National Tech Corps
According to the article “Who will be America’s First TechPresident,” an important policy goal would be to create a National Tech Corps. The Tech Corps would “protect our communications infrastructure and be able to have an emergency response capability to establish emergency communications, rebuild networks and databases, and provide tech support for all relief and recovery efforts.”
Therefore, the article says that Americans should volunteer to be part of the National NetGuard who can “volunteer to be trained and deployed to respond to any terrorist attack or national disaster.”
University of Connecticut student Heather Williams’ initial reaction to this was that it did not sound very practical. A recent national disaster, Hurricane Katrina, was absolutely devastating to the city of New Orleans. But in that case, Williams said, the people would not have had access to a computer for emergency information. How could the people have had access to Internet communications?
Homes destroyed by Hurricane Katrina
Furthermore, if a lot of information about our emergency responses are online, terrorists who are looking to target the United States might gain access to that important data. According to The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, Al-Qaeda gets 80 percent of its information about targets for free on the Internet.
That being said, it would certainly be important to have an emergency response team that focuses on getting our communications infrastructure up and running after an emergency situation has rendered it useless. But if we are going to do that, we should have professionals who are solely in charge of our emergency communication system, rather than volunteers. We should also be careful to not depend completely on “21st century communications systems,” or we leave ourselves completely vulnerable to cyberterrorism. The Internet, while significant to many aspects of our lives, may not be the best medium for disaster communication, and should not be completely relied upon in an emergency.
