Don't know much about Eclipse Phase rules. But generally Cyberpunk works on there being a culture and a counter-culture. The culture tolerates the counter-culture because it is useful.

Given what you said about the setting, the Orwellian main culture may not hunting down the the criminals because they are a useful pressure valve. People can join the underground and feel like they do something, while sill being directed.
Another thing is corporations might prefer an underground to cover some of their corporate espionage and sabotage.
And naturally there is the underground underground that tries to play everyone against everyone else for a little bit of freedom.

Alternately, security is incomplete: a panopticon. Yes, you could be watched anywhere at any time but in truth you're not. There's so much data to filter through that unobtrusive crimes go undetected for months and it's only after investigation that the pieces are put together and the perpetrators are uncovered.

The public, and maybe even the rank-and-file of the corporate police force, believe that surveillance is more powerful than it is, and that's what keeps the system working.

So the players can either be that rank-and-file, slowly realizing how flawed their organization is... or they can be members of the elite secret unit required to hide the big lie.

30df25 2012/01/15(Sun)14:42 No. 7890 ID: 30df25
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High profile cases for police in a post-Singularity setting?
- Anonymous already mentioned one of the problems with omniscience: the time it takes to process all that data. Sure the criminal was recorded somewhere, but even with expert-sysystem AIs that still only narrows down the footage to 72 hours worth of useful tape, which would need to be reviewed and correlated by actuals with training. However, the PCs have to find the culprits in 48 hours "or else," so they're sent to do conventional forensics and investigation.
- Take a page from Masamune Shirow's "Ghost In The Shell": the criminals are people who were briefly hijacked and injected with a compulsion that seemed harmless at the time. All the footage shows the hijacked people, but never the hijacker since the hijacked ones never broke behaviour patterns before the compulsion was triggered... can't even tell how long a 'puppet' had the compulsion since it could lay dormant for years.
- this time borrowing nan idea from distributed computing: the crimes are committed by teams of people, but each person does something small and innocuous, something that would not exceed detection thresholds for uncivil behaviour. ie.: man found dead, poisoned after spending the afternoon in a cafe. No trace of the poison in the cafe's plumbing, nor on any of the staff. None of the drinking containers detect for poison. Turns out it was a half-dozen patrons in the busy cafe, each depositing a small amount on the victim's cups with accidents or helpful carrying during the day. Each small amount was harmless, and wouldn't alert the shop's pollution monitors, but as the victim drank, and got new cups, the poison accumulated to a fatal dose in her bloodstream.

Or, alternately, you could make things easier on yourself as a GM and *not* have omniscient surveillance in your world.

But that would not be realistic. To me maintaining my own suspension of disbelief is more important than anything else. The minute I can't do that I lose interest in GMing.

The obvious solution is that the 24/7 surveillance is fairly trivially broken, but infrequently so (with most users either not even considering the possibility, or deciding the benefits outweigh the privacy limitations). Making the system totally completely secure would not only be impossible, it would be vastly more expensive than dealing with the issues caused by untracked users.
Making the system voluntary leaves plenty of room for areas with minimal tracking. Read 'Harmony' by Project Itoh for some ideas.

use a spin on the GITS "ghost hacking" idea:

the criminals have all been mind hacked. they do not remember committing the crimes, nor what they did with the loot.

the realm crooks are the ones who controlled these victims

are you bad enough dudes to find them?


or maybe its someone exploiting the constant survilance: blackmail done via stolen personal info gleamed from surveillance logs