. "News and Terrorism: Communicating in a Crisis." Countering Urban Terrorism in Russia and the United States: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2006.
The following HTML text is provided to enhance online
readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML.
Please use the page image
as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy.
Countering Urban Terrorism in Russia and the United States: Proceedings of a Workshop
nopoly. The more people are empowered to respond appropriately, the more secure we all will be.
As a local police chief once said: “You can’t build a fence around a community, but you can arm your citizens with knowledge.” Scientists, engineers, and the government must work to get good information into the hands of the media quickly during a cyber-, radiological, nuclear, chemical, or biological attack. We must all work together to determine the best way of doing that.
It is at our own risk that the technical community thinks of its homeland security responsibility as simply creating the latest counterterrorism technologies. They should also help empower the media, and thus the public, with knowledge. Ignorance and misinformation can be as damaging to the information infrastructure of a nation as a break in an oil pipeline. It can cause paralysis among citizens who are often the best first responders, confuse professionals trying to respond to a crisis, and help generate the fear that is the terrorists’ goal.
