necks out with rebuttals in the media lack the ability to respond in language that the public can understand. My suspicion is that this imbalance is a widespread phenomenon across North America and beyond. Monbiot has, for instance, complained of the passivity of British climate scientists in face of recent attacks on their research.

This of course makes the job of the emergency planners who need to keep on top of possible droughts, flooding and extreme weather doubly difficult, especially if their political masters belittle climate change as a possible source for those concerns.

It may be said that someone of George Monbiot's talents comes in short supply. In the past he made himself available for talks outside the UK to articulate a pro-science perspective on climate change. But his reluctance to fly, because of the role that air travel plays as a major generator of greenhouse gases, has restricted his availability overseas. But, we cannot always rely on an outsider.

The challenge for consumers of news about climate change is that scientists are contributing all the time to a large body of arcane knowledge that is inexact and a work in progress. Scientists are, for instance, debating the timing and scale of rising sea levels and glacier melting, not if they will happen at all with global warming. For non-specialists it can be downright confusing.

But there is enough data on hand, remarks economist Jeffrey Sachs to demonstrate the urgency of a global strategy to deal with climate change. "Large scale use of oil, coal and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet," he wrote recently.

As recounted by Monbiot, the current scandal involving hacked emails at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia reflects more the typical efforts of a science prima donna -- that is unit head Phil Jones -- to maintain his august reputation to the point of suppressing new data that challenged his flawed 20 year old paper on local heating and urbanization.
 
And it is true the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change representing the work of thousands of the world's climate scientists, erroneously reported the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers within three decades - a nonsensical claim considering the enormous 30,000 square kilometer land mass in question - 300 years is the more likely time frame if global warming continues unchecked, experts have told the Guardian.

Monbiot is calling for the resignation of the head of that organization, Rajendra Pachauri for covering up that error. In one delicious Guardian column he wrote about how the current IPCC head - an economist, not a climate science incidentally -- was the choice of George Bush and ExxonMobil to replace a bona fide scientist Robert Watson whose outspokenness on global warming was not of their liking.

Science is too important to be left to the pundits and politicians.

Photo: Wikipedia - CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

The police appear divided on the volumes of information stored on databases coming their way.

So, observes criminologist Samuel Nunn who has local Indianapolis police officers attend his class on crime and technology which he teaches every other year at Indiana University.

While "the administrative brain trust," heading the Indianapolis police department is never going to turn down data coming their way the lower level patrol officers only want stuff that is going to help them do their jobs, he says.

"The local level officers are not as impressed with all of this information generating capacity as their bosses," says Nunn.

He reports from conversations with his students that it is the common technologies embodied in the laptops, PDAs, cell phones and wireless devices in general plus applications like GPS that excites them the most.

Yes to global positioning systems or a tool that details the history of an address including the number of police calls made to it.

On the other hand, "to hell with that," is the general attitude towards more esoteric stuff like data mining, Nunn finds.

What has come to be known as intelligence led policing, itself a product of 9/11 and the counter terrorist impulse emanating from Washington seems to be receiving a mixed response at the street cop level.

An intelligence based approach involves "connecting the dots," the lack of which we are told led intelligence and policing pre-9/11 at the national level in the US to ignore credible reports from sources that terrorist attacks were about to occur.

Intelligence analysts in policing, especially in the cross country fusion centers, have become the norm as a result of that failure. Their job is to spot for what is called in the trade, "precursor crime."

But the ineptitude surrounding the Christmas bomber's ability to get onto a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit shows that the compiling of hundreds of thousands of names on various watch lists of people has not made American any safer.

The challenge, says Nunn, is that analyzing electronically stored data for potential threats "is tougher to do," than old fashioned talking to people on the street and developing leads in the solving of a crime.

"More information is clearly better than less information, but more information at some point can block you up."

80,000 people including one recently publicized eight year old boy will get pulled aside annually at US airports for special interrogation by authorities before they are able to board a plane.

