Remote bomb assessments using web applications
A year or so ago I had an interesting conversation with a network security guy at a big company about terrorism and global information warfare. He said that one day they were doing a war game to assess what happens in a global operations when they are under significant attack. Now mind you that this was happening around the time when operation shock and awe was just beginning. They were sitting in their SOC (security operations center) watching the corporate LAN when suddenly big chunks of the global network started going down.
It took them a few hours to figure out that the US bombs had knocked out the power to essentially the entire city of Baghdad. Later when we were talking about it, it became clear that this could be used to assess large scale bomb accuracy assessments. If an application is being housed out of a certain building, it is trivial to access the application before and after detonation to see if it was successful it destroying the target. Additionally measuring applications in surrounding buildings would tell you the state of collateral damage (at least as a measurement of power and telecommunications).
But bringing it one step further, geolocation tied to specific applications can tell you a lot about the state of affairs of huge chunks of the globe. As more and more networks are being built, you can detect many forms of natural disasters, like earthquakes, floods, fires, tornadoes, tsunamis, etc… anything that can cause power or telecommunication outages. This seems like an interesting application, but it would need to be so decentralized that it makes it very cumbersome.
Some companies already have this sort of thing set up because of the nature of their business, but it is not tied into global response. Maybe something like Echelon has enough nodes and sensors to be able to detect something of this magnitude, although it is doubtful if the three letter agencies of the world would share this information to the public in any reasonable timeframe.
