Nine people who took part in the 2011 Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver have been ordered by the B.C. Supreme Court to compensate the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia for damage to various vehicles they caused during the riot. The decision was handed down yesterday after a trial. In all, according to the CBC, the “B.C. Criminal Justice Branch laid 912 charges against 300 suspects in the wake of the riot, including 246 adults and 54 youths.”
Many of those charged were identified later by video coverage of the riots, which you think would have taught other hooligans a lesson about rioting and causing property damage.
Well, no. In a riot on Friday night in Montreal after a Francofolies concert, about 100 people “left 20 buildings around Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles vandalized — including police headquarters,” the CBC is reporting.
Two people have been arrested so far — with more to come, police said, according to the CTV Montreal News report tonight. Montreal police will review video coverage and neighbourhood surveillance camera recordings to identify those who took part in the riot and caused property damage.
In other words, some of those rioters will be paying for the damage they caused, sooner or later. And some will also face charges.
It shows the value of camera surveillance, though I know some worry about a police state taking advantage of a system like that. But if it brings some people to justice and deters others from committing crimes, why not?
But I predict that one day, crime as we know it now won’t exist anymore because every single human on the planet will have some sort of microchip or other tracking device embedded in their body, and every move everyone makes will be on record, stored away on some server readily available to police forces. Call it the material world’s version of the Akashic Records, though I don’t think it will record everyone’s thoughts. Just their movements, which will mean anyone who commits a crime will be caught in no time at all, because authorities will know exactly who was at the crime scene.
Of course, yes, there will still be the idiots who get carried away, like the hooligans in Vancouver and Montreal. But they will be apprehended very quickly.
Yes, I polished my crystal ball tonight . . .
Now, I am off to go skinny dipping.
— Jillian
Jillian Page 
The risks of abuse of those technologies far outweighs the benefits.
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What risks do you see in democratic societies like those of Canada and the United States?
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That level of surveillance, which leads to more and more centralized-government, combined with demands from the public for “protection”, can quickly morph from “nanny-state” to “police-state”. We must remember that “democracy” is really “the tyranny of the malcontents”. People wanted “change” after the disasters of the Bush years, so Obama promised “change” but he didn’t specify what kind of “changes” he was going to bring. Obama’s “change” has been a disaster, driving our country deeper into debt, and bringing more “police-state” than we could have ever imagined.
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There may be no risks in democratic societies (though what constitutes one of those is another discussion!!) but what about its risks in non-democratic ones? What about if you go on holiday from your democracy to a less-than-democracy? And what’s to stop a democracy from becoming less-than-democratic, aided by these very devices?
Laws passed for very good and laudable reasons are frequently misused and abused by later administrators. In the UK some years ago we had anti-terror legislation introduced – all well and good. More recently those laws have been used by local councils to “investigate” parents over their children’s schooling. We have Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, aimed at controlling noisy neighbours and yobbish street activity, which have subsequently been used by the over-officious to prosecute people for perfectly lawful activities.
If you’ve done nothing wrong what do you have to be afraid of? Other people, that’s what
peter
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