Future technology platforms will assist law enforcement in this process by equipping every police and army officer with a specialized handset device that contains several distinct (and highly secure) apps. One app will handle salaries and serve as the interface between officers and the ministry that pays them. In Afghanistan, the telecom Roshan has launched a pilot program to pay Afghan national police officers electronically through a mobile banking platform—a bold move geared toward ending the rampant corruption that cripples the country’s finances. On these specialized phones, another app could require officers to report their daily activities, as they might in a logbook, storing that information in the cloud that commanders could later mine for metrics on efficiency and impact. Other apps could offer training tips or virtual mentors for newly integrated officers—as in the case of Libya, where many of the militia fighters were integrated into the newly created army—and they could provide secure online spaces for anonymous reporting of corruption or other illegal activities by other officers.
Citizen reporting over mobile platforms would strengthen the state’s ability to maintain security, should the two sides choose to work together. Every citizen with a mobile device is a potential witness and investigator, more widely dispersed than any law-enforcement body and ready to document evidence of wrongdoing. In the best cases, citizens will choose to participate in these mobile vigilance activities, out of national sentiment or self-interest, and together with the state they will help build a safer and more honest society. In the worst cases, where large portions of the population distrust the government or favor the ex-combatants (like those who fought the battle against Gadhafi), those citizen-reporting channels could be used to share false information and waste police time.
Citizen engagement will be crucial beyond initial security issues, too. With the right platforms and a government inclined toward transparency, people on the ground will be able to monitor progress, report corruption, share suggestions and become an integral part of the conversations between the government, NGOs and foreign actors—all using mobile phones. We spoke with the Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who remains among the most tech-savvy leaders in Africa, and asked how mobile technology is transforming the way citizens address local challenges. “Where people have needs—economic, security and social—they will turn to their phones,” he said, “because their phones are the only way to protect themselves. People who need immediate help can now get it.” This, he explained, was a game-changer for populations in developing countries and particularly for people emerging from conflict or crisis. Building trust in the government is a crucial task, and by leveraging citizen participation through open platforms, this process can be much quicker and more sustainable: “In Rwanda, we have built a community policing program, where the community passes on information,” Kagame said, stressing that it was made much more efficient by the use of technology.
As crowd-sourcing becomes a defining feature in the future of the rule of law—at least in the aftermath of conflict or disaster—a culture of accountability will slowly emerge. Fears of violence or looting will remain, but societies in the future will have all of their personal possessions and their historical artifacts documented online, so there won’t be a question of what’s missing when security returns. Citizens will be rewarded for sending in photos of thieves (even if they’re police) that show their faces and their loot. The risk of retaliation would be real, but evidence suggests that despite their fear there is almost always a critical mass of people willing to take that risk. And the more people there are willing to report crime, the more the risk to the individual is reduced. Imagine if the ransacking of Iraq’s celebrated Baghdad Museum in 2003 had occurred twenty years later: How long would those thieves have been able to hide their treasures (let alone try to sell them) if their theft had instantly been recorded and broadcast across the country, and other citizens were highly motivated to inform on them?
Lost artifacts damage a society’s dignity and the preservation of its culture, but lost weapons constitute a far greater danger to a country’s stability. Weapons and small arms routinely disappear after conflicts and find their way onto the black market (an estimated $1 billion annual business), later appearing in the hands of militias, gangs and armies in other countries. Radio frequency identification (RFID) chips could represent a solution to this challenge. RFID chips or tags contain electronically stored information and can be as small as a grain of rice. They are ever present today, in everything from our phones and passports to the products we buy. (They’re even in our pets: RFID chips embedded under the skin or on an ear are used to help identify lost animals.) If major states signed treaties that required weapons manufacturers to implant unremovable RFID chips in all of their products, it would make the hunt for arms caches and the interdiction of arms shipments much easier. Given that today’s RFID chips can be easily fried in a microwave, the chips of the future will need a shield that protects them against tampering. (We assume there will be a technological cat-and-mouse game between governments who want to track the weapons with RFID chips and arms traffickers who want to deal the weapons off the grid.) When weapons with RFID chips were recovered, it would be possible to trace where they’d been if the chips themselves were designed to store location data. This wouldn’t stop the trafficking of arms but it would put pressure on the larger actors in the arms trade.
States that donate weapons to rebel movements often want to know what happens to those arms. With RFID chips, such investments could be tracked. The Libyan revolutionaries were an unknown quantity to almost everyone, so in the absence of any tracking capability, governments that distributed arms to them had to weigh the benefit of a successful revolution with the possible consequences of those weapons going underground. (In the beginning of 2012, some of the weaponry that Libyan militias used wound up in Mali with disgruntled Tuareg fighters. This, combined with the return of the Tuareg contingent of Gadhafi’s army, led to a violent antigovernment campaign that created the conditions for a military coup.)
Electronically traceable arms distribution will have to overcome hurdles. It will cost money to design weapons that include the RFID; arms manufacturers profit from a large illicit market for their products; and states and arms dealers alike rather enjoy the anonymity of weapons distribution today. It’s hard to imagine any superpower willingly sacrificing its ability to have plausible deniability regarding arms caches or covertly supplied arms for some long-term greater good. Moreover, states might claim that falsely planting another country’s weapons in a conflict zone would point to their involvement and lead to even more conflict. But international pressure might make a difference.
Luckily, there are myriad other ways the RFID technology can be used in the short term in reconstruction efforts. RFID tags can be used to track aid deliveries and other essential supplies, to verify pharmaceuticals and other products as legitimate, and to generally limit waste or graft in large contracting projects. The World Food Program (WFP) has experimented with tracking food deliveries in Somalia, using bar codes and RFID chips to determine which suppliers are honest and deliver food to the target area. This type of tracking system—inexpensive, ubiquitous and reliable—could demonstrably help streamline the serpentine world of aid distribution by enhancing accountability and providing data that can be used to measure success and effectiveness, even in the least-connected places.