Smart911 Wants To Know More About You
Counties across the country are adopting a third party service to enhance their 911 emergency dispatch services. Smart911 is a program that helps provide 911 with additional information about who is calling – with the intention that they in turn may provide more information to first responders.
The way the system works is that the county asks residents to voluntarily create a Smart911 profile in which they provide pretty much every detail of their life.
Once the call arrived, the caller’s information popped up on the dispatcher’s screen, enabling her to relay the Smart911 data that the citizen had shared on the profile.
“In this instance, the female is a domestic violence victim, and it has information on there about her ex-husband, and she has a restraining order against him,” Carpenter said of the dummy call. “It says her son is autistic, and he has a tendency to hide in the upstairs closet. The husband is Type 1 diabetic.
“You can put all kinds of information here. You can put your medical information, what kind of pets you have in the home, so if the fire department is responding for something like a structure fire, they can see how many people live in this residence that we need to be looking for, and their animals as well.”
The 911 call takers will then be able to provide critical information to responders. Responders can be alerted to many details they would not have known previously, fire crews can arrive at a house fire knowing how many people live in the home and the location of bedrooms, EMS can be advised of allergies or specific medical conditions and police can have the photo of a missing child in seconds.
“When you call 9-1-1, you’re not having your best day and even the simplest of details can be difficult to communicate in a time of panic,” said Prattville Police Chief Mark Thompson. “By creating a Safety Profile before an emergency happens, you are ensuring that we will have the information we need, even if you are not able communicate it.”
Essentially this system is offering “more safety” if you divulge all the personal and private information about your life to be stored altogether in a single database somewhere, accessible to many people including the government.
What medicine to you take? What do all the members of your family look like? What medical conditions does your husband have? How many rooms are in your home? Where can people hide? What automobiles do you have? What are the vin and licence plate numbers? What kind of legal actions do you have pending for or against you?
If this wasn’t bad enough, what the article fails to mention is that this system also wants to know about your guns as shown in the video at the top. How many do you own? Where are they located in the house? Who has access to them?
The Smart911 has been adopted in 38 states and more than 1,000 municipalities. How many of the people in these areas have provided all the details of their personal lives, including information about their firearms and where they are stored towards this database? Many questions remain about how the information is shared.
What if this information is hacked? All the personal, vulnerable, and private details about your home and your life are now in the hands of people who can use it against your or sell it to would be bad guys.
Americans should not be so dependent on the government and police that we would be willing to share all of this personal information for the illusion of more safety and security.
