Crowd reSource

You can all go to war now.  You don’t even have to be of military age.  All you need is a Internet connection, and if you’re reading this, you’ve already got one of those.

Just pick what side you want to be on, figure out what you have to contribute, and get busy.

Technology Review recently documented several of the people who contributed to last year’s Libyan revolution.

. . . It’s a mid-April night in 2011, and Twawa’s men are frightened. Lightly armed and hidden only by trees, they are a stone’s throw from one of four Grad 122-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers laying down a barrage on Yefren, their besieged hometown. These weapons can fire up to 40 unguided rockets in 20 seconds. Each round carries a high-­explosive fragmentation warhead weighing 40 pounds. They urgently need to know how to deal with this, or they will have to pull back. Twawa’s cell phone rings.

Two friends are on the line, via a Skype conference call. Nureddin Ashammakhi is in Finland, where he heads a research team developing biomaterials technology, and Khalid Hatashe, a medical doctor, is in the United Kingdom. The Qaddafi regime trained Hatashe on Grads during his compulsory military service. He explains that Twawa’s katiba—brigade—is well short of the Grad’s minimum range: at this distance, any rockets fired would shoot past them. Hatashe adds that the launcher can be triggered from several hundred feet away using an electric cable, so the enemy may not be in or near the launch vehicle. Twawa’s men successfully attack the Grad—all because two civilians briefed their leader, over Skype, in a battlefield a continent away.

I posted some time back about how glory-seeking French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy helped jumpstart the NATO intervention in Libya.  He was only the most famous of those who contributed their time and effort to the overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi.

A French naval officer mobilized 250 Libyans on the ground to provide intelligence.  A Lebanese-American radio producer arranged for two-way satellite feed for the rebels, and contributed value information on first aid,  An Egyptian intelligence officer contributed accurate information on the deployment of loyalist forces.  A Denver surgeon coordinated with NATO so that they wouldn’t accidentally bomb resupply convoys to Misrata.  A Georgia high school student provided vital information about weapons, land mines, disarming ordnance, and provided detailed medical handbooks.

Google Earth and iPhone compasses provided information about where the rebels’ shells and rockets were landing.

A single mom in Paris created a television channel showing videos and interviews from the rebel side, all in collaboration with a Libyan man who kludged together a satellite uplink.

The Libyan man, “Mo” Nabbous, was the one who died, shot by a sniper while broadcasting.

Gathering open-source intelligence is now ridiculously easy; feeding the stuff to the people who need it can be more difficult, but with 70% of the developing world on cell networks, it’s getting easier all the time.

The downside of all this technology is that wars are going to be a lot easier to start.  A single person with a 3D printer can create his own drone armada.  It’s possible to print weaponry as well, though I don’t know if anyone’s yet done it.  Open-source intelligence from Google Earth and other resources can lay out your route to the target, and tell you how well your bombs did.

Yes, you can all go to war now.  The question is: do you want to?