An acknowledgment of knowledge = power in context to our discussion of a panopticon place was revealed by a very unlikely source.
I was cleaning the house the other day while the living room television was tuned to Investigation Discovery. The typical story was of some criminal who for a long time eluded capture. He was being interviewed afterward from prison and revealed that each time he planned to commit a crime, he checked the weather channel to make sure that heavy fog was predicted. Among a laundry list of precautions he took, one was to make him as invisible to detection as possible. He stated his assumption that he would be in view of a camera, and possibly watched from helicopters above.
While he was aware of the possibility of detection, it did not deter him, but only made him react in ways that countered the deterrence. So, the power shifted to him from being aware he may be perceived, and took precautions not to be.
Other criminal organizations are reacting similarly. Mexican cartels have kidnapped and enslaved engineers in order for them to build radio networks. These networks were developed to aid in communications among the organization without being detected by the police.
It appears that criminals are convinced technology has all eyes on them. However, instead of discipline, the criminals are reacting with strategies to outsmart the technologies set to deter them.
This is not surprising. Governments, in practice, are little more than syndicates with a veneer of legitimacy. Of course rival syndicates as well as individuals are going to devise measures to counter technologies and techniques employed against them; I am boggled by the reactions of people when they believe that this would not occur. It's like assuming that forbidding drugs will somehow eliminate drug use.
ReplyDeleteWhat's bothering is that more and more measures beyond even the color of law are taken by those governments--using crime and terrorism as their excuses--to use more of these technologies on us without a warrant. The most recent of these is a U.S. District Court Ruling permitting warrantless surveilance via concealed cameras on suspect's private property.
This is a clear violation of unalienable rights to the security of one's property (which, by the by, includes one's body), and it is a clear violation of the 4th & 5th Amendments. (It can also violate the 1st, in that it can inhibit the free association, assembly and expression of individuals via intimidation.)
Not that the government needs to plant cameras; it is already the case that they can, and have, access the phone service providers' networks and access your phone's GPS, microphone and camera remotely.