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A Chat With Zavilia, a Tool For Identifying Rioters
HansonMB writes with an interview in Motherboard.tv. From the article: "Social media isn't just great for starting 'social unrest,' it's proving to be quite helpful for quashing it too. Not long after the bricks began to fly in London's latest kerfuffle, locals angry over raging mobs scrambled to assist the police in their attempt to identify street-fighters and free-for-all hooligans ... Now with more than 1,000 people charged over the chaos, a few citizen groups continue to provide web-based rioter identification platforms, in hopes of being good subjects, maintaining the country's pursuit of order, and keeping their neighborhoods safe."
Who else misread that as 'Chavzilla'?
I really wouldn't feel good creating a web based tool which I'd know for sure was going to be used by governments to crack down on legitimate protesters.
Ok, if this riot was truly a bunch of hooligans wrecking the place with no real reason, then yes, prosecute them. Use facial recognition on all those fancy cams Briton has installed and see who you can track down. If they have stolen goods in their house, and such, then law enforcement can figure stuff out.
What scares me though is: Lets say they've prosecuted the obvious rioters, then they start moving down the chain and start getting people who talked about the riot: "Dude, people are smashing stuff out here. I bet anyone could steal from the stores near where I live." Is this just a casual observation, or are they insigting more rioting? I mean it is a definite grey area, but if the powers at be want to crack down on people, stuff lighter shades of grey can be prosecuted even!
And lets go a step further... What if you're talking about stuff that might happen in the future? You could say stuff like,"Well they got most of the rioters, but all the ones wearing pillow cases with eyes cut out didn't get caught by facial recognition. Why won't rioters in the future take this simple precaution?" Isn't it possible you're guilty of encouraging rioting through this speech. Depending how far they want to go with prosecuting people, things could get messy.
And don't forget this could start looking like the draconian censorship of evil dictators, but only a softer gentler kind: You won't be censored, but you'll be selectively remembered. Don't talk about certain things because the police will arrest you. We won't censor you, but we'll listen in. And when we're listening in, we'll archive all the semi-bad comments we can on you. In case you become a threat to the political climate, they'll just arrest you, and give sound bytes to the media saying your most radical thing so the public is brainwashed into thinking you're an evil person that deserves punishment.
The Zavilla instigator clearly doesn't understand IP law, and more specifically, copyright law. References to copyright protection in the original article were positively cringeworthy. I also struggle to see how this will scale if each photo has to be hand annotated, it needs google-style auto face-detection.
If you are free to use social media to organise riots, I am just as free to use the same social media to identify the idiots who rampaged through my neighbourhood. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.
I wonder what they really mean with "We do envisage much greater uses for Zavilia. However, as these are currently copyright pending, we cannot disclose any further details." as there is no such thing as "Copyright Pending".
Grow up.
Ummm... yeah, The problem being that many local shops and traders who lived in the area also had their shops broken into, stock looted and buildings burnt
[...] The copyrights have been made on the Zavilia brand name, principle, and technologies. [...]
[...] Although we cannot comment on exact figures, we can confirm the website peaked at over 100,000 unique visitors. [...]
[...] We have made contact with the authorities regarding several identifications, although we cannot disclose the exact figure due to security reasons. [...]
[...] entire documents detailing why Zavilia is “unethical” and “encourages vigilantism.” These remarks are however unfounded, and no damage has been done. [...]
[...] We do envisage much greater uses for Zavilia. However, as these are currently copyright pending, we cannot disclose any further details. [...]
Is it just me or is this interview nothing but a stream of useless PR crap? Our platform is so super-secret, 'cause it's copyrighted, y'know, and it does mighty good, but canna tell ya, 'cause it's so super-secret. Yeah, right. Colour me unimpressed.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
The thing i don't understand, why somebody on the internet asks you to commit a crime, for some reason people think it's a marvelous idea and go ahead and do it?
Was this a copycat of Egypt, etc where people were bored and didn't need a political statement?
If that is the case then there a far more serious issue regarding ethics and morals then whoever did it, right?
So I just went to the zavilla webiste: The main page says "The development of Zavilia: Identify UK Rioters has been temporarily paused due to a substantial decrease in traffic and in user interactions. However, we fully intend to continue development at some point in the near future." In other words, either someone has got to them or there wasn't much of an interest anyway. Also, the old website has what? About 20 photos, most of which seem to have been taken from either Getty or Reuters. I can't exactly see this going anywhere.
