The body politic is composed of so many unresolved traumas set against each other in a state of rest - which beget more traumas in turn - that various layers of privacy are the only means that such a society can continue on: it intermingles with itself using a multitude of curtains between its subjects, and all sorts of harmonizing thoughts are projected onto subjects via subjects, until some calamitous crisis - large or small - removes the curtains by force, in one way or another.
More often than not, this is a chaotic and violent process, so that a bounty of fresh traumas are generated while others are resolved.
Through the pursuit of security, or even vengeance, we've given police, intelligence agencies, and the court system the ability to penetrate and cleave through the layers of privacy, the curtains, that allow a fundamentally self-antagonistic society to sit with itself. Reveal the truth, in other words, and perpetrators get their just deserts, and victims are made whole again.
This conceptual split benefits the carceral and military ideologies that our imperial society rests on quite handily, but of course its contrived truth only appears in a fraction of cases, if one is being generous.
There is no ultimate truth in the legal judgment, that is if the judgment is meted out by an institution sustained by capital. Judgment in this case only becomes the means to shed the light necessary to guide the sustained application of extraction.
Another way to put it is this: legal judgment is the laser that guides the cutting saw, as in some way capital must preserve the chunks of resources that it tears from the earth, whether those resources are natural or human.
Those that wish to not get cut have to engage in all manner of contrivance to escape the teeth of a capitalist society, which regularly sheds its most vulnerable and "superfluous" through the course of its operation. Doubtless, when the vulnerable and superfluous work to protect or even sustain themselves, by definition they often do so outside of the "law," the code that governs a capitalist society.
And so a given investigation can be riddled with "suspicious" behavior, which is only so much shrinking back from the light of the extractor, on the part of the vulnerable.
One's "precarity" in such a state of affairs is a global attribute, which governs one's impulses to take steps to protect oneself, which, the more sustained and numerous these efforts are, the more of a disturbance they cause which can attract the attention of the legal and security apparatus.
