U.S. embassies used to pass important security alerts to Americans abroad through word of mouth, Janice Jacobs, assistant secretary of State for consular affairs, said Friday.

Embassy consular sections relayed those warnings, called “warden messages” through pre-organized phone trees or by actually knocking on doors, she said. Later, embassies began sending mass emails to Americans who had registered with them, but those emails usually reached only a handful of citizens living or traveling in those countries.

When criminal gangs attacked city buses in Matamoros, Mexico, and kidnapped several Americans in April 2011, Jacobs said, the embassy immediately Tweeted out a warning, which was re-Tweeted across thousands of followers within two hours and featured on CNN.

Read more @ nextgov.com

Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 8:00 AM – Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 1:00 PM (PT)Irvine, CA

The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies will be holding a workshop to examine current knowledge and research on social media’s role in alerts, warnings, and crisis.  The workshop, organized by the National Academies, is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Division. The workshop will take place February 28-29 at the National Academy of Sciences’ Beckman Center in Irvine, California

Participants in this event will include researchers and practitioners in the fields of risk communication, public response to emergencies, alerts and warning systems, emergency management, and mobile device communication.

Learn more @ nasawsmworkshop.eventbrite.com

Wednesday the White House released a new National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security.   This is an issue easy to underestimate.  Like the plumbing in your house, it tends not to be at the forefront until something goes wrong: leaking, freezing, breaking, bursting, or when the well goes dry. Below is a quick take on context and potential implications.

On June 26, 1974 at a Marsh supermarket in Ohio, a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum became the first retail product sold using a scanner and Universal Product Code symbol.  Our lives would never be the same.

The use of the UPC and other “bar codes” allows the supply chain to be digitally monitored, mapped, and managed as never before. Logistics became one aspect of a supply and demand chain.

Read more @ the HLSwatch.com Blog

From Kim Stephens @ iDisaster 2.0

Yes, I know that the time of writing this post is Pre-Super Bowl, but this Mashable article about the social media command center organized for the event has me thinking. I found  four key lessons the emergency management community can take away from their effort, before the event has even happened.

Read more @ iDisaster 2.0

The federal government’s intelligence community needs to do a better job of sharing intelligence information with the country’s critical infrastructure sector, according to a recent report from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council.

The council’s 227-page report (pdf download), “Intelligence Information Sharing,” is a follow-up to a similar study it conducted in 2006. While information sharing between the federal government and private critical infrastructure sector has improved since the 2006 report, it still “is not sufficient to maximize the protection and resilience of the nation’s infrastructure,” the current study states. The council, which provides the president with advice on the security of 18 critical infrastructure sectors, calls information sharing “perhaps the most important factor in the protection and resilience of critical infrastructure.”

Read more @ securitydirectornews.com