But those absurdities have not lessened the love affair with intelligence based policing.

What we are dealing with here, Nunn wrote a few years ago, are billions of bytes of data on individuals circulating among police agencies. They include criminal histories, assets, debt, locations at particular times, purchase patterns, biometric identifiers (fingerprints, photographs, DNA samples), etc.

"At any given moment, thousands of inquiries are sent through dozens of regional, national, and international systems seeking answers to questions about people's identity, where they are, what they have done, or what more other agencies and agents know about these individuals. In 2005 the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) averaged 4.5 million inquiries per day."

Meanwhile, popular American culture has played a significant role in nurturing some misconceptions about the technological capabilities of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Nunn cites the film, Enemies of the State, as a prime example

 "People's expectations get pumped by fictional treatments of crime and police technology. You can see it turning into pressure to get local police or any police agency to modernize and to get better at what they do."

In the cultural narrative depicted in movies like  Minority Report and televisions shows like 24 and CSI the good guys always uncover the conspiracies concocted by the terrorist, which Nunn has dubbed as "the boogeyman of the 21 century."

Writes Nunn, "This model helps us accept 9/11 as an interruption or aberration. Looking back, we had the pieces if only someone had put them together: the plot was within our grasp. Heroic FBI agents wrote memos, villainous or incompetent supervisors ignored them or, worse, destroyed them."

If terrorists are sneaking around in an urban setting, American authorities in these films, rely on surveillance technology to root them out, Nunn observes.

"If we know a sleeper cell is operating in a city's neighborhood, the authorities can place the cell under surveillance with visual monitoring, communications interception, dialed number logs, video taping, credit card purchases, and other transaction footprints used to build a virtual sphere of information control. Alternatively, we can figure out what terrorists 'look like' through profiling, find them, surveil them, uncover their plans, and incarcerate them. We will process information to prevent terrorism."

Therefore, it is not surprising to discover that the US government under George Bush made an effort after 9/11 to encourage the making of films where potential scenarios of criminal actions were played out in a fictional format to help Washington develop real counter terrorism tactics.

Nunn says that some Hollywood productions and planned TV shows were altered or postponed after 9/11 either because of fears the depicted violent strategies could be successfully imitated by real terrorists or they had the potential to cause a public panic. 

Photo of Sam Nunn courtesy of Indiana University.

Information overload kills

The following may appear strange to the dutiful readers of this blog and Digital Communities in general.

The political kerfuffle in Washington over a failed effort on Christmas Day to ignite an explosive device on a Northwest Airlines' passenger air plane approaching Detroit from Amsterdam demonstrates the limitations of security technology today.

This columnist has written about the millions of unverifiable names, which have sat rotting away inside giant US government terrorism watch list databases since 9/11.

Now, we have an example of a would-be airplane bomber who was undone not by any security infrastructure built in place -- but by his own incompetence in terms of handling a liquid explosive material and the quick wittedness of fellow airplane passengers who scrambled to stop the 23 year old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from doing any further damage.

One complaint is that there are insufficient numbers of skilled intelligence analysts within the US government with the ability to spot genuine terror threats among the volumes of electronically stored emails, telephone calls and other forms of private communications.

Another is that there are too many bureaucratic layers within US intelligence to allow for a coherent approach.

But the bigger issue is really human capacity to absorb only so much data and analyze it, even with all of the sophisticated software tools at hand.

"No matter how sophisticated or exotic, [the databases] are not likely to succeed in helping [to] find needles in haystacks that are constantly being fed more hay. Not this decade anyway," states Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent for 24 years and a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

In a recent interview she makes the important point that it is US foreign policy and military overkill -alluding to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan Somalia, and Yemen -- that is radicalizing more local people and creating more terrorists in the process.

The US government data bases, writes Middle East expert and blogger Juan Cole, are at the heart of a failed US led campaign which has tended "to cast a broad net" to ward off terrorism.

