Minutes after the explosions in central London, a quiet room inside the ambulance service headquarters on Waterloo Road became the heart of the capital’s emergency response. A chamber usually used for low-priority calls was transformed in a short space of time into the ”gold control room” — the communications centre for hundreds of ambulance workers rushing to help the victims.
Saving lives is always the top priority, but the unprecedented scale and impact of the blasts meant that being able to coordinate and contact large numbers of personnel was more important than ever before.
Coping with the terrorist attack was a test of years of preparation. Some of the first respondents to the scenes of the explosions across the capital were officers of the British Transport Police, who are responsible for law enforcement on the underground system and the nation’s railways. They were able to rely on a new communications system, Airwave, which was rolled out late last year.
Airwave handsets work like a combination of a digital two-way radio, mobile phone and data terminal. This means that officers can talk to each other, make phone calls and potentially tap in to information from local, regional and national police databases — all from a single device. The system, which is also encrypted to prevent sensitive information being heard by criminals with radio scanners, has been deployed across the UK at a cost of almost £3-billion in partnership with mobile network O2. It was heralded as ”a 21st century tool to fight 21st century crime” by British home office minister Caroline Flint — a theory that was certainly put through its paces last week.
”We’ve had Airwave for quite some time — and we think it’s one of the best pieces of kit we’ve ever had,” says Andy Trotter, deputy chief constable, British Transport Police.
”Airwave vehicles were sent out to Russell Square and Kings Cross, and they dropped so-called ‘leaky feeders’ down into the tunnel so that Airwave could be used underground. Searchers said it was a massive help to be able to talk to each other.”
The Airwave system was always intended to link up the emergency services through the same network, but it has not yet been fully deployed. The Metropolitan Police’s system is not yet rolled out, and the equivalent arrangement for the ambulance service is not due until 2007. This meant that other workers had to rely on more traditional communications devices — but even then, there was technological assistance on hand.
In response to the attacks, and under instruction from the authorities, a procedure known as Access Overload Control was swiftly put in place — shutting down the mobile phone network to give priority to more important calls, such as those to 999 or between emergency workers.
While many people across the capital struggled to get their calls to connect thanks to the sheer volume of traffic, only authorised calls were allowed through at incident hotspots. The system, which was a secret protocol until several years ago, grades callers by at least 15 ranks of importance: high priority personnel have special codes embedded in the Sim cards of their mobile phones, allowing them to make calls when the overload control is put in place.
When it was invoked last week, telephone networks closed their systems to ordinary traffic, leaving bandwidth clear for calls that mattered.
The grim task of clearing the crime scenes and collecting evidence also required technological assistance. British Transport Police lorries loaded with hi-tech equipment and breathing apparatus, including battery-operated trolleys for moving rescue workers along the damaged tunnels between Kings Cross and Russell Square stations were deployed in the crisis zones.
”These trolleys can carry up to 1 000lbs, running backwards and forwards along the track,” says Trotter. ”When you’re down there wearing two layers of protection, it’s incredibly hot and when you’re lugging kit — or a stretcher — 600 metres along the tunnels, you won’t last long.”
Metropolitan police officers, meanwhile, are painstakingly entering information gathered from the crime scenes into Scotland Yard’s investigations database, Holmes (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System).
The system, built in the wake of the Yorkshire Ripper case and now in its second revision, allows large numbers of officers to contribute and analyse complex cases. Despite its age, Holmes lets every single piece of data in a case be entered and then evaluated, allowing it to be sifted, sorted, prioritised and catalogued. It is not only Metropolitan Police investigators who are contributing — information from the public was also fed into Holmes by officers in other forces. After last week, about 200 call takers outside London were employed to glean evidence from the public, and then remotely enter it into the Holmes database to take some of the pressure off Met officers.
Pito, the Police IT Organisation, is responsible for the development of Airwave, Holmes and the Police National Computer — a centralised cross-country database that is seen as critical to the future of policing. It also works on systems to protect access to police computers: thanks to a service called Browser Access Control, each police officer needs only one login for multiple systems, which means that passwords are less likely to be written down. Thanks to the critical nature of the work it does, Pito has to ensure that its systems are resilient and secure — and it recently upgraded its disaster recovery under a contract with Siemens in 2002.
But experts remain concerned that becoming reliant on technology can hold inherent risks, especially when the threat of terrorism is involved. Agencies responsible for protecting the UK’s ”critical national infrastructure” have warned against complacency, and security experts warn that public services will become more vulnerable as they increase their dependence on web-based technologies. Such concern has led to an entire industry dedicated to ensuring the nation’s most important infrastructures remain solid at times of crisis.
While emergency services responded directly to the attacks, workers elsewhere swung into operation to make sure the wider network remained safe.
In government terms, this means protecting the resilience of the national infrastructure, including services which, if compromised, could cause large loss of life, have a serious impact on the economy or carry grave social consequences. Such plans cover sectors such as communications, the emergency services, government, public safety, energy and water.
There have been concerns about the government’s plans to protect these vital services, with much of the worry revolving around the sheer number of organisations involved.
That is no surprise — the number of crisis management teams inside Whitehall is astounding, and one of the leading groups is the Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA). This is a small unit of the Cabinet Office, which employs some 20 civil servants to draw up ”business continuity” plans for individual departments that could fall foul of an attack, and to fill gaps between them.
At the top of the tree is Ian Watmore, the government’s chief information officer. Apart from looking after government, he is supposed to tackle vulnerabilities in public sector and commercial telecommunications systems, as well as those in the financial and banking sector. Watmore is also responsible for ensuring that local government systems, usually seen as a weak point in the infrastructure, come up to standard.
But CSIA is not the only organisation dedicated to protecting the country’s networks in times of trouble. The National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre is another interdepartmental organisation set up to defend the national infrastructure against electronic attacks, while the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit investigates and tries to prevent electronic crime. The Department of Trade and Industry runs its own information-assurance efforts — mainly ensuring that the privately run parts of the infrastructure remain secure.
All these agencies draw on the resources of the Communications Electronics Security Group, part of the secretive Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham. This huge organisation, managed by the Foreign Office, describes itself as the national technical authority for information assurance. It has a reputation for independence and being unwilling to bend its standards to suit political convenience.
Despite fears over the problems surrounding infrastructure resilience, the government’s electronic infrastructure was staunch in the face of possibly its biggest threat to date. Official websites and communication networks didn’t even flicker as they handled sudden unexpected patterns of demand.
The central government web portal, www.direct.gov.uk, had a rush of hits after news of the bombings broke. However, a more modest figure of 80 000 visitors arrived at the site that day — though it did mark the site’s biggest ever audience.
Last Thursday marked a watershed as emergency workers rushed to make sure people were safe, and the country’s systems were secure. But whether they were behind the scenes or in front of the cameras, the grisly reality will not be forgotten quickly. – Guardian Unlimited Â