A Boring Dystopia

The ubiquity of phone cameras, and the means to get recordings distributed on the internet is one of the factors of the twenty-first century that gives me hope. It's known in COIN that brutality by an occupying regime will turn bystanders into sympathists, sympathists into activists, and activists into militants. Camera footage going straight to the internet for wide public distribution only cranks this effect up to eleven.

In the olden days, it was the officer's word against the civilians, and the legal system has a presumption of regularity that law enforcement officers (and other officials) are presumed to be telling the truth until there is evidence to the contrary. So if you weren't resisting arrest, and he says you were, the court would side with the badge.

As you probably know, police lie... routinely.

It's how in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, the police would open hostilities with peaceful protestors, and release dogs on them, and they'd get away with it because it was the word of the uniforms versus civilians.

The 2014 shooting of Michael Brown was an interesting case, because there were a lot of witnesses, though they didn't catch the incident on camera, and their version of the story conflicted with that of officer Wilson. The discrepancy made it online, and that lead to some forensic analyses in a hurry, and with each new revelation the police version of the story would change. Drastically

Also, this led to the Ferguson unrest. A peaceful protest by the neighborhood. The police responded with militancy and brutality, and had a nightly habit of joyriding in their MRAPS, tearing up the neighborhood and saturating it with CS gas. But there were a lot of independent press with cameras live streaming all the events to the world. And the world was appalled.

For the first time, after that, news agencies started tracking officer-involved homicide. The FBI is obligated to do this by congressional order from (I think) the 1970s, but they just don't, and haven't for decades. Instead, it was up to a handful of voluntary organizations who tracked news articles and obituaries and didn't get them all.

(It turns out that precinct coroners routinely cover up for their brethren, if there is any way to justify that a suspect died on their own, not facilitated by a police knee or bullet. As much as 75% of all officer-involved homicides might have gone undetected because of this.)

The crisis in Palestine also comes to mind. Abuse of Palestinians by IDF is notorious and has been for half a century. One tactic I remember was saturation bombing with cluster bombs (purchased from the United States). As many as two thirds of the bomblets (small metal spheres that explode like grenades) would go unexploded and get lost in the target region, later to detonate when happened by an unobservant passerby or a curious child.

But this time, there are phones in Gaza that capture the carpet bombing, the relentless brutality of IDF and the results of the famine, and despite tepid responses from ranking officials, the people of the world are livid and aghast. (This has caused a retaliation by IDF to harass and sometimes kill journalists who are covering the Gaza strip. Israel has now slain a conspicuous number of press correspondents.

And this time it's impacting elections in the US. Now AIPAC support for a Democratic candidate is a millstone, and now AIPAC is making shadow PACs to secretly donate against those candidates who are against the Israeli genocide. And some of those candidates are balking when they learn they got secret AIPAC money.

So yeah, the ubiquitous cameras are a surprising new counter for any situation in which a military or paramilitary force likes to be disproportionately brutal or abusive. (And that would be all of them.) In COIN, this is (very) old news, but we are just so used to paramilitaries operating under Nacht und Nebel and getting away with it.

I wonder if this factors into the new wave of age verification laws. If anonymity is removed from the internet, that doesn't only curb porn consumption, but also curbs political speech, including sharing videos of police doing bad things.