Social media and social disorder

[Robert_S]

The police can infiltrate a criminal group, get their Blackberry messages and stop crimes/make busts more effectively with the advanced notice of where and what they will be doing.

[Thinking Aloud]

Any effort to curtail electronic "group" gatherings would by definition cover places like this...

[Atheist-Lite]

Any effort to curtail electronic "group" gatherings would by definition cover places like this...

...the loss to culture is beyond estimentation.

[pcCoder]

The police can infiltrate a criminal group, get their Blackberry messages and stop crimes/make busts more effectively with the advanced notice of where and what they will be doing.

An advanced criminal group could perhaps use encryption and some sort of trust based relationship. Each user could have their public/private pair and perhaps through key signing establish who to trust, with the final decision made by the sender of a message to encrypt to a specific key and optionally any keys signed by him/herself and maybe other trusted keys. When a bust happens, reduce the trust down to the ones known/trusted directly. Of course I imaging a group smart enough to try that would be smart enough not to do it.

[Robert_S]

The police can infiltrate a criminal group, get their Blackberry messages and stop crimes/make busts more effectively with the advanced notice of where and what they will be doing.

An advanced criminal group could perhaps use encryption and some sort of trust based relationship. Each user could have their public/private pair and perhaps through key signing establish who to trust, with the final decision made by the sender of a message to encrypt to a specific key and optionally any keys signed by him/herself and maybe other trusted keys. When a bust happens, reduce the trust down to the ones known/trusted directly. Of course I imaging a group smart enough to try that would be smart enough not to do it.

I was thinking along the lines of mass disorder. I did see where some people used the Blackberries to defend their neighborhoods.

In any case, is strikes me that trying to outlaw communication tech will just make the outlaws find ways around the laws while putting the rest of us at a disadvantage.

[Hermit]

our notions of free speech and expression very much come from a bygone era when it might well be OK to stand and rant and call a bunch of similarly minded fringe loonies (or rioters) from Hyde Park corner and get little result, whereas with interlocking overlapping text groups you can very quickly get a 'swarm'. The technology does make a difference.

I think you may have paid insufficient attention to Apophenia's post.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Let's face it, they have the technology (have had for at least a decade) to completely block mobile phone signals inside prisons except for 999 calls - yet they don't use it, despite the huge problem of drugs inside prisons and the fact that mobile phones are used to arrange drops - a quick text to say, "I am in the yard, toss the package over the wall now."

Mobile phones are banned inside prisons yet they still won't use this technology! What fucking chance of it being used anywhere else? Fuck all!