The cops who use facial recognition and an online post to catch a baby rapist are the same cops who will use facial recognition and an online post to track down asylum seekers to send them to concentration camps.
You and the baby rapist have the same rights. An infringement on the baby rapistâs right to privacy is an infringement on your right to privacy. You should be able to use encrypted communication networks, this is true whether you are committing no crimes, whether you are a âfucking piece of shit drug dealer,â or whether you are seeking an abortion in Texas. Cops compromising encrypted communication is a threat to you the same way it is a threat to drug dealers.
âDONâT FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES?!â Is not a useful or actionable admonition because âcrimeâ is a constructed category that makes âforgetting to fill out a form 10 years agoâ âassisting your child in seeking an abortionâ âhaving the wrong tattoosâ âhaving a blanketâ all equally good reasons to unperson you.
âDONâT FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES?!â and âJust donât break the law.â are things that are said by people who are entirely too comfortable with the idea that they are never going to be targeted by law enforcement considering that we live in a society in which so much is criminalized.
The fact that he is âa fucking piece of shit drug dealerâ is why the original article is comfortable making a joke of his arrest. The contemptible nature of his crime means that itâs okay to pair his face with cheese puns, and itâs why that article was widely circulated - as opposed to this article by an investigative journalist and encrochat user whose home was raided as part of the same nationwide sting.
The reason that you (and everyone else who makes this argument) reach for âbaby rapistâ as your criminal of choice when making your criticisms is because it doesnât sound as righteous when you say âsheâs a piece of shit abortionist, DONâT COMMIT CRIMESâ or âthat fucking piece of shit was sleeping on a cardboard box, itâs not hard to keep away from the cops if you just donât break the law.â
You are attempting to frame the conversation as though the only people subject to this kind of surveillance are people who are easy to hate - drug dealers, rapists, murderers, etc.
The rate of violent crime has been falling for decades. People are less likely to harm one another now than they were at any point since we started tracking those numbers. In spite of that, our population is more criminalized than ever.
In the four years since I made this original post we have seen these types of surveillance being used to track protesters and asylum seekers. The murder/rape case clearance rate isnât up since these types of stings started becoming more common, but it is now illegal to fall asleep with a blanket on a bench in Oregon and to provide a D&C to a person having a miscarriage in Texas.
âCrimeâ has expanded in the the last four years, and none of that expansion has done anything to make you safer.
So, completely aside from the fact that I donât think it should be illegal to sell drugs, the point of this post isnât that this poor woobie drug dealer got caught, it is that:
We are all subject to a horrifying level of surveillance and
We can all be dehumanized by the state at an time because âcrimeâ is malleable and there are very likely things you have done in your life that could make you subject to the same kind of state violence that a âfucking piece of shit drug dealerâ is - and you can be subject to that same level of state violence even if you havenât done anything to âprovokeâ it.
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