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\F0\CTECHNOLOGY, CRIME, AND CIVIL LIBERTIES
\J At any given level of enforcement technology, the practices
of the law enforcement agencies represent a compromise among several
considerations: suppression of activities regarded as undesirable,
costs, the convenience of the authorities, and civil liberties (i.e.
the right of citizens not to have his privacy invaded or even worse
to be wrongfully punished). The matter is further complicated by the
fact that what activities are so undesirable as to be prevented by
legal means depends on one's point of view which is further
influenced by one's position in society.
It is not the purpose of this essay to resolve all these
problems, but merely to point out how technology can make the
problems easier to solve. In the main, we shall be interested in
ways in which behavior that is universally agreed to be criminal can
be prevented while the civil liberties can be increased.\.
1. Gadgets.
2. Reducing motivation for crime.
3. Civil rights.
4. Institutions.
5. Kinds of crime.
Gadgets
Crimes
\J 1. Murder. The use of guns for crime could be reduced as
follows:
1.1. Register guns as often proposed.
1.2. Tag bullets and guns with radioactive isotopes. If each
box of bullets is tagged with 30 isotopes out of 30 pairs of isotopes
(one from each pair), then if a bullet is found in someone, it can be
determined who bought the box of bullets provided sales of bullets
are registered. Of course, illegal bullets could be manufactured,
but criminals do not use a uniform kind of gun, and posession of
untagged bullets would be a crime. Likewise, guns barrels should be
rifled or otherwise scored and the scoring registered when the gun is
manufactured so that if a fired bullet is found, the registered owner
of the gun can be determined.
The government should obtain the co-operation of the bullet
manufacturers and put the marking system into effect without notice
so that the unmarked bullets would be flushed out of the system
before too many criminals noticed.
2. Theft.
2.1. Eliminate money. Paying by check has practically
eliminated the payroll robbery which used to be the most lucrative
and easy kind of robbery. The universal use of credit cards with
photographs of the owner and credit checking terminals would make the
theft of cash into a minor problem.
A robber will have to demand that his victim transfer
$500 to account number 558 30 4793.
2.2. If cash is completely eliminated, then even private
financial transactions have to be recorded and fencing of stolen
goods can be detected.
2.3. Extend property registration like that required for
automobiles to the kinds of expensive goods that are commonly stolen
such as TVs, hi-fis, cameras, expensive musical instruments. It would
then be illegal to posess these items or repair them without proper
papers. Whether the paper work can be handled without too much
annoyance is doubtful until home computer terminals are available.
3. Other violence.
3.1. Hitch-hiking should be made safe both for the
hitch-hiker and the person who picks him up. This could be done if
the transaction was recorded in some way. If the car automatically
photographed its passengers and transmitted the image for storage,
then if either person came to a bad end, the presence of the
hitch-hiker in the car would be discovered. (Even without this I
think hitchhiking should be encouraged as part of a more friendly
society. Anyone who wants to clobber a hitchhiker or a driver can do
so without a delay long enough to discourage him, and therefore it is
unlikely that an increase in hitchhiking would lead to an increase in
crime related to hitchhiking except perhaps that caused by mutual
irritation by the driver and his passenger.
3.2. The goal is that anyone, child or woman should be able
to go anywhere at any time with a high degree of safety from
molestation. This could be accomplished by having the person carry a
trackable device and also having cameras record people crossing
boundaries. Then if something happened to someone, it would be
discoverable who was in the area at the time.
In this, we have to take into account the fact that crime is
a rare event. Thus, the records taken are not inspected by humans
unless a crime has occurred. Further safeguards are required to
protect people against surveillance, namely, if a person is
identified in photo that is looked at, then he gets to know about it,
and gets to know what investigation it was part of.
4. Automobiles
The two major sources of conflict between ordinary citizens
and the law are automobiles and taxes. Here are some ideas for reducing
the conflict:
4.1. The ultimate solution is computer driven cars discussed
in another chapter of this book.
4.2. A major source of injustice and complaint is the erratic
nature of punishment of traffic infractions. People see others getting
away with it and whether one is caught is a random variable with
high variance. Also the punishments are more severe than they would
have to be if the probability of being caught were higher.
Suppose that driver's licenses have the form of machine-readable
credit cards, that the car will go only if a license is in a slot
in the car, and suppose that a transponder in the car gives the
license of the car and of the driver when interrogated. Moreover, the
speedometer of the car is recorded also, and finally the recording takes
place in the driven car as well as in the police car. The numbers of
the police car and its driver are recorded as well as the readings of
the speedometer of the the police car and the reading of its radar.
Thus an objective record of the event is available to both parties.
