The Crisis in Zamboanga, and how Big Data could have helped save lives...

Watching the news these days is increasingly depressing.  Sometimes, I just want to turn the TV off and forget about reality.  But it seems reality always finds a way to wake you up.  So now I find myself writing this blog entry in the hope that my thoughts can somehow form something constructive to ease my frustration with current events.  I'm talking about what's happenning in Zamboanga (for those of you who rarely read the news).  The news is very sobering for me, we already have enough problems with territorial disputes.  Now this?



To my mind, the crisis in Zamboanga is a result of critical information not getting to the right people in a timely manner.  There have been statements from military and government sources (who prefer to remain anonymous) alleging that this was not a failure of getting intelligence, but of the government underestimating the importance of the information gathered.  This looks like the start of a never-ending finger-pointing circus to me.  But nevertheless, I still believe all of this could have been averted somehow.



If we are to accept that intelligence data was gathered beforehand, then why was it "underestimated"? Could this mean that there was a seeming lack of supporting data to give emphasis to the gravity of the situation at hand?  Was cricitical information relayed too late?  Or was this a lack of putting bits and pieces together from various and disparate intelligence sources?  Does the government and military have the resources to sift through all the information they are receiving and make sense of it all?  Do they even have the means to share vital information with each other in real-time so they can collaborate and act on it quickly and decisively?



We have the Government, the Philippine National Police (PNP), the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), and even the National Intelligence Coordination Agency (NICA) supposedly our version of the CIA, and who knows what other agency involved in intelligence-gathering and counter-intelligence.  I have strong doubts as to their ability to effectively share key bits of information that may prove to be critical in helping the top brass make informed decisions.  If they only had the means to quickly analyze all the data coming in from their sources and quickly provide insightful reports to those who have to make the big decisions, then maybe, just maybe, the crisis in Zamboanga might not even be in the news right now.  All because the right information got to the right people at the right time.  And who knows, lives might have been saved in the process...



Obviously, there is so much that Big Data can do for the government and military of this country.  But are the decision makers they even aware of it?  I certainly hope proponents of Big Data have already reached out to them to help them realize what they may be sorely lacking all this time...