Infragard Social Media and Public Safety Event

Recently the San Diego chapter of Infragard invited me to speak at our “Social Media and Public Safety” event on May 23rd. The event was held at the beautiful Irwin Jacobs auditorium at Qualcomm’s headquarters. It’s a fantastic facility for such events.

I gave a talk on “Social Media 101″ to explain some of the basics of common social media and why emergency and incident responders should be using it. It’s not often that information security professionals talk up the importance of using social media, mostly because we’re so busy preaching why they are so bad for security and privacy. But they are valuable tools that emergency responders can ignore only at their peril. My premise is that if we don’t understand how to use such tools ourselves, how can we help others protect themselves online?

SDG&E arrived to demonstrate their new Incident Command Trailer. Very cool.

My conclusion? Get involved! Use the tools. Learn the culture. Pick a topic you care about and aren’t worried about from a privacy perspective  (like fishing for example!) and post only about that. Anything is better than nothing and nothing is what the bad guys are hoping we will do.

While the event was going on, we used twitter hashtag #sdcssm which was trending locally in San Diego until at least 9pm that night. Take that, #songstogetlaidby!

For those interested in a copy of my presentation, I’ve made it available here.

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