Up in smoke

In the last stretch of this year’s election cycle the candidates are really burning up the trail, at least the parts of it not already on fire.

That’s right in several states political violence rose to the level of arson as ballot boxes were set on fire in Oregon, Washington, and even Arizona recently. The good news is, sometimes we learn our lessons and there were cameras monitoring a few of those sites.

In fact, a suspect is already in custody in the Arizona case, and I expect the one in the northwest isn’t far off from that as we speak. A good reminder of the value of having proper security apparatus around important infrastructure if nothing else. Our technology is only getting better in handling situations like this as well with the advent of AI able to sort through information faster and bring things to a resolution with a sort of speed we haven’t seen before.

Take Iveda for example: this week they’ve released updates for their body cameras that let them interface with the IvedaAI platform and provide data to officers to provide a whole new set of services to law enforcement. Body cameras can now use facial recognition to perform actions like identifying missing persons, identifying weapons in a crowd of people, or draw attention to important details that ordinary human beings would have normally missed.

So, while you may see a heightened level of political violence this year I’d be willing to believe it might be that last time you see it so pervasively. In our new society of heightened monitoring aided with artificial intelligence, you can run but you can’t hide.

At least not for long.