{"id":416,"date":"2006-06-02T13:43:56","date_gmt":"2006-06-02T19:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=416"},"modified":"2006-06-02T13:43:56","modified_gmt":"2006-06-02T19:43:56","slug":"open_source_pol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=416","title":{"rendered":"Open source policing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, the International Herald Tribune ran a story<\/a> (reprinted in the Times<\/a>) 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<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today comes word<\/a> from the Houston Chronicle that Texas’s governor, Rick Perry, has<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}