Life from the near future of location surveillance

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ALL UNCLASSIFIABLE BEHAVIOR is prohibited.

Everything not prohibited is compulsory and Vice-Versa.

/1984

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How can I Santa-hack the location data record of my cell-phone, and make it appear that I visited every house in the country on the evening of the 24th December?

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Hmmmm, so when I go out, frequently, to drive the new, expensive, Italian sports car I just bought… wandering aimlessly, simply for the enjoyment of being behind the wheel, some joker could be perceiving that as potential criminal behavior? Great work, Columbo. You cracked the case. Here’s a donut.

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If you’re able to afford an expensive sports car, they won’t bother you. If you can afford that, you can probably afford a lawyer and that’s no fun.

I’m not sure if the slope is as slippery as the ACLU presents it as being. The government has always been able to do things under the guise of intelligence/prevention that it has been unable to do in the name of law enforcement (many would argue that the purpose of a stop/search is what makes something ‘unreasonable,’ and thus requiring a warrant, under the 4th amendment—searches for the purpose of law enforcement being presumptively unreasonable, while searches for prevention being more reasonable). The FBI, in fact, had a rather firm firewall between its law enforcement and intelligence division before 9/11, with virtually no sharing of information between the two. After 9/11 this firewall was highly criticized, on the theory that better information sharing could have prevented 9/11, though this logic would seem to argue in favour of information flows from law enforcement to intelligence, and not necessarily vice versa.

Right now all of these surveillance programs are being used for intelligence purposes alone, and I think it would take a very deliberate, very considered decision to apply them to law-enforcement contexts. Certainly I can’t imagine it happening on the federal side anytime soon, and outside of the federal government I think only NYC has anything approaching this sort of infrastructure at their disposal.

Fontanelle doesn’t come up in my thesaurus as meaning ‘rectum’.

In my Brave New World you are chipped at birth with a device implanted into the skull, such that the chip cannot be removed without major surgery later in life. The chip is used to track you, to act as an internal taser for the police to control civil disobedience, to induce seizures in political dissidents, and to release endorphins and oxytocin on proximity or purchase of well loved brands. The rights to induce chemical stimuli in the minds of the population are sold to the highest bidder, to raise state revenue. Hormones are secreted via GM cells grown on the chip surface. It’s maybe a good job that I’m not in charge of public health (yet) but I do have a Kickstarter for this…

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First thought, take the battery out of the phone.
Second thought, taking the battery out of the phone is obviously suspicious activity now too.

Woah.

When I first read 4th edition Shadowrun, the bit where it talks about how people would be expected to have their commlinks turned on and broadcasting their ID at all times, and would draw police attention otherwise, seemed a bit far-fetched…

look like someone is playing Ingress, i have driven like this setting up large fields…

So if this dystopian vision came to pass, we would no longer see stacks of police cars sitting in the parking lots of bars at closing time?

You wouldn’t need Kickstarter for this.
If an idea like this doesn’t get government funding I don’t know what would.

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Presumption of intent to commit a crime is something people can be arrested for now on far less evidence. New Jersey law, for example, requires people caught having a slingshot or flash paper to show they intended on using it for a legitimately purpose in order to avoid conviction.

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