Here’s a real life example from a lowly park ranger. I heard this all over our dispatch radio network which if you have a police scanner you can listen in on.
Ranger at a park reports a missing person, non emergency, with vehicle. (these get reported fairly regularly if a person is known to frequent the park and they are missing the park gets a call.)
Approximately 30 minutes later, parks are searched no vehicle found. Trail and remote areas to be searched on foot as needed.
Possible crime involved reported. 30 minutes later designated ranger uses flock network to determine last 2 known locations of the vehicle. Last hit was about 2 hours previous and over an hour drive away.
Information was passed on I assume as it ended park involvement.
I have changed some of the details to make this more of a summary of how things happen. We can also ping cellphones to find people on the trail or in the wilderness areas or access cc records for lost wallets. The lowly park service has this capability, larger agencies got extra tools.
We don’t have privacy and haven’t for decades. Your digital self leaves a trackable trail everywhere you go. Every swipe of a card, your car, your phone can be tracked. What used to be hours or days to access now is often in real time. Facial recognition, gait recognition lots of analog world type of information can be converted to data points and tracked.
Can a determined person frustrate a system in the moment by using cash, masks, never wearing the same clothes twice? Sure. But we are getting awfully close to having a database of all people such that there is no need for alibis because they already know where everyone is at.
I am a part time park ranger. I will be as long as they will allow me to be. I haven’t worked in the actuarial profession since 2000.
Summary
I have had many careers since being an actuary. Actuaries are the best people to hang out and discuss thing with, so I’m still here. I was there when the rebel outpost slipped away from the SOA’s authoritarian grasp. I watched EB fight the space lobster. I saw the invigorating influx of the CAS migraction. I am here irrationally hanging with all the rationals.
I heard that a conference I’ve attended a couple of times is being cancelled this year and being permanently moved to a biennial cycle. Next meeting will be in France. Seems like it’s due to a combination of lack of research funding and non-US scientists not wanting to come to the US for conferences.
