Tech Devolution
Posted 28 Feb 10
One aspect of the continuing, astonishing pace of technological development is how quickly sophisticated capabilities become available to everyday joes. The military-industrial complex is losing control of cutting-edge technology faster than ever. Just this week, three examples hit the news:
It is now cheap and easy to jam GPS navigation systems. One small device can knock out receivers for a radius of several kilometers. Even better: for a few thousand dollars extra, you can actually spoof locations! I expect this to start showing up in techno-thrillers and caper movies no later than next year.
Second, high-speed license plate scanning is now available to auto-repo companies. For the cost of the camera and a $600/mo. subscription fee, you can drive around (at up to 80 mph) checking parking lots, highways, etc for cars under a repossession order. That’s nice enough, at least for bottom-feeding collection agencies, but the larger question is: what happens to the collected data? This technology won’t stay in the, um, responsible hands of bounty hunters and repo men forever, and once large numbers of entities are using it, one could imagine all sorts of uses for vehicle tracking. Stalking, for example.
Finally, widespread commercial use of video surveillance, and effective conscription of cellphone call data, allowed authorities to rapidly discover a complete record of the Dubai assassination team. Even ten years ago this would have been impossible; now it’s everyday. (What’s most surprising is that the team, widely believed to be from Mossad, didn’t realize how easily they’d be found.)
Human ingenuity ensures a proliferation of unexpected uses for new inventions. It’s a brave surprising new world.
This post indexed as: Crime, Intelligence, Technology
“Shipbreaker” Breaks Into BAM
Posted 16 Feb 10
My story “The Shipbreaker,” first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine last year, has just been selected for Otto Penzler’s Best American Mystery Stories 2010. Lee Child is the guest editor, and the pub date is roughly October. I am thrilled and honored!
This post indexed as: Writing
How to Raise Tom Sawyer
Posted 12 Feb 10
I happen to be reading The American Frugal Housewife this week (I found it at the library, but a Project Gutenberg version, nicely formatted, is here). First published in 1833, the handbook was popular throughout the nineteenth century. Not just a window into how people lived 150 years ago, it also has advice that anyone might find useful today.
Not the recipes, I’m sorry to say; most begin with some variant of “Boil three hours.” Nor the medical recommendations (though I do like this one: “the constant use of beer is a preservative against fevers”).
But Mrs. Child does have relevant advice for modern society in one area: parenting.
In this country, we are apt to let children romp away their existence, till they get to be thirteen or fourteen. This is not well. It is not well for the purses and patience of parents; and it has a still worse effect on the morals and habits of the children. Begin early is the great maxim for everything in education. A child of six years old can be made useful; and should be taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not been done to assist others.
Children can very early be taught to take all the care of their own clothes.
They can knit garters, suspenders, and stockings; they can make patchwork and braid straw; they can make mats for the table, and mats for the floor; they can weed the garden, and pick cranberries from the meadow, to be carried to market.
Provided brothers and sisters go together, and are not allowed to go with bad children, it is a great deal better for the boys and girls on a farm to be picking blackberries at six cents a quart, than to be wearing out their clothes in useless play. They enjoy themselves just as well; and they are earning something to buy clothes, at the same time they are tearing them.
As I announced at breakfast this morning, things are going to change in this household!
This post indexed as: Personal, Reading
Learning to Walk and Shoot Guns at the Same Time
Posted 11 Feb 10
Good policing relies on training, which depends in turn on institutional experience and wisdom – just like good lawbreaking.
I’ve been reading Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies, a thoroughly researched account of the great gangsters of the 30′s: Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, etc. (It was the basis for last year’s movie of the same name.) What’s most striking is just how incompetent everyone was: cops, the FBI, the criminals themselves.
Bank robberies go awry because no one bothered to case the bank beforehand. Getaways nearly fail when cars run out of gas, or get stuck in the mud. Innocents are gunned down by panicky, tommy-gun wielding amateurs.
But law enforcement comes off even worse. Obvious leads — fingerprints, phone records, eyewitness accounts — are ignored, while enormous effort is expended on worthless rabbit trails (finding the house were kidnapping victim Bremer was kept, for example). Over and over gangsters are caught, only to shoot their way free because the G-men left their cars a mile away, or failed to cover the back door, or simply failed to recognize who they had cornered. Dillinger’s escape from jail, using nothing but hutzpah and a carved wooden gun, is classic.
This isn’t to poke fun at Hoover’s incompetent agents, however (even if Melvin Purvis was truly and remarkably unfit for the task given him). The problem was that no one had any experience conducting complicated, wide-scale, geographically broad investigations. Even something simple, like firearms training, was ad hoc and uncertain — an agent might be taken out to plink at cans in an empty field for an hour, then sent into action.
Good guys, bad guys: they were all just making it up as they went along.
Police culture is certainly open to criticism (DWB, the blue wall, defiance of rules, and so on). But sometimes it’s easy to forget that over the decades law enforcement has gotten better at its job — and just like any process, much of that is learning from past mistakes, then institutionalizing the lessons.
Whatever happened to tommy guns, anyway?
This post indexed as: Crime, Reading
You Can Hire the CIA!
Posted 01 Feb 10
Active CIA personnel are moonlighting - for very nice salaries – at private companies.
So far as we know, they’re not actually engaged in black-bag entry or covert assassination. (For a discussion of the latter — why not knock off your business rivals? — see this Overcoming Bias post. Interestingly, the most obvious reason,”because it’s wrong,” didn’t really enter the comment stream.) Rather, CIA experts in lie detecting are hiring out to hedge funds and the like, to evaluate the truthfulness of statements by competitors and partners.
Why anyone thinks the CIA would be good at this is a question for another day. And at a time when contractors nearly outnumber US soldiers in our two wars, concerns about line-blurring between public and private intelligence may seem quaint.
Still, it seems like a slippery slope. In Russia, a profit-seeking military has become thoroughly corrupt. That’s nothing to emulate.
This post indexed as: Intelligence, Military
I, The Jury
Posted 01 Feb 10
Some time ago I sat on a jury. The case was difficult — if it were easy, it wouldn’t have gotten to trial — and after long deliberation, we deadlocked, 11-1.
This was unfortunate, but not rare; while only two percent of federal cases result in a hung jury, the rate for local jurisdictions is 6-7% (NCSC). It’s up to the prosecutor what happens after that (commonly a retrial).
What should we make of the individual who remains steadfast in his or her opinion, despite considerable pressure from everyone else in the room? In our case subsequent information, revealed after the trial, strongly suggested our holdout was mistaken — that the other eleven had come to a proper conclusion.
Popular opinion tends to glorify the individual, especially against mass conformity. But really, we don’t live in 1984, or 1930′s Germany, or even 1960′s Greensboro. Chances are, if you think one thing and everyone else thinks something else, you’re wrong.
We can’t all be John Galt.
That said, I have a short story that has accumulated a dozen rejections, and I keep sending it out. It’s a good story, by God, and someday someone will realize it!
This post indexed as: Crime, Personal, Writing