After a feeding frenzy of speculation and much frantic activity since the explosions that rocked the Boston Marathon on Monday, the authorities got their men with an amazing demonstration of their efficiency and professionalism. Mere days later, and one of the two brothers involved is dead, while his younger brother is in custody. Kudos to all involved in closing this crisis down in a heartbeat.
The thing that struck me with the incredible ease with which these two were identified and cornered was how impossible it is today to walk down any city street and not be recorded onto someone's hard drive. As much as this can be seen as an invasion of one's privacy/rights by "Big Brother", recent events simply prove how such surveillance can be viewed as a positive rather than a negative.
None of us like the idea of walking around a town or city being followed by cameras on every corner, but you know, with the advent of camera-wielding smartphones, it is possible for all sorts of people to be taking your photo or even recording video of you at any time out in public, without you being remotely aware of it. If one was forced to choose, I think we would probably feel that our images were in safer hands with the authorities.
Quite why these two brothers (from the current young generation) would not assume that they could be caught via camera surveillance is beyond me. Unless of course, from the get-go, they wanted to be identified, found and martyred for some ridiculous cause or another - thereby ensuring their fifteen minutes of fame. Make that "infamy". If they actually thought their baseball caps and dark glasses could prevent their identification then they were even more unsophisticated than imagined.
We probably won't get to hear precisely how they were picked out of thousands of images from the crime scene area, but almost certainly it involved the FBI's new billion dollar tool - Next Generation Identification (NGI). This tool is not fully operational as yet, but it is purported to include iris scans, as well as facial and voice recognition software, and a vast database with which to compare data of interest.
This truly is Big Brother in action and means that whether a criminal or innocent passer-by, your movements around town on any given day can be completely monitored/recorded, and your freedom to commit any criminal act you choose is definitely compromised. But that's a good thing, right? Right! Or in many people's minds, maybe. There are always the bleeding hearts moaning about invasion of privacy and unconstitutional abuse of one's civil rights.
Ditto the bleeding hearts already moaning about the fact that the younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was not read his Miranda rights upon his capture. I have to say, this outrage is both amusing and simultaneously outrageous. Have we come so far down the road of civil rights for all, that we worry more about the Miranda rights of some violent terrorist coward than the human rights of the 175 wounded and 3 dead victims? Give me a break, puh-lease!
These two criminals showed zero humanity towards hundreds of people who they randomly targeted and whose lives were either destroyed or changed forever, and yet we hear bleeding hearts crying out about how disgraceful it is for the FBI to detain and interrogate Tsarnaev in whatever fashion is deemed necessary (and legal)?!
The way I see it, scum don't have any rights. Slime gets to be stuck against the wall, where it belongs. If you carry IEDs into public streets, and onto a site where you know there are the maximum number of potential victims to maim/kill, and then detonate said IEDs causing irreparable damage, carnage and mayhem - guess what ? You forfeit your rights to any kind of civility whatsoever. You don't have the same rights that might be afforded to "normal" criminals.
But there's always someone taking the sides of those who subject society to their insanity, trying to find the "root causes" and finding someone/something other to blame, rather than the insanity of the protagonist itself. However, all of that bleeding heart liberal BS seems to evaporate a lot quicker when it is your town, your partner, your son/daughter, your family whose lives are twisted cruelly or obliterated totally by such insanity. Then people suddenly seem to look at it differently, and are not so worried about the civil rights of terrorist murderers.
It was a shocking and horrifying week, one that included an entire American city and surrounding towns being on total lockdown, with a "shelter in place" order, and even a no-fly zone over Watertown, MA. But the authorities did a stellar job of regaining control and one can only hope that the speed and efficiency with which they did so will act as a deterrent for those living a lie as the enemy within.
It is painfully ironic that the younger brother now in custody was a pre-med student in college, and he got there in part via a scholarship provided by, wait for it, yep, the City of Boston. It transpires that he will now be remembered forever by that city, and (unless he gets the death penalty) the city will be housing, feeding and looking after him for the next six or seven decades. I am pretty certain that many in Boston resent every further penny that the city will now be forced to spend on him, given what he has cost them already. - Kevin Mc
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