Crowdsourcing the Law

Remember that scene in Fahrenheit 451 when Montag is on the run, and the announcer on television talks to his “friends” (in Bradbury’s future, television has friended the entire audience), and the announcer tells the friends to go outside and look for the fugitive?

In the François Truffaut film, this scene was particularly chilling, with whole streets of zombielike couch potatoes stepping outside onto their perfectly manicured lawns to look for the man whose crime was reading Charles Dickens.

Now the State Department is trying to bring that scene to reality.

Our friends at Foggy Bottom have created the Tag Challenge, in which citizens will be rewarded with thousands of dollars for finding “fugitives” in certain cities.  The State Department will provide a mugshot and a general location, and citizen entrepreneurs the rest.

Will one of the bad guys be named Montag?  I hope so.

The manhunters will have to create ad hoc organized groups in order to search for the fugitives, and they’ll have only twelve hours to do it.

This follows DARPA’s balloon challenge, in which teams were encouraged to report the locations of ten red weather balloons scattered across the United States.  (This challenge was won by a team from MIT, some of whom are now employed in Afghanistan using similar methods to locate terrorists.)

All this is clever, actually.  They’re trying to crowdsource intelligence gathering, which is cheaper than sending up satellites or training and placing agents.  They’re letting human greed work for them.  Plus, they’re not employing Bradbury’s couch potatoes, but people who are smart, ambitious, and wired— exactly the sort of people they’re trying to recruit anyway.

Other countries have been doing this stuff for years.   China has legions of highly organized hackers doing their bidding, and Russia has used freelance hackers to attack, among other places, Estonia and Georgia.

There is something diabolically simple about dandling a cash reward out the window, and saying “We’ll give $50,000 to the first person or team who can provide the text of the meeting between the foreign minister of Lower Slobbovia and the president of Trashcanistan.”  And then they give $25,000 to the second person, because the first person might have just forged the whole document.

It’s certainly cheaper than maintaining a massive, expensive brick-and-mortar intelligence agencies like CIA.

And of course there’s danger of blowback.  Once you’ve created a highly intelligent, highly deniable, mercenary Internet cannibal swarm— your very own private Anonymous— who’s to say it won’t turn on you if someone offers it a suitable reward?

And who’s to say that— as in the Bradbury novel— it won’t be used to punish dissent?

Now what the State Department actually needs here is to cast a wider net .  Jewel thieves being present in five cities for twelve hours will attract only a certain class of competitor, but what will attract the rest is a story.  A story that features intelligence gathering, steganography, making and breaking codes and ciphers, covert actions in far-off locations, and a big party at the end so that the players can be recruited.

What the State Department needs is an ARG like those created by Dagmar in This Is Not a Game.

In short, the State Department needs me.

You can find me wearing a porkpie hat, standing by the public phones at the bus station, and carrying a late edition of the day’s newspaper.  Ask me if I’m the one who wanted the double-shot vanilla latte.  I’ll say I wanted the cappucino.  And we’ll go on from there.