"You catch terrorists with good police work. You look at networks, suspicious behavior, clues. Ignoring the desperate pleas of a father who goes to the CIA with information about his son being radicalized in Yemen but then patting down 170 million Nigerians ever after is brain dead."

Cole is referring to the Obama's administration's list of countries whose citizens will be subject to extraordinary scrutiny by American border officials.

But the combination of pat downs, long rounds of interrogation and the naked exposure of passengers with high tech whole body scanners will only "tax and tire" the airport inspectors and thus make them "less alert," he adds.

I guess what I am trying to say is that the hysteria around international security in the air is ignoring our own human limitations that cannot be easily solved through technology.

The latest manifestation is the new $150,000 a pop body scanners which are being installed with much haste in airports around the world. Based on the millimeter wave sensor technology they are designed to do what critics are calling "digital strip searches."

However the new scanners would not have caught the recently dubbed underwear bomber, technical experts have told the London Independent.

Abdulmutallab was allegedly concealing in his underpants on the Northwest flight a package containing nearly 3 ounces of the chemical powder PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate). Also, he carried a syringe containing a liquid accelerant for the purposes of detonating the explosive.

The Independent spoke to Ben Wallace, a Conservative MP, who was formerly involved in a project by a leading British defense research firm to develop the scanners for airport use. He told the newspaper that such trials indicated that low density chemicals, liquids and plastics can go undetected with these devices.

On the other hand, the new scanners will spot high- density material such as metal, knives; guns and dense plastic such as the C4 explosive.

Journalist James Ridgeway at Mother Jones magazine makes note of how the former Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, frequently popping up here and there promoting the new scanners, is actually now a paid lobbyist in Washington for one of the leading whole body imaging machine makers, Rapiscan Systems.

Because the new body scanners cannot detect what terrorists might put inside their bodies, the next generation of intrusive technology down the pipe for airports might come straight out of the UK prisons, Ridgeway reports.

He points to the Body Orifice Security Scanner or BOSS chair (how Monty Pythoneque!) which has been compared to an electric chair and is largely used to track cell phones, shivs, and other dangerous contraband that has been swallowed or inserted into body cavities by inmates. "So far, it only detects metal, but you never know," says Ridgeway.

How do police forces make sense of all of their collected data?

The answer of course is the reliance on data mining technology via internal algorithms to analyze trends and connect the dots.

As I reported in my last blog, much of the data collected on citizens in the United States or North America is often not vetted for accuracy or even updated.

Lawyer Maureen Webb, elucidates further on this point in her seminal book, Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the post-9/11 World.

"None of the data mining programs contain a mechanism by which individuals can correct, contextualize or object to the information that is being used against them or even know what it is."

This kind of precision in data mining is not possible because systems operate on a "preemption principle," she explains. 

"They would be bogged down if they were held to the ordinary standards of access, accuracy and accountability."

Secondly, she writes, "data mining is assessing guilt by Goggle keyword searches" in its reliance on broad categories to find potential terrorists among targeted ethnic, religious and racial groups.

Meanwhile, Whit Andrews, an industry analyst at Gartner, says that the main customers for the variety of data mining software products on the market are very large government and private commercial organizations.

He notes that the data mining technology continues to improve but it is best used when the data is arranged in a linear fashion for simple searches as in "show me all of the records that contain X in the field data."

Commercial providers wanting an up to date analysis of sales and customer trends for products and services have benefited from data mining because the searches are generally straight forward, Andrews explains.

Where it gets complicated is in the more ambitious and perhaps nebulous searches of masses of data by police and intelligence to predict trends and avoid incidents of crime or terrorism.

The efforts can be "hair raising"for the analysts and the results are less than satisfactory in terms of the quality of the results, says Andrews.

A typical question that might come up in policing or intelligence may include the following: --"you want to find data on every person who has traveled from Toronto to New York City last year and who has also gone to Kabul.

The challenge is that you are looking for different items or objects such as for example a health record or an airline ticket to identify patterns of specific people targeted.

