Snitch phone in WV

| March 5, 2012

The West Virginia Department of Homeland Security, in an obvious attempt to heighten Zero Ponsdorf’s anxiety levels, has launched their smart phone app, for those pitifully few of us who use our phones here for anything other than phone calls according to The Danger Room;

I downloaded it onto my phone. The interface is simple. After informing you that you should dial 911 for an actual emergency and asking if you want to submit your geolocation information, the app is fundamentally a camera function. You can annotate the image you capture with date and location (if you didn’t enable the auto-geolocation function); additional details like a “Subject’s” name, gender, eye color, “hair style” and more; and vehicle information if applicable. And you can submit your own information, allowing the authorities to contact you, or choose to submit it anonymously.

Once you click the green “Submit Report” bar, the picture you’ve snapped and the information you’ve recorded goes to the West Virginia Intelligence Fusion Center, a partnership between state law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. “The longer you wait the less accurate eyewitness information becomes and evidence fades,” the fusion center’s director, Thom Kirk, said in the statement.

Although it’s nice to be prepared, there’s little chance of anyone catching any terrorists in WV and the “Fusion Center” will be inundated with photos of me sitting on my deck in my underwear with a frosty cold one, or Zero brush-hogging while under the influence;

It’s also unclear why West Virginia thinks its citizens need app-based suspicious activity reporting. A February study from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University found that not a single plot or alleged plot involving Muslim-American terrorism occurred in the state in 2011. (.PDF) A Washington Post investigative project in 2010 found that West Virginia was one of only 15 states that has no terrorism convictions in state or federal courts since 9/11 and ranked 36th in states receiving federal homeland-security cash in 2009.

Now, if they had an app for reporting stills and meth labs, that might work for West Virginia, unless there’s an aversion to revenooers.

Category: Who knows

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NHSparky

I love my smartphone. I also love the fact that me, the g/f, and daughter are on a 700-minute shared plan and used about 100 minutes of that last month.

But we used the shit out of Angry Birds, Facebooking, Words with Friends, texting 1400 times between the three of us, and of course, here.

We’re doomed. Then again, aren’t “smart phone” and West Virginia mutually exclusive?

CI Roller Dude

Wait…I forgot where W.V. was, let me go look on Google Maps….oh, there it is. Now thinking of world wide terrorist…do you think any of them have even heard of W.V?

gi_janearng

Sounds to me like just more brainwashing of the sheeple to get them to stick their noses in their neighbors’ business. The DHS has been on a huge rampage as of late uploading “public services announcements” that are very Nazi-Germany like in their propaganda trying to create a paranoia in people that the “real” terrorists are the ones living right next door to you.

Steadfast&Loyal

If you use an iphone (or even have itunes) you can see several of these types of apps in the store.

I have a couple that supposedly send data to DHS and the FBI. They get all sorts of pictures from me on a weekly basis invovling my wife’s cat eating, sleeping, or maybe my dog sleeping with the cat (the horror). They even know what I eat for breakfast, or road kill i see along the way.

I have no idea where this data goes but i have been doing it for a year (dedication, eh?) so far….not a peep.

Susan

Dear Fusion Center,

If you are going to develop apps like this, why don’t you use them a little more constructively. For example, the aforementioned suggestion of reporting meth labs etc. You will avoid a shit load of Constitutional issues is you use this for general law enforcement rather than selectively targeting one type of “incident.” Just a thought.

Sincerely,
Person with a Brain

OWB

Fusion Center????

But, ditto what Susan said.

Zero Ponsdorf

Damn… Just yesterday I was looking at PUBLIC aerial pix taken of my place when we were putting up hay and building my new shop last year. (really!)

Now this!

Maybe I’m not paranoid after all?

gi_janearng

@7, I’m not paranoid either but I don’t like the precedent it sets. It gives people an easier route to bother me for the “suspicious looking bag” I’m carrying to my trunk from my house that is merely carrying my daughter’s pink .22 to the range that we are legally able to have or why I went from having a small coin purse to suddenly carring one that could conceal my .45. The paranoia the government is trying so hard to spread among US citizens is there, you can find a lot of their nonsense just simply watching the DHS’s YouTube channel.

Don’t even get me started on Google Maps…

Ann

Do the hillbillies from Deliverance count as terrorists these days?

gi_janearng

@9, Probably…the media seems to work awfully hard at depicting people who live out in the boonies separated from society as uneducated and dangerous heathens.

PintoNag

My dream is to drop off the grid, but until then, I keep my electronic connections just as simple as I can. No smartphone. No GPS in my car. Email but not Facebook. I don’t go to the web on my phone.

That doesn’t mean my data isn’t out there…it is, and I know that. But the less connection I have now, the easier it will be to pull the plug when, and if I ever get to the place I can.

As far as what’s above me…*sigh* I use the Serenity Prayer for that.

Ann

We all know law abiding citizens with registered firearms are not to be trusted.

OWB

Well, it IS easier to focus on law-abiding citizens rather than on criminals.

UpNorth

@#13, yeah, law-abiding folks usually go home. Easier to find them there. And their smartphone is in their name, not a burn phone or a stolen phone.

malclave

or Zero brush-hogging while under the influence

Brush-hogging?

On second thought, I probably don’t want to know…