Strong Angel Event III in San Diego: are we ready to face a disater?

29/08/2006 Written by Roberto Preatoni (SyS64738)

Those who won­der if the west­ern world would be able to face a cyber ter­ror attack that would cut off power, phones and Inter­net access, should have joint the third Strong Angel event, a 5-​days sim­u­la­tion that was set up in San Diego, Cal­i­for­nia, by teams from the Pen­ta­gon, non­govern­men­tal agen­cies and sev­eral dozen tech­nol­ogy companies.

The event was con­ceived as an occa­sion to test a new set of dig­i­tal tools for respond­ing to dis­as­ters, but con­sid­er­ing the report draw out by the team of expert charged to check and judge how effec­tively the emer­gence was faced, the exper­i­ment hasn’t been sat­is­fac­tory at all.

The lim­i­ta­tions of pro­vided tech­no­log­i­cal items were made man­i­fest when an effort to restore com­mu­ni­ca­tions by set­ting up wire­less net­works resulted in a three-​day data traf­fic jam.

Any­way an impor­tant goal was achieved, that is the effec­tive coop­er­a­tion between vol­un­teers from dif­fer­ent social or work­ing envi­ron­ments, in such a chaotic context.

This seems to be the right direc­tion to be taken: as Eric Ras­mussen, the orga­nizer, stated, “the value of Strong Angel is 70 per­cent in the social net­works that will be cre­ated. What we do is try to bring peo­ple with dis­parate back­grounds together and ensure that they are forced to enter into a conversation.”

But even if people’s con­tri­bu­tion would be fun­da­men­tal for the good out­come of such an oper­a­tion, it was tech­nol­ogy that had to be tested: a huge amount of mate­ri­als were assem­bled in San Diego in order to fur­nish all the equip­ment that could be needed in case of nat­ural dis­as­ters, epi­demics, ter­ror­ist attacks or the after­math of a war. 

The com­mand cen­tre was cre­ated on august 21^th in an aban­doned build­ing near the air­port in San Diego. The head­quar­ter should have been pro­vided of a state-​of-​the-​art wire­less net­work which was intended to route video images, satel­lite map coor­di­nates and other data from an array of mobile com­put­ers, but it failed to come to life.

The col­lapse of the net­work depended on the fact that too many high-​bandwidth appli­ca­tion were con­nected together , clog­ging it. 

But in spite of the col­lapse of the net­work, a soft­ware devel­oped thanks to the con­tri­bu­tion of Google, Microsoft, ESRI, Inter­graph and other com­pa­nies was tested suc­cess­fully. The soft­ware allowed the shar­ing of a sin­gle set of dig­i­tal satel­lite maps and to over­lay event data relayed from emer­gency work­ers through­out the San Diego area. 

This third edi­tion of Strong Angel event, wasn’t a for­mal exerci­ta­tion, indeed it was struc­tured as a lab­o­ra­tory where to exper­i­ment with tech­nol­ogy that might turn out to be use­ful in dis­as­ter settings.

This unstruc­tured approach turned out to be deci­sive in recre­at­ing a sit­u­a­tion as sim­i­lar as pos­si­ble to a real emer­gency, and demon­strated our tech­nol­ogy ‘s defi­ciency, but on the other hand it revealed an unex­pected will to coop­er­ate by all the par­tic­i­pants, and as claimed in offi­cial dec­la­ra­tion, a com­mit­ment by Tech Com­pa­nies to keep col­lab­o­rat­ing in order to over­come the leaks in technology.