Pearl River      There are still a lot of “known unknowns” in the wake of the killing of the United Healthcare CEO with the killer still on the lam, but there are some serious, and, frankly, disturbing things we are learning already.

Let’s start with the state of surveillance in New York City in the name of security.  Police investigators have access to “60,000 cameras” in a vast network.  As the Times reports,

The 60,000-camera network includes some installed across the city by the police and by the Department of Transportation, along with thousands that belong to private entities — big banks, hotel chains, schools and real-estate companies.  Any of them can be accessed remotely through the Police Department’s Domain Awareness System….The system coordinates data from many surveillance tools, including license plate readers and phone call histories, to help identify people.

That was news to me, and given this tragedy, if New York City has done this, every big city will soon be following.  The system is searchable with key words like “backpack” and “bicycle.”  Facial recognition software only exists for people already in the New York system who have been arrested, which given its history means their system is heavily weighted towards non-whites.  Other public security operations around the country have more widely acquired facial recognition software, and now it is likely to spread.  Given how it is used increasingly in airports, like those in New York and New Orleans, there’s a reason this killer was jumping on the grey dog and taking the bus in and out of the city.

The astute tech observer, professor, and sometime columnist, Zeynep Tufekci, made some additional, and to my way of thinking, frightening observations about some of this as well, saying that,

…new technologies that will be deployed to help preserve order can cut both ways. Thompson’s killer apparently knew exactly where to find his target and at exactly what time. No evidence has emerged that he had access to digital tracking data, but that information is out there on the market. How long before easily built artificial-intelligence-powered drones equipped with facial recognition cameras, rather than hooded men with backpacks, seek targets in cities and towns?

I find that super scary, because reading about Ukraine and Gaza, we already know that in warfare it’s now drones “gone wild.”  How many minutes will it be before we see this stuff happening next door?  For those of us who have had our home address broadcast by the haters on Fox News, it’s hard to pretend in our divided society that the next steps won’t be even worse than the last ones.

The rage is palpable, and on social media, it is immediate.  With only the least, almost performative, sympathy, the anger around healthcare, insurance, and the rich and powerful erupted past any normal boundaries.  As Tufekci points out,

Even on Facebook, a platform where people do not commonly hide behind pseudonyms, the somber announcement by UnitedHealth Group that it was “deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague” was met with, as of this writing, 80,000 reactions; 75,000 of them were the “haha” emoji.

She draws the correlation to the Gilded Age and the vast and explosive inequity which is unbridled in America now.  I would compare this shocking reaction to the surprise many felt at the election of Trump over Harris.  Currently, there is a river of rage among many not in the one-percent among working and lower income people that is like molten lava waiting to volcanically erupt.  Trump rode that wave, and we’re seeing it break at the least provocation, as this killing demonstrates.  For all of the public and private authorities that rush to bulk up their security now, we need to see many more learn the real time lessons from these situations and stop pretending and start addressing the issues directly.  As one of my organizers used to say, “you gotta learn!”