Christopher Parsons, a polisci grad student at UVic, has come up with better arguments to back up the unease that some of us are feeling about citizen surveillance in the Vancouver riot: besides the purely technical problem of it being sloppy police work, social media users are acting as a mob:

The social media users processing riot photos are acting as a lynch mob just as mindless and violent as the rioters themselves. In particular, like past cases of Internet vigilantism, they are circumventing the justice system to get accused rioters fired from their jobs and expelled from school. As Parsons points out, our justice system protects people from this kind of “justice” using libel suits, although they may be difficult to pursue online.

But the police probably don’t even need this wetware (human) facial recognition system, because the government has ordered ICBC to make their drivers license photo database and facial recognition system available. The drivers license database has always been a tool of law enforcement and we’ve always had to accept that the cost of driving is access to the police. But to date ICBC’s facial recognition system has only been used to prevent identity theft – I feel like this is a concerning expansion of police ability. The slippery slope is obviously hooking the facial recognition system up to closed-circuit cameras, as is gradually being done in Britain and the US.

Camera phones and social media have become powerful tools for holding police accountable. But after the Vancouver riot, Internet vigilantes and the police are collaborating to use these tools to gather evidence and make arrests.* A seemingly lone voice in opposition to this practice is this blog post that identifies it as citizen surveillance in opposition to citizen journalism, where you use mobile devices and social media simply to document.

She points out that, like other cases of Internet vigilantism, it takes on a mob mentality and isn’t necessarily being practiced only in a desire for justice. The personal decision to cooperate with law enforcement rather than critically monitor police could become a public embrace of security values. And there are the slippery slopes, particularly if the surveillance were available to private-sector employers:

• protesters of authoritarian regimes
• people who drive badly
• Pride Parade marchers
• 4/20 Day participants

As this is just a blog post, she doesn’t make the ethical argument explicitly, but I’d like to see a philosophy paper follow this up. Do we want to live in a society where people help the police like this regularly? Do we want this to be a social media norm? And what does it mean if this practice gets exported to countries where people have more to fear from the police.

In the comments, she lays the responsibility for the riots where it belongs:

I think our city needs to rethink the intensity of a sports culture that leads to this kind of extreme reaction.

* Being present in a riot violates the law against unlawful assembly, which means everyone who took a photo is guilty as well.

Standard operating procedure for police — indeed for everyone now — should be to assume the presence of video recorders.

(Via CNN)

That’s the Victoria Police. Shouldn’t they be investigating those bodies?

BC’s police forces are known for taking a middle ground in drug enforcement: they rarely press possession charges but don’t support legalization or decriminalization. Still, I am shocked to hear Victoria’s new chief of police (transplanted from Vancouver) go on record that Victoria does not have a drug problem, drug abusers do not cause significant public disorder and hard drugs are relatively hard to acquire.

I’m expecting the Chief, the media and politicians to have a discussion about this over the next week or two. It could be true for all I know. For example, I only recently came to understand that crack and meth are the popular street drugs, not heroin as the media always told me growing up.

Unfortunately, alcohol addicts have a very high cost to society, so perhaps this is far from good news.