"The critical challenge in searching has been the number of relationships and the ability to reduce those relationships to something that an analyst can parse," says Andrews.

"But you might literally have thousands of relationships that need to be addressed. And then you need to make it possible for the analyst, to interpret whether those relationships are fulfilled," he continues.

Andrews experienced first hand having his name mysteriously put on a US government watch list where it stayed for two years. The result was that he was pulled over for questioning by authorities to a back room every time he tried to board a flight at an airport.

"I was on the watch list because my [original] name is Thomas Andrews," he recalled.

None of the authorities at the airport could explain to Andrews why he was being subjected to this level of scrutiny or if there was another Thomas Andrews wanted by the police.

"There is the possibility that someone had misused my name or that it was an extremely common name. Another [possibility] is that it had nothing to do with my name."

A chilling by-product of the over-reaction to 9/11 in Washington is the building of giant global electronic databases containing personal citizen information that in some cases includes hearsay which has not been properly verified or vetted.

The U.S. government's philosophy of so-called risk assessment is straight out of Kafka and Orwell's nightmares, writes lawyer Maureen Webb, the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post 9/11 World.

"It is a world in which individuals are presumed guilty, detained and not told the charges against them, denied the right to face their accusers, denied the right to know the evidence against them and the criteria by which they are being judged, and given no recourse and no one to advocate for them."

Eight years later after the passage of the Patriot Act it is not clear if this enormously expensive project has caught many real terrorists. We know the government databases have mostly ensnarled innocent people at international borders and left behind permanent psychological and physical scars.

The most famous example is IT specialist and Canadian citizen Maher Arar who upon returning home from visiting his wife's relatives in Tunisia was stopped and held in New York City in 2002. Questioned but never charged, he ended up being sent to Syria, the country of his birth where he was jailed and tortured for almost a year on suspicions of terrorism -- that were found to be groundless by in an official inquiry in Canada by Judge Dennis O'Connor. Following that, in early 2007 Arar received an apology from the Canadian government - the original unproven accusations based on hearsay and guilt by association against him originated with Canadian police and security officials -- and was compensated to the tune of $10-million Canadian.

Unfortunately, Arar has never personally recovered from his ordeal. He cannot get a job in IT consulting in Canada which tends to demand a certain amount of travel all over North America.  Not helpful then was the Department of Homeland Security which has barred him from entering the US. No full explanation was provided by DHS secretary Janet Napolitano during her visit to Ottawa earlier this year.

Much of the personal information in the post 9/11 databases has not been confirmed and updated, comments, says Peter Manning, Northeastern University professor and author of Technology of Policing.

Currently, the giant databases in the US contain items like warrants and arrest records which are shared among the FBI, customs immigration officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

So, people with particular kinds of names -- usually Arabic sounding -- will continue to experience delays and possible incarceration while crossing international borders, Manning remarked.

One good thing he says is that the databases are incompatible with the municipal police computer systems, which limits their damage to the national and international level.

"The only way that it might work as it has always in the past is if someone from the Toronto Police Department knows somebody in the New York Police department. And the New York Police Department knows somebody in Homeland Security and says, 'can you get me some information.'"

Also, data mining continues to be an underdeveloped technology, That is, explains Manning, it is often difficult to do accurate searches of patterns and trends from the accumulated data in the giant data bases.

The problem, he says, is that in software, it is hard to match different objects, such as for example, as an airline ticket or a health record.

But ordinary citizen should not be complacent. Take a look at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics where a billion dollar plus security budget has managed to facilitate communication and data sharing via compatible technologies among national, local Vancouver city police and security and intelligence forces within Canada, as well as with neighboring US law enforcement authorities across the border.

"We also have risk assessment here in Canada and it is this risk assessment that is cranking out the data on relative risks to the Olympics," says Micheal Vonn, policy director at the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

The target is not terrorists who have fallen off the list of threats, but "protesters," says Vonn.

The Canadian media has reported on how potential critics of the Olympic Games among political activists, artists and journalists are being targeted under the new security blanket enveloping Vancouver.