Great, the idea of using social media to identify rioters, dissidents and other criminals has already proved very successful in China, another flourishing democracy. Just don't forgot to sent death threats to the rioters, make sure they loose their jobs, and humiliate them publicly before handing them over to the authorities. In combination with censorship this creates exactly the right amount of fear and respect for authorities that is needed to keep the citizens calm.
My guess is that these tools would also be useful for personal army requests, calling in the cops in the middle of the night to wake up someone you are annoyed with. If they really actually work as tools for bringing perpetrators to justice, then they would also work very effectively as tools of harassment and wasting of police time.
Korma: Good
You make an interesting point. In East Germany, the power of the Stasi was not that they were everywhere, but that they had enough snitches everywhere. This is usually how dictatorships handle things.
Korma: Good
Subjects? Can't imagine there are many rioter-identifying subjects; it's a corner-case of British nationality law.
I expect they mean citizens, which is something else entirely.
If you're eligible for a British passport you're a British citizen. British passports say: "Nationality: British Citizen".
I agree it is out of order to trash small businesses, mug people, or attack their homes, but this was a tiny percentage of the rioting and looting. Most of it was big chain stores who fully deserve it IMHO, and snitches like Zavilia are acting as their personal Stasi.
In a riot you will always get a few people using it as cover to commit anti-social crime.
Yes, curse those big businesses.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Reading the 'context' for Ms. Sherrod hardly changed the content; it just added spin. Referring to her as 'innocent' is a mistake in my book - the racial bias shows itself even in her explaining of the context of the original comments. Attention to racist comments when they don't originate from the white/male demographic are largely ignored.
(e.g. Al Sharpton [wikipedia.org], Ray Nagin [wikipedia.org], Joseph Lowery [clipsandcomment.com])
This is just another one of those cases. It's not racist because a white man didn't say it.
kdawson, is that you?
And do what to them? Hurt them? Kill them? Threaten them?
How about that isn't a good idea, because besides breaking the law, you just might target the wrong people to fuck with. What if you trigger vigilante retaliation in the form of hunting down looter punks and exterminating them? After enough of these punks get greased mysteriously, they will be whining for that "police state" to protect them. Oh the irony.
Take the Red Pill.
Yea, being from Germany one of the first thoughts about TFA was "the Stasi would have loved such a tool". Turning ordinary citizens against each other has a long history.
What is needed is a website to identify and arrest banksters and recover their loot.
(With that money you could rebuild all the damage from rioting)
A fine nazi brownshirt website you've setup.
Oh well, monetary collapse isn't far away now.
You'll be getting fucked soon enough.
What about the ordinary people the rioters assaulted and killed?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
When one person throws a brick through another persons shop window, they're already turned against each other.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
After a state fair in my area some teenagers organized a flash mob.
Dozens of them showed up to shop lift food at a local convenience store. None of them had the brains to put a cloth over the cameras in the store.
The local police chief put the video footage from the store's security cameras up on the web.
He went on the local TV news to report that by doing so about half of the mob had been identified by neighbors within only a few days.
Talk about working smarter and not harder...
I've heard about yet another new technology out there. Well I suppose technically not really new, but now inexpensive enough for routine consumer use, that could have significant impact along the lines being discussed here. I understand it's called a video camera; small enough to fit in your hand, it takes instant digital movies, which can then be shared, posted, spread around.
Pundits have already speculated that it can be used on both sides of any dispute. Some suggest that it will be used to capture wrong-doers in the act, others suggest that it will invade the privacy of innocent bystanders, some even suggest that it might be used to monitor the authorities themselves
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rodney_King].
Man: I've bleedin' got one, look! What's that then?
Postal Clerk: This is a dog license with the word 'dog' crossed out and 'cat' written in in crayon.
Man: Man didn't have the right form.
Postal Clerk: What man?
Man: The man from the cat detector van.
Postal Clerk: The loony detector van, you mean.
Man: Look, it's people like you what cause unrest.
[End Of Line]
At least they will know who to give the stitches to when they get out.
This is similar to www.scumbook.com but they are using a mixture of web reporting and facial recognition software.
Facebook has already been used quite successfully to hunt down dissidents in Bahrain. Images have been posted online to crowd-source the identification of opposition supporters. Visitors were told "write the traitor's name and work place" and leave it to the government to do the rest.
Source:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/8681230/Facebook-used-to-hunt-down-Bahrain-dissidents.html