Situational awareness for protestors
Avoiding being ‘kettled’ is now easier for students and other protestors in London. And it’s all to do with a smart way of sharing intelligence.
In the military world, there’s a lot of talk about ‘data fusion’ and ‘situational awareness’. This is where data from all kinds of systems - surveillance drones, fighter aircraft targeting pods, satellite imagery, sigint stations, troops on the ground and many other intelligence sources - is combined to create a Common Operating Picture (COP).
In other words, it’s a way of pooling knowledge so that commanders know what the hell is going on.
Now, protestors in London have access to technology using similar concepts. It’s called Sukey and its main benefit is to prevent you getting trapped by police lines - ie, being kettled.
Sukey is an app for smartphones (and there’s a simpler version for dumbphones, working via SMS). It pools information provided by the protestors themselves. Using Google Maps, it shows your current position and overlays coloured blobs to show the exit points - street junctions - by which you can get away. Green blobs show open exits. Yellow ones are obstructed but passable. Red ones are blocked.
As well using Google Maps, Sukey also shows a kind of compass display, naming your current location and showing the relative directions of the exits (which, in a crowd, you may not be able to see).
There are buttons allowing you to tweet or file reports to Sukey. Reports can be filed via Twitter as well, using relevant hashtags. And there’s a tickertape news feed, with information drawn from news services and Sukey users.
For now, Sukey works only for London, but the creators have ambitions to go national and even international. Of course, it won’t be much use if the country you’re in shuts down the Internet. Sorry Egypt…
Sukey says that your location information is kept secure and not shared. Let’s hope that’s true, because if the police were able to tap into the data stream Sukey would become an invaluable situational awareness tool for them.
