Britain's High-Tech Riots

Social media and other emerging internet technologies have played key roles in Great Britain's devastating riots, reportedly sparked by the August 4 fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, a man alleged to have had ties to London gangs, while he was in the custody of Scotland Yard. As it has in other recent uprisings, Twitter played a role in the coordination of England's riots, but the preferred tool of Britain's young looters and arsonists was Research in Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry Messenger instant messaging service (BBM). Thirty seven percent of UK teens use BBM, a free service that makes it particularly easy to send messages to groups. BBM's proprietary encryption also makes messages more private and difficult to trace, another characteristic that made the service popular among perpetrators of England's extensive chaos, arson and looting. Some point to BBM as the primary planning tool for vandals. Some have even called it the London rioter's best weapon.

RIM issued a statement pledging to cooperate with law enforcement and regulatory officials working to squelch the riots and seek justice their aftermath, but the company hasn't said directly whether it plans to turn over chat logs or other identifying information about its subscribers to law enforcement. RIM's pledge of cooperation, though, was enough to trigger a group of hackers who call themselves "Teampoison" to post an online threat to RIM warning the company not to cooperate with police. Teampoison claims to have access to RIM's databases and said if the company turned private information over to police, they would make the names, addresses and phone numbers of RIM's employees available to rioters. It is unclear whether RIM can un-encrypt messages sent over its BBM messaging system, but the company can shut down the entire service. David Lammy, a member of Parliament from Tottenham, where the worst of the riots started, is urging RIM to do just that. Police are also uploading photos, taken by London's some 1.5 million closed circuit TV cameras, onto Flickr and asking the public to identify anyone they may recognize. A Google Group even formed in the days following the riots called "London Riots Facial Recognition;" the group's subscribers are trying to find a way to apply facial recognition technology to identify looters in photos posted on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

UK Government Discusses Blocking Internet Access

The misuse of social media to plot crime and destruction in the UK spurred UK political leaders to investigate how to shut down or limit use of social media websites and messaging services that criminals used to plan their bad acts. UK Prime Minister David Cameron wondered aloud "whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence." Some people who used these services to plan crimes are already being prosecuted. On August 11, Welsh police arrested two men on charges that they used Facebook to incite criminal activity. Some members of Parliament are pushing for the ability to block services like Twitter in the event of a major riot, and  the British government plans to meet with representatives of Facebook, Twitter and RIM to discuss how the companies can work with police to address situations where their technology is being misused to plot damage. If Britain and other western governments actually do start blocking social media to address violent uprisings, though, it would put them into a category with countries like Egypt and Tunisia, which both sought to restrict access to internet-based communication services in the face of anti-government demonstrations, and in the case of Tunisia, a non-violent uprising.

On Another Side...

Londoners have found a host of creative, helpful and even fun ways to apply these technologies, too. A website called CatchALooter, for example, lets people upload photos of looters, and the dates and locations where they were taken, to help police, governmental authorities and community members identify who they are. The site PhotoshopLooter posts photos of looters that have been doctored to make the looters look ridiculous. In one photo, hooded thieves are shown fleeing a high-end retail store, each one carrying a cat. In other photos, men with facemasks are running out of smashed-up stores desperately gripping stuffed animals, paintings of unicorns and Justin Bieber posters under their arms. A musician even started a Twitter page, @Riotcleanup, that broadcasts the times and locations where bands of broom-wielding Londoners converge to help clean up the wreckage. @Riotcleanup quickly got over 85,000 followers.

This new, catch-the-looter technological applications emerging in the aftermath of the UK riots have resulted in the coining of a collective new term: "crowdsourcing justice." Which applications will prove effective at bringing the truly guilty to justice remains to be seen in the coming weeks. What is particularly troubling, though, is the overall ethical propriety of such technical vigilante justice. How many innocent bystanders or people just trying to get home for example, will get caught in these technological traps and end up wrongly accused? We don't know. Whatever happens, we can't escape the fact that twenty first century innovations in electronic communication have taken social unrest, and its aftermath, to an entirely new and fascinating level.