Also recently affected was Amy Goodman, the award winning host of the Democracy Now radio show in the US. She was on her way to Vancouver to publicize her new book, Breaking the Sound Barrier and talk about health care reform and wars in Asia when she was stopped, questioned and searched by officials at the Canada Border Services Agency for 90 minutes, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Goodman revealed that Canadian border officials were worried about what she might write about in terms of the Vancouver Olympics When she revealed her ignorance about the upcoming sports event, they refused to believe her.

Goodman also mentioned to the CBC that her car was searched and the officials demanded to look at her notes and her computer. Eventually, she was permitted to enter and stay in Canada for only 48 hours

"I am deeply concerned that as a journalist I would be flagged and that the concern - the major concern - was the content of my speech," she told reporters.  The CBSA refused to comment on Goodman's statements.

Manning says that Canadian police have software technology that has solved some of the incompatibility technology challenges experienced by their US counterparts.

"Canadian police have been much more advanced with respect to these formalized modes of sharing data than American police," he noted.  [More on that in a follow-up]

Emergency management is short-term in its focus on immediate disasters and measures to clean up the damage.

But climate change, the catalyst for droughts, forest fires, violent storms and extreme weather demands a long term response.
 
Canadian environmental policy analyst Robert Paehlke estimates, for instance, that the developed countries which are pumping out the majority of fossil fuel emissions per capita into the atmosphere must reduce them in the range of 30 to 50 per cent by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

It is a do-able exercise technically but only over a forty year time frame, he told me in a recent interview.

Paehlke says this is a challenge for politicians who generally are elected for four or five year terms and are experiencing pressure from powerful oil and coal producing interests that have more clout than the new green industries pushing solar and wind.

"It takes real leadership to say, look, 'we have got a problem; [but] it may be 30 years off [to solve it]," says Paelkle, professor emeritus in environmental studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario and the founding editor of Alternatives Journal.

Some problems such as a serious shortage of water is threatening both the viability of agriculture and communities in the US southwest, although that concern has not filtered down to the Americans who are still headed in that direction to live.

Meanwhile, rising ocean levels, a century from now, may overwhelm the low lying coastal communities of California including the San Francisco Bay Area. Local scientists are anticipating that Silicon Valley could be underwater by then.

"Sea level changes are now in the matter of centimeters, not meters, not enough to make a dramatic [change] but it is mercifully slow so that you can anticipate it."

The scariest scenario for Paelkle is the melting of glaciers, the source of fresh water for many areas in the developing countries including India and Pakistan.

"The only hope is desalinization of sea water or long pipelines somewhere else, unless you are going to try to move. But it is not easy to move tens of millions of people."

We all know the solution to climate change -- a combination of carbon taxes and cap & trade to reduce the reliance on fossil fuel to slow down the planet's overheating. But, achieving a global agreement with each country signing on looks like an almost insurmountable task -- as witnessed by the low expectations surrounding the upcoming Copenhagen conference.

Another obstacle is that climate change denial has jumped in the US population from 57 to 71 percent in 18 months, according to a recent poll. One columnist George Monbiot in the UK Guardian has written that it is the older portions of the population who still adhere to the notion that climate change is all a hoax - in some quarters it is a left-wing conspiracy to install state ownership.

Paehlke attributes the highs and lows in public support for action on climate change to the changes in the weather.

Two years ago, the winters were getting warmer and there was extreme heat in Europe killing people. Plus, Hurricane Katrina, spurred on by warmer oceans, had slammed into New Orleans the year earlier. That was when climate change topped the charts in terms of general concerns. But as temperatures have tapered off, personal priorities have shifted.

What is misunderstood is that scientists never stated that climate change meant that each year would be hotter than the next, says Paehlke.

Climate change, he explains, is a subtle and incremental process occurring over a number of decades. That is, temperatures may vary annually but the long term trend is still a hotter planet if humanity stays the course in terms of fossil fuel usage - i.e. way beyond two degrees Centigrade minimum for a tolerable world temperature.

