Snitch phone in WV

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