I wrote this story for Strange Horizons' Stop Surveillance Copaganda contest associated with RightsCon25. It didn't get selected, but I'm still happy enough with how it came out to post it.
Johann sat on his couch aware, not for the first time but with a finality he had managed to evade until that night, that he was a bad cop. Not an unethical one: people with a tendency to abuse power avoided jobs with so little of it to take advantage of. He didn't know why and he didn't think it was his fault. But most of a cop's job consisted of talking with people — to help work out something, to get their help figuring out something, or to build the trust that would make either thing possible when needed — and there was only so many years you could spend in that life before you realized you were bad a it.
It was lucky that the rest of his team was good enough to compensate. The rapid-response psychologist would probably be promoted pretty soon, and Johann wanted to but couldn't think it unfair. Couldn't feel good about it either.
Johann turned on his TV and browsed through the list of movies, not yet distracted enough to eat or sleep. There was an old comedy he had bought many years and a couple of TV sets ago that he had kept not watching because he knew it would remind him of his Academy years. Perhaps it was time to revisit them. Maybe reconsider.
His phone chimed with an anonymous message notification. Almost certainly a prank — anonymity was very tempting to kids of a certain age — but even a bad cop could be a conscientious one.
Johann opened the message. As pranks went it was a deeply surreal one. Nothing but a video from a front door camera. It took almost half a minute before he parsed the absurd timestamp. It was a live feed. Why would somebody send him a live camera feed of their porch?
The image blinked. For a few dozen milliseconds some part of Johann's brain expected the message to just disappear like the mirage it surely had been.
A different feed returned. It was a living room as seen through a pet camera similar to the one Johann's brother had bought last year. His brother had authorized Johann' phone to connect to keep an eye on his cat while he was in a different time zone. Nobody had authorized him to access this one and he realized with a sudden knot in his stomach that nobody had authorized whoever had sent the message either.
Johann felt a sudden rush of vertigo and shame, as if he had opened a door in somebody else's house expecting it to lead to the bathroom and finding instead people not having sex but something more intimate, not noticing him, going on. His cheeks burned.
The image blinked again and was replaced by a software download link. He realized he had clicked on it before deciding to. The software took about a minute to download and install; not enough time for Johann's heart to calm down or for him to remember that his first reaction should have been to call a colleague to report an unsettlingly surreal crime.
The software installed. Johann authorized it to run - what else was there to do? A pop-up message appeared:
*** This Law Enforcement Global Information and Observation Network (LEGION) access client must only be used by authorized law enforcement officers for matters of public security. Unauthorized disclosure of the LEGION network is prohibited. ***
Below the text there was an authorization request to take his photo and send a facial hash to a server for biometric authentication, followed by an alarmingly large list of hardware access permissions. The last time Johann had had to do that was when he had linked his phone to the police server.
There is a world, perhaps, where Johann put the phone aside and got off the couch. In that world he went to his window and stood there for a few minutes, not really looking or thinking. He then went back, grabbed the phone, and with unsteady fingers pushed aside the new software to call his boss.
In the real world Johann gave the authorization and the software unfolded a map of a city neighborhood far from his own. Johann couldn't pan the map outside a narrow area but he could zoom anywhere within it. Dots became visible when he went close enough. Each dot was a camera: each camara yielded a live feed without even the seconds of delay you expected when sending a family member an urgent location sharing request.
Johann started looking at streets, first, then inside people's homes. Not all of the rooms he could see were empty, and cameras yielded both sound and image.
There was a calendar icon next to each camera feed giving access to recorded videos. That was somehow worse.
Now Johann did leave the couch. Phone in hand like something too dangerous to leave unattended, he went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee while deciding what to do. He didn't consider the possibility of reporting or ignoring it. LEGION was too powerful a tool to just put aside. The only two problems, as far as Johann could see, were that he didn't have access to the area he usually worked on and how to use the evidence he found.
Maybe he was overthinking it. The system couldn't work if judges wouldn't accept the evidence you could gather with it. There had to be some sort of understanding he was now being let into. A deeper, more effective layer of the law that did not depend on the unreliable collaboration of the people he protected.
Cup of coffee in hand, he went back to his living room, closed the window drapes, and sat back on the couch. Cops were expected to familiarize themselves with the few open cases there were. He would look at the files and cross-reference them with the videos from LEGION, solve a couple of cases, and then quietly ask his boss for the next step.