What does that mean for emergency managers? It has been premature to talk about mitigation strategies for climate change since the aim of the environmentalists has been to avoid the phenomenon altogether, says Paehlke.

"In some cases it is pretty hard to mitigate because you can't mitigate a tornado. I mean you don't know where it is going to be. All you can guess is that there might be a slightly higher rate of them."

Nevertheless, he adds, New Orleans' existing vulnerability has forced local authorities to forestall further hurricane related damages with the raising of the height of the levies, as well as close consultation with experts in the Netherlands where there is a history of withstanding the incursion of an expanded North Sea.
 

Photo by Roberto Rizzato. CC Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic

Climate change is the cause of our time but it is often hard to convince a whole lot of people including many politicians, business people and even ordinary citizens of the urgency of responding proactively to the overheating of the planet.

So along comes a significant announcement of an independent task force established by the World Meteorological Organization to explore how scientists can project more accurate readings of impending storms, hurricanes, typhoons, drought and floods caused by climate change.

The WMO will conduct a year of consultations to decide how to implement its ambitious "global framework for climate services." A plan for action is anticipated at the next WMO congress in 2011.

Canadian environmental journalist Stephen Leahy, who covered the September WMO conference in Geneva for Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), makes the point that scientists are hobbled by the fact that their projections for dire events -- like rising sea levels, drowned island nations, melting of glaciers and severe droughts that potentially could kill agriculture in some regions -- are too far off in the future.

Way beyond the life-times of the current decision makers who are baby-boomers.

"One of the things that I have been asking climate scientists for years is nobody cares 60 years from now what is it going to be like in central Canada. [The general public] want to know what it's going to be like in five years time 'in my backyard,'" Leahy says.

The more chaotic weather conditions stemming from the overheating in atmosphere has made risk projections for serious rain or severe storms in the short-term much more difficult. Farmers, meteorologists and indigenous peoples cannot rely anymore on their knowledge of traditional weather patterns.

At the same time the tools for forecasting has improved, Leahy says.

He points to new technology and improved climate science which has already shortened the time it takes to prepare for drought or floods to avoid the more serious consequences to infrastructure and lives in local communities.

What the WMO envisages are on demand climate services that might for instance help farmers determine what to plant and where, based on three to five year projections of impending droughts or assist coastal communities facing rising sea levels in advance.

It would especially be an aid for impoverished communities in developing countries that lack access to weather and climate observation instruments.

What makes a normally skeptical journalist like Leahy hopeful is that the new climate change prediction tool initiative has engaged leading US and European scientists.

He points for instance to the presence of Jane Lubchenko, a noted ecologist, currently an administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and head of Barack Obama's US delegation at the WMO conference.

Much is apparently still on the table including the cost of developing the on- demand climate services, where the money is going to come from and how the services will be provided, reports Leahy.

Key will be the development of new sophisticated super computer modeling tools as the IT underpinning the research of the International Panel of Climate Change is not powerful enough for short-term one year projections.

"The [panel's computing modeling] is too broad and coarse in the sense that they look at giant readings. They cannot tell you what things will be like in southern Ontario. They can tell you what it is going to be like in eastern Canada or what the projections are to 2050, lets say."

The IPCC tends to focus on trends in the range of 50 to 100 years, which is just too far off, he explains.

Another journalist and editor, Olive Heffernan wrote recently in the British science journal Nature (www.nature.com/climate), that there are "a host of scientific and political hurdles" regarding the collection and sharing of climate data among the participating 150 countries in the WMO.

In an interview, she stated that while the UK government freely provides its own climate data to legitimate scientists, it might baulk at offering packages of information to insurance companies or planners. One way around this is to allow "data of convenience" that is tailored for specific purposes for commercialization; while fundamental information is made freely available, adds Heffernan, quoting one expert in the field.

Photo by Kevin Dooley. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

Much of what law enforcement agencies use in surveillance technology can be traced to the U.S. military.

