Recently, there was a mall shooting in which three people died about five miles from my home in Columbia, MD. My wife and I were to have been there getting her phone fixed in the exact part of the mall where the killings took place. But by some coincidental grace, other errands kept us busy and delayed our arrival by about an hour. I knew something was wrong when we were within three miles of the scene, as an army of speeding, wailing, flashing law enforcement vehicles of every jurisdiction were converging on the mall from all directions.
I thought back to my last article in this series (Security, December 2013), particularly to the discussion of how Big Data might make public venues safer than they are today. It’s a big job, even for organizations with deep pockets and lots of resources. How much more difficult is it for smaller organizations to make use of available information to better protect their employees and their assets? How much of this problem could be tackled in a way that allows data to be shared so that everyone can benefit? And if we could, what sort of data would be relevant?