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body cameras:
ive redacted a lot of details etc from the article clippings
lets start by looking at the company positioned at the center of the 'body camera' saga:
in early 2007 business was up for taser international, obligatorily connected to nasa via jack cover. in july they launched a consumer model for their taser product. they were seeking a new customer base.
two months later, there happened to be an extraordinarily absurdly viral video about tasers. an extremely cruel, violent and sadistic viral marketing ploy that in hindsight was obviously planned in advance to coincide with the launch of the consumer product.
the skull and bones reference is a curiosity but i wont dwell on what it means or how this was planned or who was in on it, suffice it to say the viral result of this incident was planned in advance.
around this time, taser began shifting in earnest from electricity weapons to cameras and cloud-based evidence storage.
their first camera was released in 2008, the evidence(.)com cloud evidence suite was launched in 2009, and by 2012 the service was maturing. the 2012-era discourse on body cameras was quite honest in framing them as a weapon for prosecutors:
by this time the shift to a 'cloud model' of policing was due regardless of which company was going to be picked to play the face. this can be placed neatly into the broader context we have covered so far.
the campaign to execute this shift began in earnest in the summer of 2014. what seemed strange then - a sudden mainstream interest in and coverage of police violence - now makes more sense.
from the same november 2014 article
police departments all over the country began to purchase body cameras and shift towards cloud-based evidence management.
indeed grants from the federal government helped to propel the adoption process forward and by 2016 the momentum had stabilized
many agencies such as in south carolina didn't even wait for external funding they just bought the cameras and waited for reimbursement.
the ruling class magnified and endlessly blasted graphic coverage of their own depraved and evil murders and then sold this as the reason to put cloud-enabled cameras on every police officer - to protect more people from being murdered by them.
they went so far as naming camera legislation after their own victims and displaying their grieving parents asking them for the cameras
the point of the transformation of course was not adding cameras, but that the cameras necessarily involved cloud storage due to the amount of data they generate
in other words: they used the victims their own victims to demand cameras, and they used the cameras to achieve moving to the cloud
at this point 'the cloud' should not be a meaningless buzzword - it is the mature computing paradigm developed over the last 50+ years to enhance automate and centrally control the delivery of violence.
just as cellphones and 3g were necessary to couple normal human beings to a networked sensor, body cameras were a necessary step in advancing that same sensor network. it is all part of the same sequence of moves.