Furthermore, the most interesting innovation within the military has come from developments in visualization software, sensors, cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles, not in the latest in weaponry, argues University of Alberta criminologist and surveillance expert Kevin Haggerty.
"The American military is not just about the use of force. They have tremendous informational capacity, though they have tremendous use of force capacity. But since the Revolution in Military Affairs [i.e. the future of warfare under new technologies], warfare has increasingly become informational activity."

Haggerty is skeptical about the utility of such military surveillance items as UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in 24/7-style policing where the areas of concern range from gang wars and missing kids to the theft of valuable personal possessions.

"There is a clearer mandate [within the military] about what you are trying to do. In the military you have ideally an end point; whereas policing is a very amorphous activity."
But that hasn't stopped the producers of the new visualization software from seeking domestic applications for their products, adds Haggerty.

"The logic of how you manage populations and secure spaces in a military context, particularly urban spaces, leads into the logic of how you secure and manage population and spaces in a domestic policing context."

Urban geographer Stephen Graham, a professor at Durham University in the UK, has written about the application of U.S. warfare strategies in the cities of the global south.

Photo: Los Angeles Sheriff's Dept. has worked with a defense contractor, Ocatron, to develop a specialized UAV for police work. Here's one test flight.

Author of the forthcoming Cities under Siege: the New Military Urbanism, he nails down in his previous writings the notion of the Revolution in Military Affairs within U.S. military planning. Here, the stress is on the reliance on omnipresent surveillance via sensors and "situational awareness," to inflict devastating and targeted aerial attacks on a perceived enemy. "Nobody in the city moves without the full and complete knowledge of the mobile tactical center."
As Graham notes, the U.S. military strategists take little account of the specificity of the geographical space when "full spectrum dominance" is the priority.

Yet, for all of the deep thinking in the Pentagon, the US military experienced great difficulty in fully securing all of Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Most journalists and experts agree that ethnic cleansing by the majority Shia forces against the minority Sunni in the sprawling city of Baghdad, not George W. Bush's military surge, ultimately led to a downscaling of local urban battles and attacks.

Nevertheless, the implementation of CCTV systems to blanket cities like London or Chicago comes directly out of the US military's philosophy of "combat zones that see [CTS]."
A project of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and launched at the start of the Iraq insurgency against the Americans in 2003, CTS facilitates the mass tracking of an urban setting and population through video cameras and sensing devices down to the minutest detail possible, says Graham.

Another piece of military planner lingo, HURT (Heterogeneous Urban Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition Team) entails the use of remote control and UAV technology to inflict considerable physical harm against insurgents without resulting in casualties of U.S. soldiers and pilots - the result of which can kill support for the war effort back home.

Graham describes one system, labeled "video flashlight," which uses software to paint in simulations of the details of occupied cities based on data fed by CTS like CCTV systems and other radars and sensors. The result is three dimensional models of subject cities which allow viewers "to fly" through them and explore the real-time tracks of known or suspected targets.

"Disturbingly, such fantasies of continuous, automated and robotized urban targeting and killing are far from the realms of sci-fi fantasy. Rather, as with the CTS and HURT programs, they are fuelling very real multimillion dollar research and weapons development programmes aimed at developing ground and aerial vehicles, which not only navigate and move robotically, but also select and destroy targets without 'humans in the loop' based on algorithmically driven 'decisions'."

Graham, a generally cool-headed academic in his writing, can't help but place these U.S. cyberpunk military theories of robotic killing machines in a racial and imperialistic context.
"Theorists of surveillance will also need to be mindful that these processes are being further fuelled by proliferating cultures of fear, and the widespread demonization of Arab and global south urbanites and urban places, generated and perpetuated by both 'war on terror' discourses and the Orientalized products of Western entertainment industries novels, video games, films."

