Actually, Wiki-anti-Terror is what I have in mind, but that’s a clumsier phrase. Before I started babbling about my ideas on this topic, I thought I should google the Internet to see if something is already up there — but I found only more general entries, like Wikipedia’s detailed, extensive article on “terrorism,” as well as a companion article on anti-terrorism, which focuses on the UK’s Crime and Security Act of 2001.

As you may have guessed, my musings on this topic were prompted by yesterday’s news of a foiled plot to blow up as many as 10 airplanes enroute from London to various American cities. I was happy that the British authorities had discovered the plot, relieved that it had been stopped before any bombs were actually exploded, and sympathetic for the hundreds of thousands of passengers around the world (primarily at Heathrow Airport, but also dozens, if not hundreds, of U.S. and European airports) who were delayed and inconvenienced by the strict new security measures put into place. I can’t help wondering if this is another instance of locking the barn door after the horses have escaped, but if there are still a few members of the terrorist gang running around, or if copycat plots are actually a serious risk, then it’s probably a good idea.

Obviously, we depend on the various security forces of the U.S., UK, and other aligned governments to take the lead in implementing defensive acts at this point, as well as proactive efforts to anticipate, monitor, and shut down any future terrorist acts that may emerge. I don’t have the time, energy, resources, or expertise — not to mention the authority — to do any of this on my own. Even if everyone in my apartment building contributed their funds and volunteered their time, we couldn’t begin to do what the Homeland Security Department, FBI, and corresponding British agencies are doing. Their efforts often leave a lot to be desired, and one often wonders whether we really are any safer than we were on September 10, 2001; but my opinions — or yours — won’t change anything.

And if I had been contemplating air travel yesterday, in the midst of all of this, such philosophical musings would have been irrelevant: all I would have wanted to know is how best to protect myself and my family. My daughter, for example, was in Ireland with her family when the news broke, and had been planning to fly through London today (not yesterday, thankfully) enroute to both business and personal appointments. She quickly realized that it would be prudent to reschedule her flights to avoid Heathrow; but where could she turn for advice on the safest and most practical alternatives? Would it be best to cancel the rest of the trip and simply return from Ireland to the U.S. — and if so, would it be more prudent to return to Boston or Chicago, rather than New York? Would it be reasonably safe to re-route the remainder of the trip through Gatwick or Birmingham, rather than Heathrow? Were things likely to be so chaotic that the best course of action would be to hunker down in Ireland for a week or two, until things calmed down?

Where do you turn for answers to these questions? After taking a quick peek at the FBI web site, where I was warned not to gamble on foreign lotteries, and intrigued to see a list of the Most Wanted Terrorists, I visited the Homeland Security website, and found nothing but a picture of Michael Chertoff and Alberto Gonzales, looking grim and sober, below a headline informing me that the “threat level” had been raised for the aviation sector. Duh! On that website, I also found a link to Ready.Gov, which informed me that September is National Preparedness Month, and also pointed me to a press release about the increased threat level, culminating in a cheery statement that “travelers should go about their plans confidently, while maintaining vigilance in their surroundings and exercising patience with screening and security officials.” Somehow, I don’t think my daughter would have been satisfied if I had called her in Ireland and offered that recommendation.

Without getting into a political diatribe, I think it’s fair to say we’ve got two problems if we rely on the government (e.g., the Homeland Security website) for advice on coping with terrorist threats. First, the government keeps much of its immediate, specific information secret; for example, the relevant government agencies have been tracking this plot for months, and apparently decided last weekend to take action by arresting a couple dozen individuals. Hundreds of thousands of travelers could have made alternative plans more calmly and efficiently if they had been alerted about the imminent arrests and security crackdown; but for obvious and understandable reasons, they were kept in the dark. Almost by definition, the government agencies must keep this kind of information secret, if they are to have any chance of preventing such attacks; but that’s of little consolation to individual citizens who are trying to make their day-to-day plans with the best possible information.

There’s also an issue of trust: to what extent do we trust the information that does eventually get disseminated by government spokesmen? To some extent, this is a matter of politics — e.g., Democrat citizens are less likely to trust public announcements from Republican government officials — but I think it’s fair to say that a widespread, nonpartisan mood of cynicism, suspicion, and distrust has permeated the country. It’s not an absolute, black-and-white thing; but to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the topic and the weather and my mood of the moment, I distrust everything that the government says, not only about terrorism, but about everything else significant in my life. When the government tells me that I “should go about [my] plans confidently,” I can’t help thinking, “Well, maybe I would go about my plans if I was traveling alone, but I probably wouldn’t be confident; and if my travel plans also include my spouse and my kids, I don’t think I’m going to take George Bush’s reassurance that everything will be fine.”

