Keeping the Peace

Source: Be Gay, Do Crime: A Starter’s Guide

Law enforcement is more complex than ever before. The legal systems of Earth were devastated by the Fall, with new rules and experiments taking their place. The fresh new circumstances facing transumanity called for new approaches. Now each habitat is its own jurisdiction, with differing ideas on what it means to keep the peace. Technological advances have made catching criminals easier while also making them more powerful and dangerous. The role of security services ranges from upholding laws and protecting citizens to restorative justice and stopping existential threats.

Patchwork Jurisdictions

The state of law enforcement in every jurisdiction reflects the polity’s dominant ideology. Many habitats follow traditional models with professional police, standardized bureaucracies, and court systems that protect private property and citizens. Within the inner system, police forces and courts are typically privatized, with contracts awarded to competing hypercorps. Larger habitats may have multiple security hypercorps handling different areas or functions. Some habitats have experimented with other systems of law enforcement: religious police and courts, sheriffs and deputized posses, or systems run entirely by ALIs and bots. In a dozen panarchist habs, every person chooses one of multiple legal systems to subscribe to, with a Political Bureau sorting jurisdictional issues and conflicts.

Policing is never value free, as each habitat ranks which groups deserve more protection than others. Police in hypercorp-dominated polities will enforce corporate law, protecting executives, high-ranking employees, investors, and valued customers over wage slaves or visitors. In bioconservative habitats, only humans are valued, while uplifts and AGIs receive little to no legal protections. In habitats dominated by criminal cartels, the syndicate itself serves as a peacekeeping force, protecting and policing their own members. The goal there is not justice, but ensuring orderliness to keep business running. Unsanctioned crime is not tolerated.

The Reach of the Law

Most habitats view themselves as sovereign entities, albeit usually aligned with others in a framework such as the Consortium or LLA. With a few exceptions, legal power is concentrated in the individual habitat, not the larger political alliance.

The Titanians and Jovians are the only two polities with significant bodies of law and police forces that have jurisdiction over all of their territory and citizens. The Lunar-Lagrange Armed Forces, while predominantly military, have the authority to intervene in habitat affairs, override local laws and security forces, and engage in necessary “police actions.” The Morningstar Constellation empowers each of its habitats to handle its own affairs. On Mars, the Martian Rangers serve as a sort of planetary police force under the authority of the Tharsis League, though their jurisdiction is limited to areas outside of major settlements or sovereign hypercorp territory. They work with traveling judicial Magistrates who are empowered to establish ad-hoc courts and juries wherever needed.

The Consortium has a representative legislative body in its Planetary Congress, but its edicts are largely symbolic and toothless and ignored by its habitats. The bylaws passed by the Consortium’s Ministry, however, directly impact member hypercorps and business affairs. A Consortium auditing and police agency known as Oversight has authority to enforce Consortium bylaws and act to protect the security of its constituents, reporting directly to the Hypercorp Council.

Interstate Affairs

There are no longer any multi-state agencies: no Interpol, Europol, or United Nations Police. Habitats only grudgingly acknowledge the authority of other polities when absolutely necessary.

Only one law-enforcement treaty, the Treaty of Uniform Security (TUS), has been signed by the majority of transhuman polities in the Solar System. The TUS is principally targeted at a class of criminal that almost all polities want to punish: extremists who damage critical habitat infrastructure, collaborate with TITAN agents, or spread the exsurgent virus. Given transhumanity’s fragile existence, anyone who threatens it must be stopped, no matter the cost. The TUS outlines the protocol for extradition of such criminals from one polity to another. Habitats that apprehend a fugitive may choose to prosecute the offender themselves instead of extraditing them, though this would be a politically charged move and is not invoked lightly. The standards of proof required to extradite a suspect are high. The idea of being extradited to another habitat, perhaps another polity, is a controversial issue to most habitat residents. Police agencies usually only turn to extradition as a last resort.

Beyond the TUS, there is no legal framework that covers the majority of transhumanity. Allied polities often have their own treaties to cover criminal law issues, but they vary tremendously in scope and frequency of enforcement. Some of these treaties grant visiting law-enforcement officers limited authority, at least when pursuing fugitives from their home turf. Typically, the visiting officer must ask for permission before making the trip and then must follow the orders of local habitat officials. Before permission is granted, the officer must explain why they need to travel to the habitat, instead of letting local police take care of the matter. Commonly, police only travel to other habitats when investigating complex and important cases. Most of the treaties emphasize inter-habitat cooperation as necessary to stop sophisticated criminals active in multiple locales, like cartel members and exhuman terrorists.

