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Safety and Security through inconvenience - Seattle's 911 website

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An article appeared on the Seattle Post-Intellegencer regarding a website that displayed the Seattle Live 911 website feed on a Google map. The city's response? Change the text to images in an attempt to prevent the map display for security reasons.

The Seattle Fire Department's Real-Time 911 Fire Dispatch response:

"PLEASE NOTE: To address security concerns raised by the public safety community, Seattle Fire Department now displays current incident data as an image within your browser rather than as plain text. The information displayed in the image is updated every minute and then automatically refreshed to the screen. Historical incident information will continue to be displayed as text, just as it has been in the past.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this action has caused. Our intent is to enhance the safety of personnel and the public but still provide information about current emergencies in our community."

Fire Department spokeswoman Helen Fitzpatrick said "That's where the security issue comes in because it shows where all our resources are at one time on a map." Apparently the City doesn't believe that the 'text' version doesn't do the exact same thing. Bruce Schneier (a security guru and author of "Beyond Fear") says, "The government is not saying, 'Hey, this data needs to be secret,' they are saying, 'This data needs to be inconvenient to get to.' "

In fact the new version poses another concern... its not 'accessible' to visually impaired surfers because it won't read on a text reader.

Perhaps the City could address security concerns by throwing in false information to mislead any evil intentions. What other things could the City of Seattle do to make our lives more secure? Maybe they could make it so that people had to click on 15 links to get to the site, or constantly change the URL so that no one can bookmark the live feed of the 911 dispatch page.

On the same thought then maybe all of those air traffic reporting sites should also be banned. AeroSeek is available on your laptop and this Java air traffic tool on your cellphone might be an extreme security risk for Seattle.

 

 


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