One wonders about the future when Gangs could be leveraging big data and machine learning to track police and predict where they will raid. "Predictive policing" indeed.
For example, post-communist Bulgaria still has a corruption problem to this day, but its nature is rather different. The former communist state security had a monopoly on all illegal activities during the 1990s. Street gangs of “mutras” were allowed to roam the streets, steal cars, racketeer small family businesses for “insurance services”, but were never allowed to touch anyone’s child, to force someone into human trafficking or to engage in their own illegal foreign schemes without the full knowledge of the state. State security had all the information about former smuggling routes and the gangs were used solely for “doing a job” with a higher risk-rate.
Also, a lot of ethnic Albanians in the diaspora are from Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, and Bosnia so they are survivors or the children of survivors from the Yugoslav Civil War.
You see similar issues and dynamics among Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto and Australia, Vietnamese gangs in the Bay Area in the 90s and 2000s, Punjabi Gangs in BC in the 90s and 2000s, Algerians in France/Belgium/Netherlands, Kurds from Turkey in France/Sweden/Germany, and Central American gangs like MS-13 across California - all are the children of survivors or survivors from very brutal civil wars dropped into impoverished neighborhoods with locals who were antagonistic to these refugees. Because these survivors had existing community structures and occasionally actual combat experience, they could organize and fight back.
Add to that a lot of the players in the conflicts in the old country ended up converting their militias or organizations into Organized Crime to continue funding the "good fight" in the old country.
Also, other Balkan diasporas have similar issues like the Albanians. Serbian organized crime is a player in NYC, Chicago, Australia, and Germany for example.
You've mentioned many examples already, but another on would be Lebanese people who fled the civil war to Europe, and went on to create some of the most powerful criminal organizations in Germany and neighboring countries.
A similar story is happening in Netherlands+Belgium with the Mocro Maffia - a big reason they were able to be successful in the XTC game was because Moroccan Jews are a big player in XTC manufacturing in Israel and there was a diaspora of both Muslim and Jewish Moroccans in Belgium, Netherlands, and France that organized crime groups were able to leverage.
And like you said about the Lebanese, same story with a subset of the Shia Lebanese diaspora in South America (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia) helping enable Hezbollah.
How many new grey market criminal organizations will we call disruptive instead of criminal? What will happen when criminal organizations will be able to get rounds of investment, the same as any legal organization? With major corporations intentionally violating the law as a "cost of business" what is the line between criminal and legitimate organizations?
That is the differentiator between grey market and black market.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/11/uber-hired-olig...
Look at Amazon India for example - Prime Video India basically shut down for a year due to the Tandav scandal and Amazon Delivery Trucks in Bangalore were burnt because they pissed off the Small Business/Pharmacy lobby in KA. And they were publically humiliated before all this by the Minister of Commerce in 2019.
This was a big reason Uber divested out of China and ASEAN - they started stepping on entrenched players toes and had no political cover. In the US, the worst that would happen is corporate litigation with an out of court settlment or speeches by local politicians. Not in developing countries.
Weaponized litigation like SLAAP is of course being abused, but as a business operating in the developed world, the rule of law still holds. You won't mysteriously have the IRS or FBI start auditing every single of your transcations, see your trucks or stores burned down, be held PERSONALLY liable, or even mysteriously get shot while leaving court.
Why should people be indemnified under the fictious umbrella of the corporation as juristic person?
This is a historic aberration that needs to end.
Truth or consequences!
Drug gangs have used devices to detect raids by detecting poor opsec (Bluetooth, etc). As this tech gets easier, it’s easier to build surveillance networks.
No doubt there are significant netowkrs of surveillance all over!
What is your interpretation of a will?
It'd be amazing to see surveillance capitalism turned against itself like this
I don't know if it's universal, but here government-owned vehicles always have an X in the license plate, so you wouldn't even need a database, just alert on any X-plate entering the neighborhood.
Could detect strobing lights with the same cameras, and summon the Watchers automatically.
In fact, if they flash signals (red blue lights) .. you can automate it..
You could hire gig workers to place the dronepackages a "pr" gag allover town. There is not a need for flags, territory or other outdated concepts. Just attrition and correlation.. of wear and tear on civilization
Any conflict has reasons behind it, as it is just another enterprise that consumes resources for expected rewards. Given the practical needs to manage the said consumed resources, even in guerilla style warfare the conflicts have to have limits (i.e. be contained to a territory). The territory, which these conflicts are waged on, can be and is sooner or later linked to (at least suspected) interested parties. The flags are basically just means to identify a given interested party once it grows past the Dunbar’s number. I do not say that there aren't concepts out there that have little to no practical use (say, an anthem, or a motto), I'm just saying that your list outdated concepts were not good examples.
It will be interesting to see the police response to the next abusive cop put paid leave being killed or maimed by a drone released by vigilantes.
How about a scenario where police officers are sousveilled by large, anonymous groups to build datasets that can be used to apply pressure to law enforcement and their union groups when they attempt to take more power by demanding larger police budgets.