If you suspect your neighbors are cooking up meth or fertilizer bombs in their basement — or maybe you just want those damn kids to get off your lawn — “help” from the government is as close as your iPhone:
The PatriotApp links your phone to American security and law enforcement agencies via the Internet and allows you to report anything you want at the touch of a button.
By simply pressing the relevant icon, users can sound the alarm for terrorism, ‘suspicious activity’, a health pandemic or an environmental safety issue.
The $0.99 app, named after the controversial Patriot Act brought in by the U.S. government after 9/11, is designed to ‘encourage active citizen participation in the War on Terror and in protecting their families and surrounding communities’, its makers Citizen Concepts claim.
Not a lot of imagination is needed to come up with all sorts of scenarios for abuse of this app, although creator Charles Reinighaus “truly believes that 99.9 percent of people are good and will not misuse the technology”.
It is truly a wondrous society we live in, that the state need not lift a finger to create a surveillance network, when its own citizens will happily provide one. Even the Soviets and East Germans weren’t so lucky.