Yesterday, the International Herald Tribune ran a story (reprinted in the Times) on how people in China are using the Internet to investigate and punish bad behavior. When a cuckolded husband posted on the web a message about his wife’s affair with a student, “tens of thousands [of] total strangers” used the Net to form “teams to hunt down the student’s identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home.” One of the participants wrote, “‘Let’s use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons.'” It was only
the latest example of a growing phenomenon the Chinese call Internet hunting, in which morality lessons are administered by online throngs and where anonymous Web users come together to investigate others and mete out punishment for offenses real and imagined … Many here draw disturbing parallels to the Cultural Revolution [when] mobs of students taunted and beat their professors and mass denunciations and show trials became common for a decade.
Today comes word from the Houston Chronicle that Texas’s governor, Rick Perry, has
unveiled state plans to install hundreds of video surveillance cameras along the Rio Grande to allow anyone with Internet access to witness and report suspicious activity as it occurs … Perry said the cameras will cover stretches of farms and ranches on the border where “criminal activity is known to occur” … The video will be available on the Web in real time and cameras will have night vision capability. People who witness suspicious actions, including crossings, will be able to call a toll-free number to report it to the authorities.
This is great. We can all be cops now. It makes sense, too. Why keep the video feeds from surveillance cameras secret? Put ’em on the web. Given enough eyeballs, all crimes are shallow.
I smell some commerical potential here, too. Collective policing could be the next great online media opportunity. Coming soon: Yahoo Stakeout. Google Surveillance. MSN PI. And, of course, Baidu Justice.
The wisdom of the crowds.
Compare the Shoreditch Digital Bridge. Surveillance is the new social software…
In buildings which have lobby cameras, the cameras are often available on a TV channel, to all residents.
I’d say it’s overhyped. 99.9% of the time, nothing happens. Very boring.
There’s already compilation tapes of supposedly exciting security-cam footage. Not a big market, as real-life is nowhere as artistic as fiction.
Or how about billboards along the televised region? As potential hiding places, they would attract and hold online eyeballs.
here is an Orwellian proposal to implant RFID chips in immigrants…apparently folks in DC have listened to the pitch
http://www.livescience.com/scienceoffiction/060531_rfid_chips.html
more – now Justice Dept wants customer web surfing activities of major sites reported
Let’s see – half of the country will be monitroing all this streaming video, RFID data and IP addresses and the rest will be doing SarBOX compliance
Mercifully the Chinese mobs are not manufacturing but caught in their own “monitoring” – that’s only fair trade I say…
The software that allows you to escape collective policing should be a more attractive commercial proposition. Imagine GoogleBuster Tshirt, ConfuseMSN Facepaint and ExcuseYahoo Alternate Identity.
I have read books like Smart Mobs, by Howard Rheingold and similar works about virtual communities.
I would place it all, on a much wider spectrum.
In medicine for instance, the availability of patients information and graphical representation of the problem, might enable experts from around the globe to be involved in the patients diagnosis and treatment.
The idea of a larger platform, one powerful enough to augment the intelligence of workgroups is something I thought about here.
https://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/06/the_grid_land.php
I have also spent some time thinking about information economies, information ‘regions’ and the idea of humans are a tool-making species. At best, their tools managed to augment the abilities of the group, or institution. Major breakthroughs, like the technology of writing were what enabled humans to operate as groups. Indeed, the human brain itself is a wonderful tool, which allowed humans to communicate very efficiently and in real time.
https://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/microsoft_vs_mi.php
I think this de-centralised surveillance issue, has to be tied back into the broader picture here. Surveillance of difficult design problems. Online planning of the physical environment, which allows designers and engineers to communicate better and provide the human species with cheaper and better living environments. It is not just about spotting a criminal running down a laneway and alerting the police about it. It is deeper and more multi-layered that just that.
Recently here in Ireland, the strength of the economic has produced a building boom of a scale few could have anticipated. The building project seems to be, to re-build everything. The same happened in Berlin following the collapse of the Berlin wall. People struggling to come to terms with this, have grouped together online, at Archiseek discussion forum, in other to pool their intelligence on such matters. I posted up a thread there just now:
http://www.archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4957
The problem is, I think the internet, is good a producing style police. It is a very superficial way of looking at the problem – but it is the best the people can manage. I think, technology has the power to do alot more, augmenting the intelligence of groups of experts to view problems of environmental design in wider dimensions. I would like to see that happen at least, like the notion of medical diagnosis becoming de-centralised too, to benefit from more and better brains on problems.
Brian O’ Hanlon.