Accessing the police system he found there were three open cases in the area he could investigate with LEGION. The oldest one was a domestic murder, the most common type. No need to see if any camera had caught the murder. The evidence had been more than sufficient, and the case was only open because the man had been lucky enough to flee the country before anybody found his wife's corpse. Ghastly but not an opportunity to use his new tools.
Johann closed the second file without looking for camera feeds. Perhaps one had caught the graffiti artist who had created a particularly viral caricature of the Mayor's donor network. The image had been caustic enough to push the police to keep the "case" open, such as it was, but he was sure that finding them, even without the use of LEGION, would make him a pariah among his coworkers and most of the city, even including many of the Mayor's voters. When policing got close to politics people stopped seeing them as cops.
The third case, he felt, was the jackpot. A burglary, empty house, no suspects. Everything stolen had been insured, and it was probably being given more attention as a sociological diagnostic signal than as an open police case. Yet it was an opportunity to show he understood what LEGION was for.
Johann reviewed recorded videos from cameras around the victim's house for more than an hour until he found an image of somebody carrying a backpack that he was nearly sure hid the stolen items. To his surprise, somebody had already asked a judge for a facial match and the image linked to a name and a basic police profile.
Unless nobody had had to ask.
Johann smiled to himself, the uncanny disquiet he felt when he first opened the message throughly replaced by a breathtaking sense of possibility. Of course they hadn't. LEGION obviously could perform facial matching on the spot. No need to convince an unsympathetic judge, and it was a point of pride for them to be.
With a fuller understanding of the capabilities of LEGION he was beginning to appreciate why it had to be kept secret. What judge would risk his career by openly accepting a case based on evidence built bypassing their basic duty to control access to identity databases? Johann could imagine a fictional scenario that would justify that sort of crime, but certainly not as mundane as a burglary.
He knew who had done it, though. Or at least he was pretty sure he knew. It wasn't good enough for a case, and the idea of asking a judge for permission to just break into the guy's house to look for a stolen item was pure nonsense, but... If the guy had broken the law once, it was likely he'd do it again, right? LEGION could do facial matching automatically. LEGION could access many (most? every?) camera in the city. LEGION, Johann knew instinctively, could continuously monitor any person and record their every move until they did something that justified it.
So much of the software's design mirrored his new way of thinking that he found the functionality almost without having to search. After setting up the tracking tag the software reminded him that the person wasn't a fugitive of the law. It wasn't a denial as much as a request for confirmation; you could almost read within the lines an eye-rolling exasperation with meaningless red tape.
Johann gave the confirmation without any feeling of disproportion between the enormity of the means and the smallness of ends. Every situation he had floundered on counted as an unsolved one in his mind; that his colleagues' plodding police work had resolved them made the tally even more painful. The long accumulation of so many unfinished and unfinishable business justified the existence of something like LEGION as an absolute necessity in Johann's fight against crime.
He wasn't giving up being a cop. He was about to become a real one. He felt a righteousness he had almost forgotten and a sense of power that was entirely new.
A video call started without him having to accept it.
"Johann!" said a cheap avatar with mock outrage. "It takes most people a couple of days to get this far." The avatar's outrage turned to admiration. "It's kind of impressive."
Johann felt a sharp sudden awareness that, good or bad, he was still a cop. It wasn't a pleasant sensation. The avatar waited patiently until he opened his mouth and found he didn't know what to say.
The avatar pretended to smirk. "There was this guy, Kissinger, long time ago. Real piece of shit. Used to say `the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer'. Meant it too. He would have loved you - you went from browsing fake video feeds to setting up a 24/7 violation of some made-up person's constitutional rights in, what, less than two hours? Nice. Solving exactly zero cases, by the way."
"Fake?" was the first thing Johann could understand and say.
"Come on. I'm always surprised that anybody buys it. You can't just decrypt people's private stuff like that these days, you know. You should know better."
"So it was a prank?" A thought appeared to him already fully formed, obvious and huge like so many others that night. "A test. It was a test." Johann grimaced, surprised by how much relief he felt at the same time. Yes, he would have to find another job and another way to think about himself. It was better than to keep trying.
"A test, that's a good one." The avatar smiled warmly. "It's blackmail, Johann. You know that losing your job is the least of what would happen if we leaked what you allowed your phone to record you doing. No, no, from now on you work for us. Don't make that face. Just a favor here and there. Easier than police work and I bet you're going to enjoy it more."
Johann turned off the phone and dropped it on the couch. It turned itself on again.
"Come on, cheer up. You were so happy that something like LEGION existed. And now for you it does."
The phone pretended to turn itself off. Johann had never thought of it like that before.