Anarchy in the UK...and Philadelphia? Flash Mobs, Double-Edged Technology, and State Authority

During the early months of the Arab Spring phenomenon, there was much discussion of the role that technology played in undermining the capacity of authoritarian regimes to suppress political dissent.  Social media platforms and ubiquitous smart phones (or at least semi-smart phones) facilitated rapid assembly, rapid spread of news, and video and photographic documentation of abuses committed by security services (which could then be rapidly spread as well).   The same technologies that gave us flash mobs performing line dances in Grand Central Station, it turned out, could be used to extraordinary political effect.  Technology, alas, is neutral as to the uses to which it is put.  And now in the UK we are reminded of this quite forcefully, as the utility of social media and telecommunications for facilitating the rapid assembly of crowds again is demonstrated, this time for purposes of flat-out criminality.  I'll assume readers are familiar with the details of the riots in question, and of course it is not an entirely novel development that such circumstances  can be facilitated by communications technology.  But the UK riots are a nice illustration of how, as those technologies continue to improve, so too does the capacity of anyone to use them to mobilize rapidly and hence with less of an opportunity for the state to respond, whether in order to protest a dictator or to steal a bunch of clothes and electronics.  But the story gets even more interesting once one looks a bit further into it. First, not all flash-mob-facilitating technology is alike.  It seems that much of the UK organizing has been done not via Facebook or the like, but rather through instant messaging via Blackberry.  According to this interesting account, this presents a serious difficulty for police that might wish to monitor such communications either in hopes of getting real-time intelligence or at least to support after-the-fact prosecutions.  The messages are not publicly-posted but rather are distributed to particular addressees or groups of addressees, and at least acording to that commentator, British law does not permit the police to seek Blackberry's assistance to conduct any sort of generalized searching for key terms but must, instead, obtain target-specific court orders to get a particular person's logs. Second, there is an intersection here with cybersecurity and vigilantism, quite similar to what was seen when hacker groups assaulted various financial services companies for their decision to take steps against Wikileaks last year.  This time, it is Blackberry that is under threat.  According to this story, Blackberry's homepage has already been defaced by a hacker collective in response to Blackberry's decision to cooperate with the very UK laws I just described (regarding the provision of subscriber data in response to individualized court orders).  The group claiming responsibility has threatened to go much further, including the posting of personal information about Blackberry employees.  Third, we also are seeing public-spirited and admirable uses of social media in response to all this, specifically to mobilize volunteers for clean-up efforts: 

Earlier, Mr Cameron said: "We have seen the worst of Britain, but I also believe we have seen some of the best of Britain - the million people who have signed up on Facebook to support the police, coming together in the clean-up operations.

One can bet, too, that over the months ahead cell-phone photographs and videos (not to mention the UK's ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras in public places) will also prove to be important in identifying and making cases against riot participants. Finally, lest you think that criminal exploitation of these technologies is somehow a purely British phenomenon, take note of Philadelphia's decision to impose a youth curfew this Friday night in response to a disturbing set of  violent flash mob attacks in that city:

"What is making this unique today is the social media aspect," Everett Gillison, Philadelphia's deputy mayor for public safety, told the Associated Press news agency. "They can communicate and congregate at a moment's notice," he added.

So there we have it: an increasingly-familiar but also increasingly-important story of the impact of technological innovation on social order, state authority, volunteerism, and privacy.  The innovation cuts in several directions simultaneously.  It empowers the state in certain ways, the individual--and mobs--in others.