When Al Sharpton, Ann Coulter and the president of the United States agree on anything, my immediate, visceral reaction is extreme skepticism. In this case, the known facts support that skepticism.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that widespread use of police body cameras would reduce the incidence or severity of unjustified police violence. We’ve already seen the results of numerous technology “solutions” to that problem.

The introduction of mace and tasers to police weapons inventories encouraged a hair-trigger attitude toward encounters with “suspects” (“suspect” being law-enforcement-ese for “anyone who isn’t a cop”). Their supposed non-lethality made it safer to substitute violent action for peaceful talk.

The introduction of military weaponry and vehicles to policing hasn’t produced de-escalation either. Quite the opposite, in fact — now we get to watch small-town police departments stage frequent re-enactments of the Nazi occupation of Paris in towns across America.

And police car “dash cams?” That’s obviously the most direct comparison. But the dash cam always seems to malfunction, or the police department mysteriously loses its output, when a credible claim of abusive police behavior arises.

On the other hand, it’s absolutely certain that widespread use of police body cameras would increase the scope and efficacy of an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state.

The White House proposal calls for an initial rollout of 50,000 cameras. Does anyone doubt that the output of those cameras would be kept, copied, cross-referenced and analyzed against law enforcement databases (including but not limited to facial recognition databases) on a continuing basis?

Assuming a camera attaches to a particular officer with an eight hour shift (rather than being passed around at shift changes for 24-hour use), that’s 400,000 hours per day of random warrantless searches to be continuously mined for probable cause to investigate and arrest people. Even George Orwell didn’t go so far as to have 1984‘s Thought Police carry portable cameras everywhere they went!

Video technology is certainly part of the solution to police violence, but that solution should remain in the hands of regular people, not the state. More and more of us every day come into possession of the ability to record video on the spot, while instantly porting it to Internet storage so that it can’t be destroyed at the scene or tampered with after the fact. Cops need to be on cameras they don’t control.

But part of the solution is still just part of the solution. Even when cameras catch violent, abusive, criminal cops in action — as, for example, when business security cameras filmed Fullerton, California police officers Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli beating homeless man Kelly Thomas to death in 2011 — it’s incredibly hard to get prosecutions and even harder to get convictions.

Ubiquitous video monitoring of state actors by regular people is a start. But the only real way to guarantee an end to police violence is to bring an end to state “law enforcement” — in fact, to the state itself.

O desenvolvimento mais recente nesse caso, enquanto escrevo esta coluna — e possivelmente não será a notícia mais recente após sua publicação — é a “suspensão” da Rússia do G-8. Enquanto opiniões conflitantes recheiam as análises políticas, eu gostaria de oferecer a explicação mais simples e plausível para o que vemos: os oligarcas, tanto americanos quanto russos, sonham com o retorno da Guerra Fria.

A maioria das pessoas comuns não quer isso, evidentemente. Nós, que temos mais de 40 anos, lembramos como era viver sob constante ameaça de aniquilação nuclear caso o equilíbrio entre as duas “superpotências” fosse quebrado.

Porém, para a oligarquia americana — mais conhecida como “complexo industrial-militar” — que veio a dominar a economia e o meio político americano logo após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, não há tanto dinheiro ou poder na posição de “única superpotência mundial”.

Eles precisam de uma contrapartida a seu poder. Problemas menores como o terrorismo não são tão lucrativos. O dinheiro está nas armas nucleares e em aeronaves de ponta — equipamentos usados para lutar com inimigos que estejam, ao menos em tese, em paridade de poder militar. E, convenhamos, dizer que o “Irã é uma ameaça militar” é risível enquanto justificativa para esses projetos.

A oligarquia americana precisa de um grande inimigo para justificar os gastos de um trilhão de dólares anuais extraídos dos pagadores de impostos americanos (além dos lucros com vendas de armas para o exterior). Um inimigo com uma população grande, uma base industrial e uma posição de comando em sua região. Um inimigo conhecido, ao menos desde o século passado, por suas ambiões expansionistas e pela dificuldade de se vencer em conflito armado.