Ego Hunters

Criminals who escape from one jurisdiction are not necessarily free. Ego hunting is a major industry throughout the system. Criminals change identities and morphs frequently, but their egos remain unique, so skilled investigators and trackers are needed to chase them down. The legality of ego hunting varies between jurisdictions, so ego hunters themselves might be breaking the law. A few major security firms like Direct Action and Medusan Shield maintain contacts throughout the Solar System, allowing their operatives to act with legal authority when they can arrange it. Independent ego hunters seldom have that level of coverage and so may not hesitate to use illegal methods to find their targets.

Ego hunters are only paid for successfully capturing wanted egos. Most habitats that allow ego hunting require some kind of oversight, such as registering with station authorities or disallowing the hunter to make the capture personally. In that case, habitat law enforcement will arrest the suspect, after the ego hunter identifies the suspect and provides proof of their crimes and identity.

Investigations and Forensics

Thanks to the state of surveillance and forensics technologies, proof of criminal activity is easier to acquire than ever before. Almost everyone is walking recorder. Sensors are omnipresent in nearly every habitat, recording every event in minute detail. If an investigator knows when and where a crime took place, they can almost always pull up detailed logs of the event, including high-definition video from multiple angles. Hacking sensors is possible, but difficult, and can also leave traces behind. Virtually every manufactured object, whether it is a tool, toy, or weapon, has built-in computers and sensors that record everything that happens around it. A staggering amount of information can be obtained from simple objects like clothing or room sensors. Witnesses to a crime, including potential suspects, can be made to reveal anything they thought or experienced via psychosurgery. This is highly intrusive, so even when this technique is legal, it is reserved for investigating serious crimes.

If the sheer amount of surveillance data is not enough, forensics analysis can provide more evidence. Given the state of science, forensics analysis is nearly impossible to fool. Nanoswarms can sweep a crime scene and find even the smallest clue. Any trace evidence can be quickly analyzed with near-perfect accuracy. Complex and chaotic events can be reconstructed through computer simulations and walked through by investigators in simulspace to test out any number of theories of the crime. Even untrained investigators can usually determine the perpetrator by running the evidence through expert AI software. Crimes of passion and other unplanned crimes are almost always solved due to these technological advantages.

The Hidden Arms Race

In response, criminals have learned new techniques to avoid arrest. Crime is now a skilled profession and only the most innovative criminals succeed. A crime can’t be investigated if it is not detected, so criminals focus their efforts on keeping below the radar. Despite the massive amount of surveillance in an average habitat, every sensory network has blind spots, either created accidentally or intentionally. Entire criminal outfits survive on the business of ripping sensors and creating dead zones for unseen activity. Criminals also make efforts to remove themselves from surveillance footage, whether by bribing technicians or hacking the local mesh. When possible, they act remotely. It is easier for an assassin to use a hacked service robot or airlock to eliminate a target than to pull the trigger themselves. For elaborate schemes, some criminals fork themselves so they become a conspiracy of one, with a lower chance of betrayal. Terrorists have used specially pruned beta forks for suicide missions, martyring themselves dozens or hundreds of times. More importantly, if the crime is subtle enough, no one will ever realize it was committed. A soul trafficker who works at a farcasting facility could secretly copy off egos for later resale without ever being caught, if they are careful enough.

Investigators who tackle skilled crime have to outthink their adversaries to have a chance. Every technique criminals deploy can be countered. Blind spots in sensor networks can be found through analysis. Hacks can be traced back to their origin. Gait analysis can identify a unique ego, no matter what morph it is sleeved into. Network-traffic analysis can identify darknets and illicit mesh communications. However, as one side develops a method of fooling the other, a counter-technique will soon appear. It is a neverending arms race between cops and crooks. Success on either side of the law requires good planning, skill, cunning, and a bit of luck.

In any case, crime requires time and good planning to pull off. Once the police can identify a suspect, they can usually get enough evidence to prove their guilt. The most successful criminals are never identified as suspects in the first place.

Identity Issues

Criminals make frequent use of identity theft to hide their footsteps. It is easy to assume the identity of someone who was lost in the Fall and only recently pulled out of cold storage. Brainprints can uniquely identify an ego, but even these change naturally over time, especially with significant use of drugs or mental trauma. Biometric data only applies to a particular biomorph, so resleeving can bypass that method of identification. Morph nanotat IDs and serial numbers can be altered. And with so many aspects of people’s lives stored online, identity theft remains a serious issue.

