is short, incisive, and, alas, some of the most accurate explantions of dysfunctional government bureaucracis. Here are some excerpts:
Botterell suggested that we begin, rather than end, with the notion that the federal government can’t protect us.The federal failure should be the starting point, and, he suggested, it could be a liberating starting point. Once free of the illusion that Mommy and Daddy are going to make it all better, we can ask smarter questions about what it will take to protect ourselves. Botterell is not a naive libertarian, and he was not talking about buying assault weapons and hunkering down in the basement. Instead, he was talking about identifying the native strengths of our communities, and reinforcing these strengths with technology.
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Botterell has made or helped to make [important inventions] including California’s Emergency Digital Information Service (EDIS), and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP).
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No matter how much research is done disproving their assumptions, people insist on believing in panic. Panic actually occurs only in specific circumstances – this is all pretty well understood. Some of the research goes back to the Second World War, when there was attention paid to the behavior of sailors trapped in submarines. The research shows that where there is a dreaded hazard shared equally, panic almost never occurs. Reasoned flight is not panic. When people were running away from the collapse of the World Trade Towers, they stopped to pick up other people who had fallen. That was not panic. Only perceived competition for the means to escape creates panic. If panic is a myth, why is it mentioned so often in discussions of warning?There’s a tendency to believe in the myth of panic because it reinforces a sense of bureaucratic elitism: we can’t trust the citizens with warning information, because they might panic.
 You can read another Gary Wolf’ piece – Reinventing 911 – How a Swarm of Networked Citizens is builing a better emergency system, from the December 2005 issue of Wired, which discusses Botterell and others.