Microsoft is hosting a two-day symposium in Redmond bringing together an international group of 300 people who work in public safety. The company announced Citizen Safety Architecture this morning, which brings together several products Microsoft has developed for governments, such as sharing information across agencies for disaster management and criminal investigations.

The company will offer free to Interpol agencies a software called Computer Online Forensics Evidence Extractor, which will help law enforcement extract information from a computer before it's unplugged and taken back to the evidence vault. That would help them pin down what's in the cache memory, which would be erased once the computer is unplugged.

Having covered criminal courts for several months here in King County, I usually only came across computer evidence when vice squads searched Craigslist to bust teenage prostitutes and their johns. Investigators also would confiscate hard drives to prosecute child porn cases.

As for crisis management, it would be interesting to hear how software could be used to effectively deploy resources during a snowstorm, such as which streets to plow and how long you can expect to wait for a Metro bus.