This is further complicated by the sheer number of personal identification databases and systems currently in use. The Fall wiped out most of the old Earth identity data banks. While SAPIENT ID, primarily used by the LLA and PC, is the most prevalent identification system, it is by no means the only one. There are almost as many identification systems as there are habitats. The lack of centralization among identification systems provides a very large gap for identity fabricators to slip through. Of course, many factions do not want to centralize personal identification, calling out its use as a social-control mechanism.

If a crime goes undetected, at least for a while, a criminal will have plenty of opportuniy to change their identity and/or escape the jurisdiction. It is even possible to bypass normal farcasting security checks and instead use secret illicit farcasting services, an act known as darkcasting. Cartels and other secretive groups often run darkcasting operations to transfer egos from one habitat to another without alerting the authorities. Once a criminal has escaped a habitat, they may still need to worry about ego hunters, but only if the hunters can see past the layers of false identities assumed by the suspect.

Prosecution and Punishment

Hypercorp-controlled polities maintain traditional criminal-justice systems. Fear of AIs has kept them from completely replacing judges and juries, but they are increasingly common throughout the system. More frequently, ALIs are provided as public defenders for those who cannot afford their own private lawyers. AI judgments are frequently critiqued for biases incorporated in to their algorithms, though strong efforts have been made to push them towards impartiality and away from implicit transhuman biases. Likewise, most legal systems remain biased towards more privileged members of that society; the higher the status of the offender, the less draconian the punishment will be.

Prison has largely been replaced as the preferred method of punishment. In the inner system, most offenders suffer financial consequences: liens, fines, property seizure, and, in extreme cases, indentured servitude. Morphs are considered property, so sentencing can involve the seizure of your own body. Since even murder can be reduced to the monetary cost of a new morph and therapy for the victim, plus punitive damages, this approach is popular even outside of conservative habitats. Sentences also sometimes involve lifetime punishments. A felon may be denied access to elite habitats or lose the right to purchase a biomorph, forcing a criminal to remain in the clanking masses for eternity.

Habitual re-offenders and violent criminals may also be forced to undergo psychosurgery to alter their personality, at least in hypercorp polities. Ostensibly, this is to help the offender more effectively re-integrate into society, curbing or eliminating antisocial tendencies, but it can also used to make the criminal more docile and loyal to the local government. Forcible editing of minds is considered a severe crime in almost all autonomist habitats, so it rarely used to punish criminals. However, some anarchists may ask offenders to undergo voluntary psychosurgery as part of their resolution process in order to correct whatever psychological issue that motivated their crimes in the first place.

The Jovian Republic remains the only major polity to regularly sentence criminals to physical prison. The Junta maintains multiple physical prisons to house criminals, the most notable ones held on the inhospitable moon Io. Prisoners are used as labor and experimental test subjects for various Jovian black ops research projects.

The mere threat of these prisons serves as a useful tool to keep the populace in line and potential dissidents from acting out.

Outside of the Republic, a few hypercorps maintain small prisons for habitats that still inflict them as punishment. For the most part these are located far from other habitats, notably on Mercury, remote asteroids, or assorted exoplanets. Virtual prisons are more cost effective and thus more extensively employed, with convicted criminals placed in cold storage or time-accelerated simulspace for the duration of their sentence. A few habitats retain capital punishments for severe crimes, but only the most dangerous and unstable criminals are killed and ego-wiped, with all backups destroyed.

Extropian Contract Law

In Extropia and other so-called “anarcho-capitalist” habitats, the only laws that exist are contracts consensually signed between individuals and/or corporations. Each contract specifies which legal code and freelance judiciary service is used to settle disputes. Various private courts exist, each with their own interpretations of miscellaneous legal principles. Most subscribe to larger legal associations like the Extropian Legal Guild, Free Bar Association, or Mutualist Code, which all have pre-set agreements on handling legal disputes with each other, ensuring quick arbitration.

Social services freely provided by other habitats are handled as contractual business affairs in Extropian habs. If you want police protection, you must subscribe to a security firm for legal and physical protection. Take note of the breadth of coverage you select; security firms typically place drone silos around the habitat for emergency EMT services and rapid armed response, but such protections are not available with all plans. Unprotected people can be attacked or robbed at will. Other services such as healthcare, transportation, backups, education, and insurance must also be purchased. To even enter an Extropian habitat, you must sign an access, usage, and life-support rental agreement with the owning entity. Various hypercorps offer package bundles for these services.