The cross-over to the streets of the global north is not surprising, Graham adds, "given the growing privatization of western militaries, law enforcement and security industries and the efforts by a small number of military-security 'prison-industrial complex' conglomerates to colonize both 'homeland' and 'war zone battle spaces' equally."

Graham, S. Surveillance, urbanization, and the US "Revolution in Military Affairs". In: Lyon, L. Theorizing Surveillance: The panopticon and beyond. Willon Publishing; 2008:247-268.
 

To what degree do post 9/11 counter terror strategies govern the purchases by US law enforcement agencies outside New York City? Criminologist Peter Manning says that in 2009 the police are happy to receive Washington's money for whatever purposes but that their priorities remain entirely local and even parochial.

Others like Eli Clifton and Daniel Luban at Inter Press Service's LobeLog.com blog recently expressed strong reservations about the participation of members of more than 700 US law enforcement agencies and first responder organizations in one week counter terror security briefings in Israel, which incidentally will be held for the last time in November.

The two writers stress the role that the department of Homeland Security has played in paying for the course fees which run to $4,200 a student, as well as the affiliation of the actual trainers - the Miami based Security Solutions International - with "Islamophic propaganda groups."

SSI (www.homelandsecurityssi.com) promotes itself as "the world class provider of international counter terrorism and law enforcement security solutions" and is headed by an advisory board made up people with a law enforcement background.

Clifton and Luban in their article question the value of this sort of training backed by federal subsidies.

"Critics have pointed out that the most likely effect of such training - particularly for law enforcement who have never had significant contact with Muslims before - is to drum up hysteria, and increase the likelihood of a potentially tragic overreaction when they actually do encounter someone they presume to be Muslim."

Packed into the course's one week itinerary are meetings with Israeli security personnel, martial arts demonstrations including how to take down a suicide bomber, visits to the controversial West Bank security wall and towns experiencing rocket attacks from Gaza, as well as trips to Christian holy sites -- designed to appeal to US Christian Zionist sympathies with hard-liners within Israel, hint Clifton and Luban.

IT is not stressed on the trip but participants gain a picture of Israel's prowess in high tech and low tech solutions in terms of the securing and protecting key infrastructure points including government buildings, universities, power plants and ports.

"If someone wants real risk assessment, we go into surveillance, counter surveillance, of course," states SSI chief executive officer, Solomon Bradman, in a recent interview with Digital Communities.

"The technology is always available in counter surveillance and may include CCTV. But it includes a lot of other stuff -- explosive detection, through wall cameras, under floor cameras, all kinds of weird, stuff."

At the same time, the question can be posed -- what does Israel's 100 year old political struggle with the Palestinians for the same territory have anything to do with America's need to avoid another spate of 9/11 attacks -- which appear less probable as time goes along but that's another story.

Bradman maintains that although not all of Israel's security practices are easily transferable to the US, the students come away with fresh new ideas.

"A lot of these law enforcement agencies, have changed the way they provide security, or do security for things like courthouses."

It also appears that some of the blistering criticism of the SSI's program in the US Muslim community has altered the tone somewhat at SSI.

Solomon Bradman is downplaying the overtly "political" nature of the course, with his revelation that the controversial film "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West "has been withdrawn" after initialing giving it away in some training sessions.

"We are trying to stay as non political as possible, which is very difficult to do but we are trying to stay on balance as much as we can."

But he refuses to back away from the program's session on Islamic culture where the leading theme is, "where does the hatred come from?"

Bradman explains that the instruction is led by a law enforcement officer who happens to be a practicing Muslim.

What makes the SSI's message highly problematic that we know in retrospect how many western governments and their security services connived in the jailed and torturing of innocent Muslims, including Canada's own Maher Arar, as part of the overreaction following 9/11.

Also, one should be wary of the line coming out of Israel and promoted by the SSI that the conflict with the Palestinians is existential and intractable rather than something that can be resolved through vigorous diplomacy and generally non-military means-- which the US president Barack Obama is attempting to do right now with a great deal of difficulty in face of the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu's settler influenced coalition government in Jerusalem.