The Crowd's Role in Defending Against Swarms

A couple weeks ago John Arquilla wrote an op-ed at the New York Times titled The Coming Swarm. "The basic concept," he writes about swarm attacks, "is that hitting several targets at once, even with just a few fighters at each site, can cause fits for elite counterterrorist forces that are often manpower-heavy, far away and organized to deal with only one crisis at a time." As examples he cites the Mumbai attacks and attacks on three government ministries in Kabul in the space of a week by just eight terrorists. The prominence of these attacks means "suggests that Americans should brace for a coming swarm."

How do you deal with swarm attacks? Arquilla writes, "The simplest way is to create many more units able to respond to simultaneous, small-scale attacks and spread them around the country. This means jettisoning the idea of overwhelming force in favor of small units that are not “elite” but rather “good enough” to tangle with terrorist teams. In dealing with swarms, economizing on force is essential."

That sounds good to me. The core response to terror attacks must always come from trained professionals. But I'd like to raise a question: can the "crowd" play any meaningful role in a response to swarm attacks? Or any attack, for that matter?. We live in an age when the means of large-scale violence are readily available to everybody. In a day when any sixteen year-old with a grudge can shoot up a school, potential threats are everywhere. Limited numbers of police may not be able to respond to every threat in a timely manner. Can we give average citizens some role in their own defense?

I think yes and no. You certainly can't (and shouldn't) try to crowdsource everything, particularly in the realm of security. But we may be able to identify some particular functions that the crowd is uniquely suited to play.

My first suggestion is that the crowd is uniquely suited to get itself out of harm's way. When an attack is in progress, authorities need fast, effective ways to communicate the threat to citizens who may be in danger and communicate instructions. Survivors of the September 11th WTC attacks said, "they felt emergency communications could have been more helpful during the evacuation of the towers. Specific knowledge about the location of fires and aircraft impact damage was only occasionally communicated to occupants who requested the information. Those communications were apparently uncoordinated." Some announcements in WTC 2 even instructed employees to return to their offices just prior the second aircraft impact. Likewise, lives could have been saved in several of the high-profile school shootings if students knew an attack was in progress. If you communicate the threat and clear instructions, crowds could self-organize to get clear of the threat. This kind of resilience--minimizing the effects of attacks--is vital to a comprehensive defense against terrorism.

How do you communicate to the right crowd? My money is on cell phones. Everybody has one, usually on their person. In the wake of the Virgina Tech massacre, hundreds of universities have implemented text alert systems. The problem is that these systems are opt-in and have low enrollment rates. The plans are also not broad or flexible enough for use outside a specific university.

Could this idea be enlarged? Cellphone locations can be identified within a 25-100m radius by triangulation and many cell phones have GPS receivers. Google has actually created a service called Google Latitude that lets friends and family track your position using these technologies. Theoretically, it should be possible to build a flexible emergency-response system that lets authorities send alerts to every phone in a given geographic region. Shooting spree in progress at the local mall? Authorities could send a text alert to every cell phone entering a one mile radius. This strikes me as a far more relevant system in today's world than our outdated Emergency Alert System--which transmits over TV, radio, and cable.

I imagine the main obstacles would be legal and ethical. Is this a violation of privacy? Do we want to let Big Brother communicate with our cell phones? Does the government have authority to demand phone location information from cell phone companies? Should such a system be opt-in, opt-out, or mandated? Could hackers hijack the system for nefarious purposes? I don't have the answers, but I suggest this is a conversation worth having.

The crowd could also feed valuable intelligence back to authorities. Only a limited number of police officers will respond to an attack, but they could take advantage of hundreds of eyes and ears at the scene. Perhaps the same text alerting system described above could include callback numbers for sharing information. Imagine the school shooting scenario again. Students trapped inside a school building could potentially report the locations of the attacker or of victims, or even provide cell phone photos or live video. If this intelligence could be quickly sifted and collated into one geo-tagged product, authorities could rapidly develop a detailed, continuously updated "battlespace" picture.

Such a system would have extraordinary challenges. Attackers could exploit the freely available information about their own attack (as the Mumbai attackers did) or could transmit disinformation over the emergency network. Authorities would need gatekeepers to monitor the exchange of information and separate the wheat from the chaff. But on balance, I believe the benefits of a more open, networked emergency response system would outweigh the costs.

Is such a system feasible? I don't know. I'm just brainstorming here. What do you think?