Although official agencies to alert the nation over developing crises require personnel and funding and some sort of formal table of activities, there may be unsuspected problems that have symptoms which are somewhat vague but perhaps alarming to individuals who are aware that something peculiar is going on. Investigating all these speculations on suspected occurrences would probably be too much of a nuisance and too expensive for an agency which is devoted to concrete facts. Nevertheless, probably many indicators of nefarious or dangerous activity are ignored because there is no place for a vague suspicion to be put for expert examination. If various sites were set up on the internet as databases for experts to sift through that contained messages (that could be from anonymous sources) the general information retained by a researcher may be confirmed by some of these rather random postings and could lead to important information to catch a dangerous act before it occurs. Doubtless this kitchen midden of observations would contain stuff of fantasy and material placed by jokesters and over-suspicious idiots but it might collect important information missed by formal investigation agencies and could be a source of last resort sifted by computer programs for key words and phrases. At the moment there is no place to send such odd observations.
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sand: Your post was difficult to read. You did not use paragraphs to give the readers a visual brea.
Sorry. I will try to put in a brea here and there on future submissions.
Count me against this one. It sounds like a breeding ground for paranoia, libel, harassment and vigilantism.
But if you're really in favor of it, do a Google search for "Conspiracy" ...I'm sure you'll find existing public forums somewhere.
I agree that the proposed sites can be dangerous. It is a very valid criticism but I wonder if the country is more in danger from malicious reports than it is by catching something really dangerous that could result in a major terrorist attack. The information must be handled professionally with due consideration for civil rights. Up to this point the failure of federal legal and police agencies to properly validate and assess incoming information is a real concern.
I imagine each of these sites needs to be dedicated to a particular event. Something like this could be helpful if it collected medical information...if a number of individuals in one area report that they have particular symptoms, it could indicate that some sort of disease is going around. Epidemics can go unnoticed for awhile because no-one is in a position to see the "big picture".
Anyway, the big issue is figuring out what sort of data we want to track and how to convince people to submit the data (it takes time to submit data)... then how is it analyzed efficiently. Maybe this will work in 20 years when our communication and automatic analysis systems have developed a bit more.