Horsemen of London’s Apocalypse?

I don’t think the thugs who broke and burnt down parts of London saw Woody Allen’s Manhattan where he says “a satirical piece in the (New York) Times is one thing, but bricks get right to the point”. In the two weeks since London burned, enough has been written and said about the causes and ramifications in Indian newspapers and on TV studios. What is yet to be discussed, but has the most serious ramifications, is the part technology played in these riots, and the stupid conclusions that Luddite politicians like British Prime Minister David Cameron are coming to.

The rioters were organising, using the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service available on their BlackBerries. Blackberries, for all the talk of poverty and depravation, being the most favored smartphones of British teenagers, allowed the rioters to text each other to organise themselves and spread information about where the next hit was going to be. If they did this on a public-access social network like Twitter or Facebook, the police would have been able to track and stop them. But BBM is personal, and police in the UK don’t have rights to track them real-time. After the riots though, there are rumors that Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of Blackberry, is giving police access to private messages of its users, so that they can track and arrest the looters. The Indian Home Ministry, which held RIM to ransom last year to get access to it’s servers, must be having the last laugh.

The British police are also using technology to catch the rioters. They are using facial recognition technologies, tracking BBM messages, and are trawling social networks and thousands of hours of CCTV footage to bring the looters to book. Even people who (probably jokingly) incited violence on Facebook are being prosecuted. Police are actually using Twitter very judiciously. During the riots, they used it to dispel rumours, and after the riots they are posting photos and details of looters to get information through crowd-sourcing.

Even the layman on the street put technology to good use. During the rioting, people used social networking to stop rumours. Sitting in India, as someone who lived for a time in those parts, I was able to lead people to safety away from looting, through Twitter. Groups have been organised on social networking sites to organise clean-ups and show people that the British spirit is still alive. Whip rounds have been organised online to help victims who got famous through YouTube videos. And normal people are trawling online videos and social sites to help the police identify the rioters.

The only people who seem to be out of touch with the man on the street and the technologies they use, are sadly, as in India, the politicians. The British Prime Minister wants to cut off social networking sites during such incidents. This is one of the worst ideas to have come out of a politician in the Western hemisphere in a long time. Cutting them off would be akin to cutting off water for a whole city because some people are misusing their supply. And the result would simply be this: the rioters will just find new ways to communicate, and the general population will be deprived of genuine means to communicate. If the Prime Minister of a developed country comes up with such schemes, we can only imagine what our famously tech-illiterate politicos could come up with. It is time everyone understood that technology is neutral. Don’t blame it.

The writer is a tech geek

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