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 rapistās 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 āfucking piece of shit drug dealer,ā 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.
āDONāT FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES?!ā Is not a useful or actionable admonition because ācrimeā is a constructed category that makes āforgetting to fill out a form 10 years agoā āassisting your child in seeking an abortionā āhaving the wrong tattoosā āhaving a blanketā all equally good reasons to unperson you.
āDONāT FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES?!ā and āJust donāt break the law.ā 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 āa fucking piece of shit drug dealerā is why the original article is comfortable making a joke of his arrest. The contemptible nature of his crime means that itās okay to pair his face with cheese puns, and itās 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 ābaby rapistā as your criminal of choice when making your criticisms is because it doesnāt sound as righteous when you say āsheās a piece of shit abortionist, DONāT COMMIT CRIMESā or āthat fucking piece of shit was sleeping on a cardboard box, itās not hard to keep away from the cops if you just donāt break the law.ā
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 isnāt 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.
āCrimeā 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 donāt think it should be illegal to sell drugs, the point of this post isnāt 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 ācrimeā 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 āfucking piece of shit drug dealerā is - and you can be subject to that same level of state violence even if you havenāt done anything to āprovokeā it.
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