What’s
Wrong Today:

The
hive communicates about everything, sometimes it communicates about real and important
things. They snap digital photos with smart phones and cameras that are better and
easier to use than only a few years ago. In fact, compare 1993’s gadgets with
2013’s:

In 1997, Scott Adams, the creator of
Dilbert, predicted that all crimes would become
solvable because video surveillance and other technology would make it
nearly impossible to get away with much that was illegal. And now, 16 years later, the Boston bombers were
spotted on several security videos, marking the point at which the public learned
how ubiquitous video recording is in a major US city. The FBI asked the public
for help in finding the bombers. Twitter helped spread the word. They were
caught in less than a week.

We have
built a large post-9/11 domestic security apparatus. It is based on massive
crunching of big data. We know that the government is probably recording every
phone call, email, and text of every American citizen. We are told that the
information is being used to fight terrorism. But we also know that it won’t
stop there.


In 10 years, the government will always know where your car is, the same way
they can track your mobile phone today. Taxis will only take credit cards. Buses
and trains will require you to swipe an ID. If you travel, the government will
know where you went and how you got there.

So,
along with help finding bad guys, there could be some very real threats to our
other freedoms:

“We need to suspend temporarily your rights to protest,
privacy, and trial by jury.”
“Why?”
“To protect
you from terrorists.”
“Why do I need to be protected from
terrorists?”
“Because they hate you for your freedom.”

What protects us from the
slippery slope of abusive government acting ostensibly for our protection?

More Information. Information in the
sunshine, information that wants to be free:

Today, the
biggest stories break online first and then cross over to the mainstream media.
Maybe video surveillance and the recording of texts and email have a role to in
our new security. 

The Wrongologist is a citizen of
Blogostan, a pundit with portfolio who does not yet use Twitter, but who sees more
value than harm in democratizing the reporting of news.

Bob Lefsetz
says, “Twitter is a news service.”

The
dirty little secret of the mainstream media is its limited resources. With weak
financials and ever fewer talented people working for them, the MSM usually can
only report what is pitched to them. They are a virtual megaphone of press
releases and spin (see Meet the Press, The News Hour and all the rest). Old
time pols and publicists pitch in prime time, ideas that most of us have
already made up our minds about, usually along with one big issue (like Benghazi)
or a disaster that everyone’s anointed as important for the lead. From Lefsetz:

The
MSM think of themselves as gatekeepers with a corner on the market for
journalistic integrity that is lacking in Blogostan.

But
there are no gates, they were torn down years ago when the Internet became
ubiquitous and we all got broadband.

Crowdsourcing
works for investigative news as well. Look
at Cleveland and Ariel Castro: We now have reporters tweeting on every
street corner, in every home, nothing goes unreported, un-commented upon, un-experienced.

No
one is interested in all of it, but if we get interested, there is a permanent
record in the cloud, a trail of information that we can drill into, unpack and decipher.
Instead of a reporter whose editors have a corporate agenda calling the usual
suspects to spin a story, we’ve got citizens with very limited skin in the game
trying to call it as they see it.


Democracy in 140 characters. If you want more than
140 characters, you know how and where to get that, but the public is now in
charge of the story.

You
go to the people to learn what went on: In Syria, in Cleveland, in Bangladesh.
Everywhere but DC.


And this is good. Because the more facts, the
better.