Our thoughts quickly focused back to Arizona and Nevada and the conversation with the state. What would

be the impact if a terrorist drove a car bomb up next to one of these transport trucks and detonated it near

downtown Phoenix, or Tempe near Arizona State University? Or high jacked one of these trucks? Clearly,

to live as free as we do, we are exposed to certainly vulnerabilities that we can at best hope to minimize.

Would it be too extreme to require inspections of all cars that want to enter our highway system? Where is

the balance between the freedoms we take for granted and providing a safe environment in which to live

relatively normal lives day to day? What type of security would be considered a waste of effort and money?

Most Americans agreed to substantially tighter security at our airports. Here in Los Angeles, when our

national terror alert color system moves to Orange, the National Guard is deployed to LAX International

Airport and covers the terminal and beach areas around the facility. It is not clear if this is to help calm the

nerves of local passengers and the public in general or to guard against a potential ground to air missile attack

as stated by the media. If it is the latter, the reality is that deployment would truly need to be achieved on

every city block from LAX to Palm Springs twenty-four hours a day.

Over the weeks following September 11, 2001, many stories came out of New York, including many

concerning communication. Since we pay particular attention to communication issues related to wireless

technology, several stories caught our attention. One was about commercial paging technology. The one-way

and two-way messaging systems such as WebLink Wireless were up and running that day, offering

incredible in-building penetration (typically well beyond cellular providers), and would have made a

significant impact in this type of disaster recovery effort. (This is not to say that cellular providers and their

networks would not play a critical role moving forward; they will and do every day in local, regional and

national law enforcement, which this study will show). In fact, most of these networks were operational as

well, but due to massive consumer use, many of them became too jammed at times for effective emergency

communication (I also read Nextel was an exception; there may have been others).