I was in America when I learned about a particularly virulent form of criminality that’s more a subject matter than a real practice. However, its existence is indicative of deeply serious problems in the human psyche, even in a developed country like the United States of America.
It’s a format I’d heard of before, and even heard said by those in the know needed to be investigated. In the months I spent in New England, it became clear that what I had discovered related directly to this. It explained what it was and why it had caused so much concern to people.
I had already begun to suspect that something was amiss shortly after I stepped foot in the local town where I stayed. There was a suspicious feeling in the air that I had felt before in England. It was a sort of hint of a criminality that might come to the surface if I looked for it. I had also hoped it wouldn’t look for me, first.
This sixth sense is something I’d used in other contexts. It helped me to begin a search in an unfamiliar environment, and I soon found what I was looking for. I discovered banks of laptops setup by ‘researchers’, so-called, all of whom looked like ex-Police and Military types. They were working on a secretive project.
I knew it wasn’t top secret, and I probed around for information on what it was. The two words that came up were “Codex” and “Ledger”, and both related to terms used in crime circles to describe records. The former is a top-tier Database and the latter is a Dataset. They work by combing their mutual information and by training each other on it.
I later found out that the data on each is compromised of original, self-authored tips and tricks for criminality and lawbreaking. It enables more realistic, concerted activity by criminals than random acts or the opportunistic chances that we’re used to hearing of in popular fiction or in the news media.
This made me wonder at modern law enforcement and what it really needs to become. I knew that neighbourhood patrols achieve a limited set of results, but this showed much more is necessary to keep us all safe. The effort of some requires a serious response by the rest of us.
