Invitational disclaimer: Years ago, I had much more free time to spend investigating topics of special interest The best I can do is offer educated speculation that I hope provokes and stimulates attention and goodwill discussion of the topics at hand. I'm more than happy to be proved wrong. That's a long way of saying the you're welcome to complement anything you read here with comments, criticism, or your own writing elsewhere.
As of this writing we are still debating the ebbing tide of concern about fake news. Fake news, for the most part, is information that is widely distributed to distort the reality of political events. Fake news isn't exclusive to politics but that's where it garners the most attention.
I became aware of the Sol Pais story on Thursday, April 18. When I started looking for information it seemed to have appeared whole cloth - Sol Pais was imitating the Columbine shooters, the FBI was looking for her, she was dead, and here's all the corroborating evidence she deserved to die. Boom.
The story didn't develop from one event to the other. Mostly, its over. back to Mueller and Russia, and Trump-hate news.
Burp.
I am blessed and cursed by sensing patterns. And nothing about the news reports, before or since, strike me as anything but empty echoes by law enforcement that rationalized their hunting down of Sol Pais. The closer I look, the more I distrust everything being asserted about this teenager.
I first wrote about the subject of "swatting" back in 2014.
A more recent example involved gamers.
There's not only a pattern emerging, but an escalation.
The Pais narrative smells like the next step. The authorities, acting on a tip, somehow don't act fast enough to detain this girl for questioning long before she flies to Denver and [allegedly] buys a shotgun, and somehow is found dead after wandering around in the woods.
Take that in for a minute. AND! AND! they have a trove of [laughably preposterous] back story about her and her [imagined] destination and intentions.
The question for me, aside from the lack of any hard facts or objective analysis of the information at hand, was and continues to be - has the law enforcement community incorporated "swatting" as a tool in their arsenal of plausible deniability in exterminating suspects without the presumption of innocence, without warning, and without subsequent consequence.
When information is weaponized in this way, its not fake news - its more like propaganda on steroids - it pushes emotional response buttons in its intended audience. This incites an agency in that public cohort to eliminate the discomfort.
When that cohort is an intolerant, vigilante organization then the response is the equivalent of throwing meat into a tank of hungry piranha.
The public is looking away from Sol Pais's death - believing the cover stories - secure in the knowledge that it was justified. The tsunami of official terror porn has done its job.
But what if it wasn't an inside cover-up?
An even more disturbing is the distinct possibility, Pais was swatted by a zealot from a special interest group whose myopic interpretation of art, or interest, or objection to opinion or comment triggered outrage. That outrage manifested in licensing a swat killing of the offending party.
The trajectory of this kind of violence and rational to violence will not end with Pais. If Americans are concerned about hackers participating in politics online, what happens when one of those hackers or political operatives decides to target a politician, or their family, or their sponsors? This is a slippery slope covered in blood.
These anonymous tips need to be vetted. They need transparency, and they need to be evaluated by even tempered analysts. That is clearly not the case today.
The tools to unravel this sequence of alarm and violence is readily available.
We need an accurate timeline of events - actual classic news. Who, what, Where, When...
And then it gets interesting.
1 comment:
She was my lab partner the whole year she was one of the kindest smartest people I knew I wish I had her grades straight A’s in all her college level classes. She was the one person I was excited to see everyday in that period. It comes to show that sometimes the kindest people hold the deepest scars and that we should always check up on them
Post a Comment