HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE FROM WIRED on efforts to reinvent the 911 emergency-call system to take advantage of more modern technologies. The conclusion seems right:

If national safety – the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes – depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless. But if it depends on improvised reactions to unknown threats, that’s a different story. A deeply textured, unmapped system is hard to bring down. A system that encourages improvisation is quick to recover. Ubiquitous networks of warning may constitute our own asymmetrical advantage, and, like the terrorist networks that occasionally carry out spectacular attacks, their power remains obscure until they’re called into action.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: The author of the Wired article, Gary Wolf, has more on this topic on his blog.