YouTube - How to prepare for civil Unrest
The classic imperitive of those predicting the impending police state is a call for citizens to acquire guns. To stock pile ammunition, water, dried food, and prepare to take up arms to defend your life and property.
YouTube - How to prepare for civil Unrest is a limp wristed example. (not recommending watching it, but if you must...)
I favor my right to own arms and think any reasonable person should have put some effort into emergency preparedness, whether from natural disater or civil unrest.
But I wonder if guns will be enough in the future some imagine. The inevitable outcome of dueling it out against the police, SWAT or some paramilitary group would almost certainly mean death...and probably little impact in the hearts and minds of other citizens.
The "offical" story would be told through the increasingly conglomerated and well sanitized media. Memories of Waco, TX would be invoked. You and your god would know you made a nobel stand. But that's about the end of it.
It has often surpised me that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanisan during this hyper-connected internet era have not produced some game changing privately submitted bit of video. Something that never would have made it past the media censorship or at least pushed the envelope.
Maybe it's there. Maybe I havent been paying attention. Maybe YouTube and its ilk are just so full of noise it wouldnt matter, or be credible, or would be taking down promptly.
We may have an option short of the last resort of taking up arms that the doomsayers havent quite got figured out.
How about Google Civil Disobedience as the next beta feature?
Many police cruisers have had video cameras for years. Following the tradition of the UK, the US is investing heavily in large scale surveilence systems in every major city. Good, or bad, one thing about these systems is that they are closed. They are not accessible by the public. The privacy arguments dont help here. It's one thing to have a duly authorized governement actor monitoring citizen activities and another to know anyone could be watching. Which is worse?
What if we all had our own google streetview cars? What if we had our homes wired with our own cameras? Millions of video capture capable PDAs and iPhones are out there.
What if these devices could regularly upload their content to a LimeWire-like distributed network of other citizens computers. Not one copy to one server, but to many private machines.
The owners of those private machines wouldnt be able to access the video. Some electronic equivalent of the "open this letter if something ever happens to me" would seal it from them.
It would remain sealed and private until either you released it, or perhaps didnt respond to some regular email tickle; "are you okay".
When things were okay, you could dispose of the video, use it for your next video scrapbook, or you might just set it to evaporate if nothing interesting happens.
Maybe you could set a group of friends who would be able to review your feeds before it went public?
The choice to make a last stand against tyranny is a deeply personal one I hope nobody has to face. Whether you take up arms or submit to their dominion, I think anything that can be done to increase the odds that someone will know what really happened is powerful.
So perhaps those out shopping for a new AR-15 will think about buying webcams and working out some ways to distribute feeds to trusted friends and patriots.
