RE: [emergency] CAP and Signatures/Encryption

[Art Botterell <acb@incident.com>]

At 5:04 PM -0600 1/27/05, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>I don't think they will entertain chaos theory during an Incident of 
>National Significance.

Certainly anyone who's ever managed a major disaster has had to come 
to terms with chaos theory.;-)

Anyway, we're talking about planning and design, not response.  And 
experienced emergency planners know to guard against being mesmerized 
by Worst Case Scenarios, which, paradoxically, are often much simpler 
than the much more common less dramatic ones.

For just one example, in a WCS there's no ambiguity about whether the 
situation falls under emergency procedures or routine ones.  In the 
vast majority of real-world emergencies, the transition from routine 
to emergency procedure ripples out only a limited distance through 
the involved organizations and jurisdictions, and over a period of 
time, which means that a significant number of transactions always 
occur between folks who are operating in emergency mode and 
counterparts who have different priorities.  In thirty years in and 
around emergency management I can't think of any major operation I've 
seen where that mismatch of modalities didn't spawn difficulties.

Don't get me wrong, I'm an original and enthusiastic supporter of 
NIMS, based largely on my experience in deploying essentially the 
same thing in California during the 1990's (it was called SEMS 
there.)  The reason ICS works... and has been extended from the field 
level upward over three decades to its national expression in NIMS... 
is that it can be used continually in the world as it is, not only 
for an INS/WCS/RBD (Really Bad Day).

Again, it would be convenient for us if we could make the simplifying 
assumption that we're only devising capabilities for a full-blown 
NRP-activating event... and I'm all for standardization where 
possible... but our day-to-day context is much broader.

- Art