Marking Assets, Marking Enemies

Reading Balloon Juice, quoting the Belgravia Dispatch:

"...Operationally, it’s largely no-brainer fare what went wrong, as various military experts have opined ad nauseam. Why was the intelligence about the ‘activists’ on board so sub-par, to include presuming a more docile reaction to airborne commandos crashing the party at an ignoble pre-dawn hour? What of the somewhat surreal tidbit about paintball rifles, as the FT reports typically 'used to bruise and mark suspects for later arrest,' as if either of these crowd-dispersal techniques on a sea-borne vessel make any sense whatsoever?..."

(emphasis mine)

Got me to wondering about this technique, so I looked it up and found:

"Police declared the protest an unlawful assembly at 6:05 p.m. after demonstrators clashed with riot police at the corner of Ontario Street and Valois Avenue. Protestors threw paint bombs and food at officers with riot shields and shot fireworks at those on horseback. Riot police responded by shooting offenders with a paintball gun in an attempt to mark them for future arrest."

Ain't that rich?

How soon, then, until the police and the milice start firing tracking devices into crowds of protesters? Or do they already do that?

Not quite yet, but we're getting there.

First, you soften the public up, get the taxpayers and subjects used to tracking systems:

"...In Madison, Wisconsin, where law enforcement agents used GPS to track someone suspected of violating a restraining order without first getting a warrant, it's very, very real. Unfortunately, according to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, we should let go of the expectation that police need permission to track our movements.

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals held in State of Wisconsin v. Sveum that the use of a GPS device was not a "search or seizure" and didn't fall under the Fourth Amendment. The consequence of this reasoning is that the police are free to track individuals' vehicular movements wherever they go and without any approval by a court. This is true even though tracking someone's movements can give a detailed picture of someone's personal associations—they can be tracked to churches, bars, protests or their doctor's office...."

And you get them, as employees, used to constant surveillance (all in the name of "productivity"):

"Businesses large and small all have valuable assets needing protection, whether those assets be vehicles, heavy machinery, freight, tools, appliances and more. Before the era of technology, many of businesses had to rely on security guards to watch over an entire facility, and hope staff members were not stealing from the company. Now, monitoring technology has became so affordable it doesn't make sense not to utilize either video surveillance equipment or GPS trackers to watch over vehicles, people and other valuable company assets."

(emphasis mine)

"....people and other valuable company assets," eh?

Cat, meet the opening in the bag. And let's have no illusions that Uncle has a kinder view of subject-taxpayers...