iWatch is asking you to prevent terrorist attacks

This PSA is from iWatch, the citizen surveillance program from the Los Angeles Police Department. As said in the PSA it is a kind of neighbourhood watch for the whole city. “It is a community awareness program created to educate the public about behaviors and activities that may have a connection to terrorism.”

A neighbourhood watch program can be very useful but I agree with Jim Harper’s comment on opposingviews.com:

Asking amateurs for tips about terrorism will have many wasteful and harmful results, like racial and ethnic discrimination, angry neighbors turning each other in, and—given the rarity of terrorism—lots and lots of folks just plain getting it wrong. People with expertise—even in very limited domains—can discover suspicious circumstances in their worlds almost automatically when they find things “hinky.”

Although the iWatch program is about behaviors and activities, not individuals, it will not work that way.

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Comments

I understand Harper’s comments completely, but I’d rather have a lot of investigations with positive results than ignore things that seem minorly “iffy” and wind up being disasters.

People frequently make fun of the City of Boston for going into bomb threat mode when the Aqua Teen ads were discovered, claiming that other cities have had them for weeks without incident. I think the city acted very responsibly, given the lack of knowledge about the show in the mainstream, and the placement of the ads(under bridges and by hospitals, etc.). Also, the ads in the other cities were only discovered AFTER they were discovered in Boston.

only america?