[Part II] Endgame: Shiny New Toys of Madness and Evil

UPDATED June 6 (oops, fixed bad link, oops, fixed another)

In the preceding post, Part I: In the Final Weeks of WWII European TheaterI drew the probably overblown comparison between the people who are "just damn tired of them homeless psycho bums hanging around" and the deathcamp administrators of the Nazi Holocaust.

Still, dead is dead, hate-crime is hate-crime, regardless of the political party of the perpetrators. And at long last, laws have been passed though they have not yet taken effect. In the interim, it's the last chance for the haters to step up their pogroms to pick their victims and either drive them out or dispose of them.

But how can they find them?

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It's hard to defend the position, rhetorically, that some hardcore junkie and bona-fide dope fiend -- one who robs and steals to get money to score dope in between stints in lockup -- should be granted every respect and opportunity while out on the streets casing potential burglary targets or sizing up potential victims.

Then again, that isn't about mental illness, that's about crime. Yet due to recent trends in sociology and criminology, a lot of crime is considered to be less a defect in morality and more a defect in mental capacity. Morality -- right and wrong -- is slowly being linked to sanity, rightly or wrongly.

It might reasonably be stated that an utterly disordered mind might lack the capacity to discern the difference between right and wrong. Yet this isn't one of those statements in rhetoric and logic which works both ways. It's fallacious to say that a lack of capacity to discern the difference between right and wrong is indicative of an utterly disordered mind. Case in point? Sociopaths.

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I'm a computer guy, a Linux guy. I've been doing it for 15 years for fun and for pay. I have also done it for civic activism reasons.

The Aspen Hill Civic Association, Inc., was able to secure the opportunity to speak directly with the late councilperson Marilyn Praisner, over issues to do with county housing code and permitting violations such as home overcrowding, commercial vehicles parked in residential zones, etc.

Pursuant to that end, I used the mailing list for prospective members, and used that to drive webcrawlers that I wrote for the project, searching for tax and violation records on both the State tax assessment and County housing and permitting services websites. I collected geographic coordinates for all of the mailing list addresses, and wrote code to find addresses associated with non-resident property owners who also had code-violation histories.

I had written an Automated Slumlord Detector.

If you click on that link, you'll get a sadly large list with links to the per-address information at both the "Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation and to the Montgomery County Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

More importantly, at the bottom of the page, you will get a Google Map that shows you all of these locations. Just click on any of the position markers and you get a pop-up with information and links to click.

This isn't incredibly hard to code. It's almost easy, though it took me a few tries to get it right.

It's not a huge and resource-consuming application.

You could very easily run it as an application on an iPhone, or for that matter on a Nokia 770. I have in fact run it on my Nokia 770.

When I ran it on my Nokia 770, I just used it to guide me to various properties that I wanted to photograph for my Page of Shame and Code Violation.

However, my Nokia 770 did not have an integrated camera, nor did it have an integrated cellphone (though it did have WiFi). Perhaps most importantly, it did not have integrated GPS. I didn't need one; I know the neighborhood streets by heart. I grew up here. I just needed the addresses.

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The Global Positioning System is a godsend, in many ways. All modern cellphones come equipped, under a federal mandate to assist emergency responders find people needing rescue.

The GPS is also, of course, spreading into unintended, yet inevitable niches.

For under one hundred dollars, you can buy equipment to Stalk Anyone with GPS.

I should not need to point out that for most people in Montgomery County, a hundred dollars is pocket-change.

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Cellphones also have found unintended, yet inevitable, usage niches. One such is the so-called Flash Mob. The general format is a mass e-mail or mass text-message to mobile devices, causing two or more people to act in concert. This was originally used as a prank, to organize mass pillow-fights in unexpected places such as department stores.

Later uses have included organizing and filming Bum Fights and "Happy Slapping".

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My little application that integrates address, geography, land-title, and code-violation data wold be easy to build as an iPhone App. Since I already have the code-base and the data and know the google-maps API, I could probably do it in a week or so.

And if I wanted to map something else, that probably would not take me long, either.

For instance, I can just see an iPhone App that would have a little google-map on it, but instead of markers with pop-ups showing the locations and code-violation histories of local slumlords, I could have an iPhone App that shows the addresses and diagnoses of Montgomery's disabled people who have mental health problems.

I can see it now!

Not really, though I did actually see it a few days ago...

All I would need would be an electronic version of the "client list" from 751 Twinbrook Drive "client services center". I do not have such a thing.

But judging from those two clowns in the burgundy toyota cruising past me house the other day, someone else does.

And inquiring minds want to know who they are, and how they got it. Because off the top of my head I can't tell you how many laws that violates.

As of October, it will violate a few more, especially if it looks like someone is using their iPhone App "directory of crazy people" to incite hate crimes... and of course that's what it's for. Because, you know, as the sociopaths will all tell you, they're pampered on your tax dollar and besides, "normal people" ought to be living on that Real Estate instead of wackos.

Someone needs to get out to 751 Twinbrook, or wherever the records are kept, and secure their case files... though to judge by the sociopaths cruising the streets taking pictures of the crazies and putting them and their addresses and diagnoses on an iPhone app, that will be closing the barn door long after the horse has gone.

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More to come!

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