The Null Device

An interesting essay about the paradoxical effects of security systems, by scifi author Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
Police departments, especially in small communities, began to slow their responses to homes with security systems--always assuming that the alarm was tripped by user error or by a bug in the system. In larger communities, people who triggered their own alarms often were flagged so that the department wouldn't waste its resources on them. The net result was that the illusion of safety made these people less secure than they had been before.

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