Ou seja, a olgarquia americana precisa da Rússia.

E de que precisa Vladimir Putin? Bom, ele necessita de uma desculpa para assumir novamente o papel de vilão. Como os Estados Unidos, a Rússia e seus satélites, suseranias e aliados tendem a se solidificar num poderoso bloco autoritário quando enfrentam uma ameaça externa, mas que começam a se fragmentar quando há paz. Como a oligarquia americana, a russa (que é formada pelas mesmas figuras da época da União Soviética, ou por seus herdeiros) precisa de uma ameaça externa para manter aberto o seu canal de dinheiro fácil.

O melhor inimigo de todos os tempos, os nazistas, sumiu após 1945 (apesar dos esforços do Russia Today para criar novos em Kiev). Então é preciso utilizar o segundo melhor inimigo: os Estados Unidos.

É como a história de Zé Grandão e do Coelho Quincas, só que com dois Zé Grandões, que imploram um ao outro para não serem jogados no caminho dos espinhos, mas desejam secretamente acabar lá. Todo mundo ganha! Bom, pelo menos os dois grupos de oligarcas ganham. O resto de nós, nem tanto.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.

While headline writers prefer nice, neat organizational attributions (Wikileaks, Anonymous, what have you) with discrete motivations and simple guiding principles to explain the situation, there’s more going on here than meets the mainstream media’s jaundiced eye. They’re missing the forest for the trees. This conflict ultimately resolves down to two belligerent parties: The state on one side, everyone else on the other. And the state is losing.

To be honest, it looked dicey there for awhile: In the final decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, governments worldwide developed surveillance capabilities far beyond anything Orwell imagined in 1984.

All Winston Smith had to worry about were telescreens on the walls, bugs in the bushes and the usual human informers. In the real world, state surveillance has developed along less visible, but more pernicious, lines: Satellite photography. Traffic cameras. Financial transaction monitoring. RFID tracking. Sifting of information gathered from huge databases. Heck, even your cell phone can betray your location and movements not just when you’re using it, but so long as it has battery power.

But what Orwell didn’t anticipate, another author did. The global political class, like it or not (and they don’t, not one bit), is faced with the inverse transparency David Brin predicted in 1998’s The Transparent Society. There are key asymmetries at work which yield huge advantages to the state’s opponents.

Yes, states possess powerful surveillance capabilities, but those capabilities are centrally and hierarchically directed, and accessible only through relatively small and somewhat identifiable forces of operators. And they attempt to seek out and surveill what amount to straw-colored needles in a haystack of seven billion humans.

The world’s networked resistance movements are those needles. It’s much easier for the needle to see and identify the guy with the pitchfork than it is for the guy with the pitchfork to see and identify the needle. There are a lot more needles than there are guys with pitchforks. And the needles have access to their own set of tools — tools which are cheap, easy to use, and available to nearly anyone (including those aforementioned operators!) who might decide, at any time and for any reason, to become a needle.

Two conditions must obtain for the state to maintain its supremacy over the populace.

One is that the political class must know what the populace is up to.

The other is that the populace must NOT know what the political class is up to.

While the state has enjoyed considerable success in its attempts to maintain the first condition, maintaining the second has become for all practical purposes impossible, short of completely crashing civilization as we know it.

Some politicians have suggested ramping up to such last-ditch measures (e.g. former US Senator Joe Lieberman’s “Internet Kill Switch” proposal), but there’s a nasty catch. The two sets of tools involved rely on the same underlying web (pun intended) of technology. To kill one is to kill, or at least substantially cripple, the other. Not immediately, perhaps, but over any significant timeframe.

Any temporary reprieve such measures might produce would ultimately result in the opposite of the desired response. You can’t get between LulzSec and its targets without also getting between the masses and their porn, their funny pictures of cats, their Facebook friends, their stock portfolios. And you don’t do that. Not if you want to live for more than another week or so, anyway.

Here is the new reality: The activities of the political class are now, and from here on out shall remain, under a public magnifying glass. The nation-state as we know it cannot long survive such close and constant examination. We are about to move on to something else.