Police cars carry television cameras and video tape loops. When a
policeman sees an infraction he causes the video tape loop to be copied
onto a stored video tape along with relevant information such as the
speedometer reading of the police car and the automobile and drivers
license of the car he is following. He can also warn the driver if
car-to-car communication is provided, but he doesn't have to stop it.
Some events can be recorded by roadside cameras also.
This will vastly increase the productivity of the traffic police
and can also increase the level of evidence required to secure conviction.
It will no longer be the unsupported word of the policeman against
that of the motorist. If a tendency to gimmick the hardware is suspected
the hardware can be audited by civil rights organisations. Since the
probability of detection of infractions is increased, much more use can
be made of warnings, and fines can be reduced.
A means of car-to-car communication will also aid in traffic direction,
requests for directions, and in giving warnings.\.
Civil rights
\J How much civil rights should people have? This question has
been much debated as civil rights have extended. The traditional way
civil rights have been extended is to pretend that the rights have
always existed and that a violation is being detected. This obscures
the truth of the matter. Namely, individuals in a society should
have all the civil rights society can afford, and these rights should
be extended as time goes on. Here are some proposals to that end:
1. The arrest of a person accused of a crime should be very
rare even for murder. As the world becomes more settled and the
technology improves, the feasibility of running away declines.
Therefore, the accused can be counted on in most cases to be
available for his trial. Exceptions might be: the defendant is
accused of attempting to injure someone and might still do it if he
were free; he is accused of failing to appear for trial.
2. If a person is arrested, the jail should be separate from
prisons holding convicted persons. In fact, the jail should be a hotel
with good services including entertainment in keeping with the idea
that the person is presumed innocent until convicted. The custodial
agency should be independent of the police or the prosecutor, and
these agencies should have no access to the prisoner if he doesn't
want to see them. The prisoner should have full rights of private
communication with anyone including the right to use ciphers. Any
exception should be based on a court order. It is not clear that our
society can afford this reform yet since the police depend on
control of prisoners for much of their evidence. On balance, I think
we can afford it (certainly once the technologies proposed in this
chapter become available), and in any case it should be a goal
to be implemented as soon as alternate means of evidence collection
become available so that confessions and plea-copping can be
dispensed with.
3. Every institution including a prison develops a tradition.
In the case of a prison, this tradition is usually one of cynicism,
despair, and individual selfishness. Attempts by reformers to make
other attitudes dominant sometimes have success in new institutions
with selected inmates and young, enthusiastic personnel, but eventually
cynicism among the inmates and personnel re-establishes itself and is
almost impossible to overcome. This effect can be mitigated by
running prisons as batch processing rather than continuous institutions.
The idea is that a group of prisoners who will be released at about the
same time should be kept together and isolated from others. The staff
will attempt to establish a good tradition in this group. No prisoners
whose terms overlap the release date of the group will be put in it.
When the group is released, the facility becomes available for a new
batch. This calls form numerous small prisons rather than a few large
ones. Perhaps a number of states could share facilities in order to
put the prisoners into homogeneous groupings.
4. A counterpart of making crime more difficult is making going
straight easier. Once the country can afford to give each person a
base income independently of his working, people who cannot bring
themselves to work will have an alternative to crime. Under present
circumstances, it might pay to pension released criminals at a rate
of pay less than it costs to keep them in prison. If this were done
for a those who have spent five years in prison, there would be little
temptation to commit a crime in order to get a pension.
In general, a major object in improving the technology of
crime prevention and detection is to be able to afford more civil
rights.
Part of the worry about abuse of police communication
systems and future surveillance systems can be relieved by
arranging for these systems to be audited by civil rights
organisations. First, civil rights organisations should have copies
of the programs and the right to verify that the programs they
have are the ones actually being used. Second, all traffic on
the communication net including all inquiries made should be
dumped on tape drives in custody of the civil rights organisations.
This must include the authorization for each inquiry. The civil
rights organisation has the right to make statistical studies
with the data and the right to look at particular data when a
question of abuse of the system arises.
Another possibility is the wired cop. A policeman on duty
is required to carry a miniature sound recorder that records all
sounds in his presence. When technology permits, vision can be
added. The record will be subpoenaable by either side in a case.
Having such a record will permit higher standards of proof, but
one of its main benefits will be to assure police that crimes
they see will be prosecutable.
This will reduce their desire to make the arrest process a punishment
in itself.
Another immediately feasible improvement is to require
the police to accept checks for bail. The courts are in a better
position to resent bad checks than any other institution in our
society. Making people spend a night in jail because they don't
have cash for bail is part of making arrest a punishment.\.