Paul Revere's Wifi

David Stephenson in the Boston Globe today uses Paul Revere's social nettiness (as made famous in The Tipping Point) to make the point that we'd be more secure if we distributed homeland security rather than centralized it:

Instead of top-down, tightly controlled communication, when it comes to homeland security what we need is a network like the Internet, which empowers individuals and links everyone together. A system like the one that lets PalmPilot owners download breaking news to read on the go, for example, could allow citizen volunteers to download real-time information in case of emergencies. We could also learn from the US military to set up "mesh" networks -- in which wireless devices are programmed to seek each other out, bouncing phone calls and e-mails from point to point during crises. But even more important than Internet technology is Internet thinking.