Kevin Gamble is talking about the James Surowiecki book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which discusses how large independent crowds are nearly always smarter than one or two people. Very much related to that discussion is this call Smart Swarms to help solve tough security issues:

The idea is to get lots of people focused on a security issue, or even a programming problem, and then have them chisel away at the code and examine how those pieces interact and work with all the total software. Instead of looking at programming as just lines of code, these swarms of people examine how each piece interrelates and works within a network.

"The key to robust security is network thinking," said W. David Stephenson, principal at Stephenson Strategies, a company that works closely with the Department of Homeland Security to develop defenses against terrorist attacks on computer networks. He is also an expert in the emerging science of social networks. This means he spends a lot of time looking at the behavior patterns in ant hills and beehives and applying them to networks and network design.

...via Digg