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[SalmonGod]

Anyway, the good thing about the internet is that it's easy to say "HELL YEAH I'LL BLOW UP THAT DEPARTMENT STORE WITH YOU GUYS" but hard to actually put on your ski mask and head out the door.  I imagine a lot of flash crimes will naturally disperse before they start when the perps realize only five people showed up.

This is just a matter of confidence.  Enough successful events, and people won't feel so much inhibition about following through on participation.

Anyway, it does suck that flash mobs are turning into a criminal thing.  I thought they were really neat, though I guess they had already started getting boring when the more seasoned crews started following legal channels more which robbed them of all their spontaneity.  There was one at the Indianapolis Airport a while ago that I was aware of at least two weeks in advance.  I'd always thought it would be fun to participate in one of these, but after the excessive advance notice/planning/widespread public knowledge/police babysitting, it seemed less like a flash mob and more like a very mundane large scale public performance art thing.

[nenjin]

As a tool for information gathering and identifying suspects, Facebook is public and useful though. They don't need Facebook's approval to look up someone's profile and any personal information they were stupid enough to post. American employers certainly don't. Systematically going through and investigating every single person with a formal police investigation isn't utilizing the information properly. If you've got any photo evidence of people from the crime scene, you simply match faces and then launch your formal investigation on that person.

I'm not denying there are pitfalls abound, but if the police want to keep up with how fast offenders can communicate and organize, they have to start knowing how to use the same tools from a law enforcement perspective. Take a cue from the private industry. Facebook is regularly used now to supplement job applications and background checks as a way to vet potential new hires. And there isn't shit people can do about it, except be deliberate about what they put online.

In the information age, part of law enforcement's job is going to be scanning reams of information as it relates to crime. This isn't even cybercrime stuff, it's more like having a digital information officer or something.

[Nikov]

I'm thinking the same thing. Consider if twenty people mob a store but one gets caught. After confiscating the communication device they used, it would be a trivial thing to trace back who sent the "go" signal and who recieved said signal. Even without personal information on any of these persons, they do have the IP addresses assigned to the mobile devices they used at the time of the robbery. From that they can trace who those IPs were assigned to by their accounts with cell phone providers or the router logs. Then everyone in the mob has their digital fingerprints on it.

[Aqizzar]

Those would all be effective ways of catching the perpetrators after the fact, especially given the profile of the people in the cases above.  They don't strike me as the kind of people who'd realize they shouldn't use their everyday Twitter account to plan a robbery, and people who would realize that probably wouldn't do it.  And you've got the cell phone, with all contacts, if they rely on a cell-phone after leaving the house.

Comes back to the original problem though.  You can catch and prosecute people after they commit a crime, and maybe roll up most of the crew, and that's certainly a discouraging factor.  But it's still essentially impossible to prevent a flashmob-style crime from happening in the first place, without getting really lucky and catching the communique with enough time to warn the police and convince them to commit a serious presence.  Or, lock your doors.

[Pistolero]

I can't tell the difference between 20 guys using cellphones to organise a crime and 20 guys organising a crime face to face. If it can be proven that they organised this electronically, surely they are already caught?

With regard to the article, I'm very economically left, but the thing that gets me about communists is the complete refusal to acknowledge that the market affords everyone the opportunity to be the dreaded capitalist. Invest a few weeks wages, even very safely, and no one is depriving you of the product of your labour anymore, unless you work in an industry that is expanding rapidly. Invest more and you are instead profiting from others work. Are there any Marxist or other texts that deal with this?

[Nikov]

Well, I don't see a particular difference between preventing flash looting and preventing regular looting. On any random day you can have a flash looting, but only at certain times is it likely for normal looting to occur. To have the kind of police presence needed to deter a soccer riot standing around deterring flash looting would be nonsense. And to have a fraction of that presense as a token resistance is cost prohibitive. I think arresting and punishing flash looters after the fact is the best way to go, unless the crime evolves to make effective round-ups impossible. Two or three flash looting groups getting mopped up with some news coverage will deter prospective criminals from trying far more than enhanced police patrols or quiet monitoring of Twitter, neither of which seem as cost effective and a reduction of liberty.

Pistol, respectfully, let's not derail. We can always open Socialism Thread Mk. VI if need be.

[Lagslayer]

Gives a whole new meaning to the term "organized crime".

[Pistolero]

Sorry my intention wasn't to derail, it just got a couple of mentions so I thought I'd add a bit to that side of the discussion too with a question that always bothers me.

More on topic is the implicit question in my last post, how do we know this was organised electronically, and given that it was, what's the actual implication? Efficient communication makes all human activity, both positive and negative, more efficient?

[nenjin]

what's the actual implication? Efficient communication makes all human activity, both positive and negative, more efficient?

To me the implication is a crime was committed and is outstanding, and people have probably left a long trail of evidence across the internet. I will be disappointed in where all those law enforcement dollars go if the police make a lot of noise about how hard it is to track them.

[Jackrabbit]

Well, I suppose someone had to think of it eventually. Maybe one day we'll reach a point where law enforcement can effectively combat cyber-crime. Looking forward to it.

[Grakelin]

Twitter has a search faction, so just search for "Rob" + "Macy's" before you tell the press what's happening (if only you could do it quickly and conveniently on a phone or something), and bam, you have all 20 suspects.


EDIT: Why am I not a professional detective?

[Jackrabbit]

You could be a tweetective.

Sitting here, bottle of whiskey in one hand, .32 in the other, I contemplate this city and the scum that inhabit it. #DarkAndGritty

[DJ]

Gives a whole new meaning to the term "organized crime".

Now that you mention it, wouldn't this really qualify as organized crime in a court? That carries a much heavier sentence than shoplifting AFAIK, so if they nailed some of these guys thy could really make an example of them.

[GlyphGryph]

Aqizzar,

Pretty much all crimes are solved after the fact, period. Police have always been pretty terrible at interrupting and stopping crimes in progress, and thats why its pretty much always been their job to find an arrest those responsible after the fact. This really doesn't seem particularly different (except that I suspect, as others do, that it might be easier to catch people).

[Chaoswizkid]

Sitting here, bottle of whiskey in one hand, .32 in the other, I contemplate this city and the scum that inhabit it. #DarkAndGritty

The camera pans away from the screen, briefly illuminating the room and the desk but fades too quickly to black to make out anything. The phrase "Coming, Fall 2012" appears before also fading to black.