“This is the most extreme type of monitoring that I’ve seen,” says Pilar Weiss, founder of the National Bail Fund Network, a network of over 90 community bail and bond funds across the United States. “It’s part of a disturbing trend where deep surveillance and social control applications are used pretrial with little oversight.”
Computers are remarkably efficient but at the dawn of the Gutenberg press, you could have made similar observations. For the first time with paper, it was possible to commit crimes in the privacy of your own home merely by writing things down and sending them to a publisher.
Except for the “instantaneous” and “Lightspeed” observations, which I think are the real key here. Also, commiting a book crime would require conscious cooperation and coordination with another person/people (the publisher), whereas internet crimes can be done completely solo.
I think a more sensible comparison could be made between computers and telephones or telegraphs
It’s more efficient, certainly. But telling someone pretrial in 2023 they can’t use a computer isn’t realistic.