If the government can’t reveal its secrets, and if we’re not sure we can trust whatever they do reveal to us, then where else can we turn for the information we need to make prudent decisions? How about the mainstream media (MSM)? Why not just read the local paper, turn on CNN, and trust that the reporters and news anchors will tell us what we need to know? Indeed, that’s exactly where we do turn, for the most part; we can pick whatever newspaper or TV channel we think is most credible, and follow the news on a moment-to-moment basis. Of course, many of us aren’t sure we can trust any MSM “news” these days; but aside from the skepticism, the other problem is that the information provided by the MSM is likely to be far too broad and generic to help with specific questions. For example, on the MSNBC site, I found a headline titled “Travelers Deal With Delays,” with an adjacent link titled “Tips.” When I clicked on the “Tips” link, I was taken to an article titled “Should You Stay, or Should You Go?” I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it looked okay; on the other hand, it provided no information to tell me whether I, as a New York City resident, would be better off trying to fly out of LaGuardia, Newark, JFK, or perhaps even the Westchester county airport.

Also, as Howard Reingold reported in a blog posting yesterday, the MSM is already falling behind the grass-roots reporting efforts by citizens, via the Internet: a website called NowPublic.com scooped CNN and other MSM channels with Flickr pictures of reactions to the security measures at Newark, Heathrow, and Stansted airport. No doubt there were dozens of blog postings, too, within minutes of the public announcement of the terrorist threat; see for example, this entry from the “all sugar & smut … like a girl oughtta be” blog (no, sigh, I don’t follow this blog regularly … but maybe I should!).

But were these citizen-based photographs really “news”? And were the blog postings (of which there were probably many, many more than the ones I scanned quickly) any more credible, trustworthy, or useful than the MSM reports? And how do I know which blogs I should check, of the 50 million that now exist? Some of them may consist of nothing more useful than gossip or political commentary, but I’ll bet there are some that are reporting on the average waiting time to get through the security line at the top ten airports in the world.

Bottom line: none of these traditional sources of information is helping travelers make sufficiently informed decisions. Regardless of whether the government is doing a good job or bad job in actually fighting the terrorists, the information it provides to the public is often incomplete or terse (because of the need for privacy), and it’s often less than credible. Information from the MSM is also somewhat suspect (though perhaps less so than government-published news; I haven’t seen any polls about this lately); but it tends to be broad and generic, rather than focused and specific. And the blogs … well, there may be a reliable, trustworthy, up-to-date blog about the security situation at my airport, but I wouldn’t know how to find it; and even if I could, it doesn’t mean that you’ll find one for your airport, nor that either one of us could find an appropriate blog if we happened to be on a business trip requiring us to fly in or out of an unfamiliar airport.

So what’s the answer? I may be naively optimistic about this, but what about a wiki? What about Wikipedia for terrorism? It’s not worth doing if terrorism is going to be defeated by the Forces of Good within the next year; but we’ve been told repeatedly that it will be with us for decades. That’s long enough to justify a reasonable investment of time and energy … if we could find a loosely-connected army of volunteers similar to the equivalent armies that built Wikipedia, or the open-source Linux operating system. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but I could imagine it evolving over the next 5-10 years.

Of course, WikiTerror (if that’s what we called it) would face a fundamentally different problem than Wikipedia: professional vandals rather than amateur vandals (i.e., spammers and hackers). I’m not talking about governments, who might well attempt to shut down WikiTerror in order to maintain their secrets and (most important!) maintain control of a politically sensitive body of knowledge; I think we could circumvent that kind of resistance, though it wouldn’t be trivial. Heavy-handed Internet-related government actions in China suggest that governments can shut down Internet sites they find objectionable; but whether that would work in relatively open advanced countries (e.g., with the use of lawsuits, injunctions, subpoenas, and other legal measures) is far less certain.

But what I’m actually more concerned about is the terrorists themselves: one has to assume they would devote considerable energy to not only shut down such a resource, but also to corrupt it, and fill it with misinformation and outright errors. Whether the Wikipedia culture of revisions to existing articles, reversions of vandalized entries to their earlier form, and “locking” of specific pages, would be sufficient, I don’t know. Normally, one uses firewalls and various other security-related technologies to defend against aggressive, malevolent attacks on one’s network or database; but it’s hard to balance that against the openness that makes Wikipedia what it is.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I’ve sketched out a few ideas about the kind of information that WIkiTerror might collect and disseminate to the Internet community; but I think I’ll wait to see if I get any reaction to the basic concept before taking it any further.