Big Brother is Getting Very Twitchy

The Roman poet Juvenal first asked, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?”, with various translations but one of which is "who watches the watchers?" The answer we are coming up with "everybody", and the custodies are not happy with that.

   

A Philadelphia family said they are outraged over the arrest of one of their family members. The family of Neftaly Cruz said police had no right to come onto their property and arrest their 21-year-old son simply because he was using his cell phone's camera.

   

... Cruz, 21, told the NBC 10 Investigators that police arrested him last Wednesday for taking a picture of police activity with his cell phone. Police at the 35th district said they were in Cruz's neighborhood that night arresting a drug dealer. Cruz said that when he heard a commotion, he walked out of his back door with his cell phone to see what was happening. He said that when he saw the street lined with police cars, he decided to take a picture of the scene. "I opened (the phone) and took a shot," Cruz said.

   

Moments later, Cruz said he got the shock of his life when an officer came to his back yard gate. "He opened the gate and took me by my right hand," Cruz said. Cruz said the officer threw him onto a police car, cuffed him and took him to jail. A neighbor said she witnessed the incident and could not believe what she saw. [Pity the neighbour didn't take a pic as well]

   

"He opened up the gate and Neffy was coming down and he went up to Neffy, pulled him down, had Neffy on the car and was telling him, 'You should have just went in the house and minded your own business instead of trying to take pictures off your picture phone,'" said Gerrell Martin. Cruz said police told him that he broke a new law that prohibits people from taking pictures of police with cell phones.

There is a vast amount of unspoken power exercised by the office of the law; my brother was a cop and he reckoned that when he grabbed someone, he had approximately half a second to act while the other guy decided whether or not to hit someone wearing a uniform.

In a pinch he got half a second, in general life, the uniform conveys even more power, we defer, we avoid eye contact, we walk past someone being stopped, arrested, bundled into a car, we respond to the power by avoiding any contact with it. The cops, meanwhile, get used to that deference, to our institutionalised fear. That leads, eventually, to a constant, usually minor, but sometimes not, breach of the rules because the arrested person doesn't know the law and because, in the end, it is their word against the uniform's.

Ubiquitous cameras take away that protection, they constantly expose everyone everywhere to potential observation. And officials are not used to observation, they don't like it and they are reacting badly.

To the point where some of them will lie about the laws to shift that discomfort back to the general population. I've said all along that public CCTV will find more examples of official lawbreaking than it will undermine our civil liberties. Adding millions of freelance little brothers with their own CCTVs will raise that by an order of magnitude.

And this is what it looks like when the powers that be realise what is happening to them.