NOT JUST A GAME ANYMORE
Watching the post-Katrina tragedy unfolding in New Orleans and all the other places around the three states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama is heart-breaking enough. And then you start to see the evil part of human nature come out in terms of the increasingly widespread looting and other forms of lawlessness unfolding in one of the oldest cities of these United States.
It's a real-life Grand Theft Auto, played in increasingly putrid pools of brown, stinking water.
The interesting part is that the real looting is likely not the stuff we're seeing in front of the TV cameras...people scurrying in and out of stores with perishable and non-perishable merchandise. Most of that stuff is a write-off anyway. And in some cases it's being done for survival by people desperate for food and water.
And it's likely even not the folks looting the Wal-marts and hardware stores for guns and ammunition, which in turn fuel increasingly empowered and armed bands of folks now focused on more organized types of crimes.
Their other targets would obviously be any types of hard-asset that could be conveniently stolen, transported out of the area, and re-sold. Jewelry stores, and similar valuables in homes are obvious targets.
The next "relatively easy" targets for these looters would be the hundreds of bank branches and ATMs around the city. There's a finite, but appreciable amount of cash lying around these repositories, not to mention in the cash registers of thousands of businesses large and small.
Much of this has a short-time to play out given that 30,000 national
guard troops are moving into the area to supplement the 2,500 or so
strong beleaguered exhausted and overwhelmed police force of New
Orleans. And the criminal situation as it stands needs to be staunched and addressed as soon as humanly possible.
(By the way, as a total aside, these folk, and their peers in other emergency services, should be as recognized and honored for what they are doing just as the police and fire department heroes of New York City four years ago).
But the real targets that have a potentially much higher payoff would likely involve valuables that are digital in nature than hard assets. And these valuables are less likely to be covered by insurance.
I'm referring to the paper and digital information stores at banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. In an era where an individual's credit card info is worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars on the global, digital black market, this is the treasure trove that should be protected sooner rather than later.
While evacuating the city, which is increasingly urgent, the authorities also likely need to organize a systematic way for businesses large and small, to be able to send in authorized representatives to their premises in the city to secure and/or remove these stores of digital data.
Obviously businesses will also be interested in securing and removing hard valuable assets as well, and these need to be accommodated as well if at all possible given the logistical issues and other pressing priorities.
At the very least, businesses could provide lists of the most critical and sensitive locations so that they can be properly protected by federal and local authorities, again, AFTER folks have been rescued and evacuated of course.
While some of this may seem obvious, it's often in catastrophic and chaotic times, when there are so many urgent priorities to be executed by so few that the "obvious" can slip by. Our recent experience in securing some, but not ALL of the arms stores around Iraq after the the invasion are a case in point. Obviously, in that instance, we had no helpful entities providing a comprehensive list of locations that needed to be secured, as would be in this case.
Much of this is reminiscent of that scene in the classic cold-war 1964 thriller, "Fail-Safe", where (SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THIS TERRIFIC MOVIE), realizing that New York City was about to be decimated in a self-inflicted nuclear attack, a senior adviser to the President (very well played by Henry Fonda), urges the immediate removal of financial data as the first major priority.
New Orleans is not New York City in terms of the amount of critical financial data repositories, but sensitive personal and commercial digital information has obviously exploded far more profusely than the 1960s. It needs to be added to the excruciatingly long list of priorities, of course after saving and caring for the living.
Side comment on the ATMs - those of us who managed to leave pretty much ran the city out of ATM cash and gasoline before the storm. Not much of that. Cash registers though, have been hit everywhere, so we've seen.
not that it matters, at this point.
Posted by: candice | Monday, September 05, 2005 at 12:52 AM