One cannot read the just-published 9/11 timeline without feeling battered by a wide range of emotions. I was affected so deeply that I fired off a blog entry without the benefit of sufficient consideration. Setting aside political implications and the potential for individual culpability (as if one could), it's clear to me that some necessary interactive communications technologies were not in place. This shortc One cannot read the just-published 9/11 timeline without feeling battered by a wide range of emotions. I was affected so deeply that I fired off a blog entry without the benefit of sufficient consideration.Setting aside political implications and the potential for individual culpability (as if one could), it’s clear to me that some necessary interactive communications technologies were not in place.This shortcoming can’t even be explained away as a matter of cost, complexity or inconvenience. By way of illustration, I’ll throw some things together from the room I’m sitting in now. Mount iSight Web cameras on goosenecks at each air traffic console so that images of either the console or the operator can be broadcast. Use Quicktime capture tools to assemble time-stamped, synchronized streams that include and military radios and telephones, as well as radar imagery and network TV news feeds. Stream it out live and persist it as needed for analysis. Final Cut Pro and Logic could give analysts a decent head start on picking apart video and audio records. The point has nothing to do with platforms or tools, or the naive notion that a trip to CompUSA could have changed one thing. I’m not a child. The point is that if more useful gathering and analysis systems can be conceptualized with off-the-shelf tools for which operators can train in a few weeks, it can certainly be done in a more meticulous and needs-specific way over the course of a few years.Forget modern digital solutions. Surely the FAA and the military at least have 60s-era analog technology that plugs human analysts and decision makers into the vast web of U.S. air traffic control stations. Perhaps there just wasn’t time to throw the switch that puts that network on the air.My mind can’t conceive that those with the power to react had nothing but telephones between them. My heart can’t accept it. ——– Technology Industry