A free court’s legal AIs will automatically litigate minor infractions (called micro-torts) in mere seconds. More complex cases will be handled by the private courts and all parties are expected to abide by the results. Punishments incorporate fines, property forfeiture, and rep penalties. In extreme cases, a suspect may be forced into indenture or serve in a time-accelerated simulspace prison. If one party does not agree to the terms, they may suffer a major reputation hit and other Extropians will likely refuse dealings with them. Bounty hunters may also be dispatched in pursuit of suspects that abdicate on legal judgments.

Autonomist Legalities

In autonomist habitats run by anarchists and scum, there are no formal laws, only a set of norms decided by group consensus and collective action. Every sapient being is considered an autonomous person, free to do as they will, as long as they do not infinge upon others. Since everyone has access to nanofab, theft and other property crimes are meaningless. However, actions that are coercive or anti-social are not considered acceptable: assault, harassment, forknapping, mindhacking, threats to the habitat itself, and other non-consensual acts.

There are no police, so trangressions are handled by a community response. This can range from bystanders attempting to diffuse a situation to intervention by an armed posse of nearby residents. The entire community polices itself. Autonomists try to defuse potentially violent situations before they erupt. Everyone has access to surveillance feeds and sensor logs, so abnormal activity is quickly noted. People trained in conflict-resolution techniques will be called up to handle disputes. If an investigation is called for, locals will convene an ad-hoc task force to handle the matter. Residents freely carry weapons to deal with anyone who breaks the peace, and volunteer militias with drone support are called upon to deal with heavily armed aggressors.

When people do create problems in autonomist space, the response is geared towards finding out why that happened and what help the offender needs rather than simple punishment. The process is considered a collective effort, with impartial volunteers evaluating the case for conflict resolution and rehabilitation processes. The principles of restorative justice are followed, meaning that the focus is on repairing any harm done and allowing people affected by a crime to participate in its resolution. Most anarchist habitats maintain community crisis centers to guide this effort. Any resolutions must be voluntarily accepted by the offender. If they fail to support the process, they will suffer rep hits and possibly exile off the habitat. Prison and similar punitive measures are considered barbaric in autonomist circles.

Property Claims

The doctrine of “property rights without sovereignty” applies to claims made on asteroids, exoplanets, and other celestial bodies. A discoverer of a particular resource can only lay claim to it as long as they continually use it. If the land or resource is abandoned, then anyone else can claim it for themselves. When there is a conflict over ownership, parties sometimes resolve the dispute through negotiations or legal proceedings (if they share the same polity). Nothing stops either side from using deception or violence to claim the disputed resource, though. More than a few asteroids and exoplanets have changed hands after a skirmish or raid.

Gatecrashing Law

The owners of the various pandora gates dictate terms to anyone who wants to use them. Leasing gate time is incredibly expensive, but costs can be mitigated by sharing a small percentage stake in new discoveries, exploited resources, or colony revenue. Most gatecrashers must sign contracts ceding ownership of anything they find to the organization sponsoring the expedition, though some sponsors offer percentages of claims as well.

New exoplanets are a lawless frontier. Gatecrashers operate by themselves, with no law enforcement nearby. Some contracts specify that a mission is bound by the laws of the sponsoring entity, enabling inestigations and prosecution of crimes, but this can be difficult to enforce. Most gatecrashers operate in a manner similar to the military, with the expedition leader’s commands as the only law.

Exoplanet colonies usually have a similar legal structure to the polity that sponsored their creation. However, most colonies are extremely isolated, so the leadership has far more control over their populace. It is very difficult to leave an exoplanet colony, even in the best circumstances. Colonies have suffered from totalitarian leaders, abuse, and exploitation because residents can’t leave or contact other habitats for help.

New Target: Revi

[Begin Decrypted Message]

Team, I’m re-tasking you. Your new objective is to track down a wanted terrorist known as Revi. BOLO reports place her in your region. She’s an escapee from Cognite’s disastrous FUTURA program, diagnosed with the full checklist of psychopathic traits, and believed to be infected with the Watts-MacLeod virus. Treat her as an infectious exsurgent. Cognite agents are hot on her trail — and she hunts them in kind, holding some twisted biocon view that they murdered her crèche mates so that other egos could sleeve into their morphs. She retains her own original morph, an advanced futura design with enhanced cognitive capabilities, heavily modified. She makes extensive use of biosculpting and is believed to operate within Ultimate cells, using them as cover. Approach with caution; her profile pegs her as a close-combat specialist with a preternatural tactical sense. Your job is to get to her first and neutralize her. Take her out if you have to, just don’t let Cognite get her back.

[End Decrypted Message]