Here’s a fair bet: Over the last 24 hours, the intensity of the American surveillance society reached an unprecedented fever pitch in Boston. Law enforcement authorities are tracing every cellphone call made at the time of the bombings, reviewing every email or text message associated with each “person of interest” identified in the investigation, and scrutinizing every second of available closed circuit video coverage.
You’d better hope you didn’t recently Google how to make a homemade bomb or what the exact route of the Boston Marathon is, or save an oddly titled file in Dropbox or even just like the wrong video on Facebook, because someone, even now, is probably poring over that information. Events like the Boston Marathon bombings are what the surveillance state lives for.
“We will go to ends of the earth to find those responsible for this despicable crime,” said FBI special agent Richard Deslauriers at a press conference in Boston on Tuesday morning. But what he really meant was we will leave no digital stone unturned. Every one and zero will be interrogated.
We don’t yet know why the Boston Marathon was attacked on Patriots’ Day 2013 or who did it, but here’s another bet: We’ll find out. Our data trails are too incredibly rich and detailed. We are far more trackable today than we were on Sept. 11, 2001. And with each day that passes there is more data available to be crunched. Much of it is stunningly easy for law enforcement authorities to get their hands on, with or without a warrant.
Read more: The Boston bombing privacy lesson - Salon.com
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