A "Neighborhood Watch" for Terrorism?

Researchers Bill McKelvey and Max Boisot have created a framework for individuals to become a part of the fight against terrorism. They call it Global Neighborhood Watch. It envisions citizens being equipped with everyday items like cell phones that possess technologies that can detect dangers and automatically report them to the authorities, as in this example:

A salesman, traveling by train from Dulles International Airport to Union Station in Washington, hears a beep emanate from his mobile phone. He's startled, because the sound indicates that a chemical sensor in his briefcase detects the presence of penthrite somewhere in the train car . . . at the next stop, a woman boards . . . and a pager-like device strapped to her waist also emits a beeping noise.. . . As each rider's sensor detects penthrite, it alerts an agent in the National Counterterrorism Center, the U.S. government's fusion point for all terrorism intelligence. Seeing two alarms go off, the agent calls the salesman and sends a text message to the woman, asking them to describe, independently, what they see. . . The agent then enters their observations into a powerful computer. The machine quickly churns the information and looks for meaningful patterns, which, hopefully, will reveal whether there's a real attack in the offing.
This system gets around a major problem in anti-terrorism work, which is connecting different pieces of information ("dots") together to form patterns that can be analyzed. The inclusion of thousands or even millions of individuals in the data collection process

while possibly becoming a giant dot collector, would marry the filtering and cognitive power of human beings with the computational power of advanced technology - something the professors call a "socio-computational" approach to intelligence analysis.
The system would be designed around an individual human being's ability to filter out extraneous information and concentrate on the important factors that could be clues of potential terrorist threats. These clues would then be processed by computers to match them with patterns of terrorist behavior.

McKelvey and Boisot readily admit the global watch's most obvious drawback: "It requires ordinary citizens to take on the role of secret agents and to snoop on other citizens' neighbors." In 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft proposed a nationwide snooping program called the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - Operation TIPS - that was ridiculed and effectively dismissed. But McKelvey and Boisot aren't Washington insiders, and so likely feel more emboldened to offer up controversial and, some might say, heretical ideas.
The researchers see this system being adopted worldwide, and believe that people will accept the loss of personal privacy necessary to make it work because of the substantial shared benefits in curbing terrorism.

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