ubiquitous law enforcement

…With Justice For All

Posted by

5

SYSTEMIC INTEGRATED TECHNOLOGIES TICKET-TRACKING: CASE 921632

From: Supervisor of Police, Behibehin Rock
Mail Subject: HELP US NOW YOUR SYSTEM LOCKED EVERYONE UP AND WE CANT FIX IT WHAT THE —

Subject: Assent-Panopticon Ubiquitous Law Enforcement Instrumentality (all components)
Version: 3.4.0.49120
Issue: Stupidity (was: System imprisoned entire population in error)
Priority: Urgent

Resolution: WILL NOT FIX – WORKING AS DESIGNED/SPECIAL

Notes:

Does no-one read the gorramn manual?

The Behibehinti have become another entry in our list of customers who failed to read the warnings in sections 3.7, 3.8, and 3.9 concerning the need to lint your legislation before activating it, because the Assent-Panopticon ULEI has no way of knowing when you intended parts of it to be obsolete, symbolic, or selectively enforced. That said, managing to get the entire population, including the governance – although that latter is surprisingly common – jailed and awaiting trial before the now-inelegible-to-serve judiciary when the system was enabled is perhaps a new low in this particular failure mode.

Although this is closed WONTFIX, as per company policy we have dispatched a service engineer with the override code and a customer service lawyer with copies of sections 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, and the service agreement to free the customer and otherwise clean up the mess.

On the bright side, I won a week at the High Cysperia Luxurium in the departmental betting pool.

 

Trope-a-Day: Precrime Arrest

Posted by

2

Precrime Arrest: Well, while this sort of thing is easy enough to do with behavioral analysis software and ubiquitous computing and AI monitoring and all the other appurtenances of Citizen Oversight, obviously you can’t arrest people before the crime, having a great and tremendous respect for free will and all. That would be very bad form indeed. (I mean, if they were certain to commit the crime, that would be fine: under Imperial notions of the legal causality of intent, that’s why you can arraign someone for murder even if they were stopped before proceeding, but if they haven’t committed to their mens rea yet, it’s not a crime even if it was very likely to be, and free-will choices in critical moments are awkward that way.)

But there’s ain’t no rule saying you can’t quietly park a UAV with a stunner, say, in the air over people who are very likely to be about to commit crimes just in case, or quietly take other precautionary measures. If it turns out they don’t – well, no harm, no foul. That’s not an accusation, it’s just probability-based policing.