Slashdot Mirror
Big Brother Will Be Watching You In Florida
An anonymous reader submits "The Florida Times Union is running a story about the city of Manalapan putting up cameras and an automatic optical recognition system to check the license plates of every car to drive through town. As usual the article spins the system as something positive to battle crime. Just one step close to Eric Arthur Blair's vision of 1984."
www.phantomplate.com
I was about to ask, until I discovered that George Orwell is a pen-name.
They say they'll destroy the data after 3 months. While this whole thing reeks evil to me, at least [they say] they're not going to be storing all this info in perpetuity.
-PM
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
You do know Eric Arthur Blair was only George Orwell's pen name.
All you have to do is drive into town in reverse!!!
For a slashdotter, that means not buying anything from an ebay seller who lives there.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Over there, cars are installed with a fare-paying device which automatically pays road-toll depending where and when you're driving on which section of the road.
It's bad, but nothing shocking.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
aren't there covers you can put on license plates so cameras can't read your digits?
For those of you who aren't savvy to the real name, Eric Arthur Blair is George Orwell's real name.
more info
"Hu, ho, ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Hu, ho ho-ah-oh-oh-oh. Mario Paint! Whoaaa!"
In London we have cameras which recognise numberplates to check if people have paid the congestion charge to enter city centre. Numberplate recognition is also used on speed cameras to automatically send speeding tickets to offenders.
People get so worked up over a bunch of cameras...but theses cameras are in public places, people are supposed to be able to see you there!
if they want to catch people running red lights they could just do photos at intersections. this would not be helpful for tracking people, because cars don't neccessarily mean that the owner is in it.
Normally, I would be against "big brother", but in this case aren't cameras basically able to see only what the general public would be able to see anyway?
Computers obviously are less discriminatory and hopefully more reliable than a human, if the software is done right. However, the issue is privacy, so I digress. But, computer vs. policeman aside, what difference does it make if a police officer was stationed looking for people?
If a camera was focused on private property (like on a house), then that would certainly be an invasion of privacy (that kind of survellience is hopefully illegal), or the government had "special" means that cannot be easily monitored such as those security blimps then I would agree it's a loss of privacy.
I'm certainly for as little government as possible. But in this case is privacy really being lost? The same thing can be done with humans, afterall, and no one complains about loss of privacy by seeing a police officer legally on public land looking for criminals.
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
The camera takes infrared photos of the license plate. Is there a material that is opaque in the near-infrared spectrum, while being transparent to the visible spectrum?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Manalapan has a population of 321. It's probably just some guy with a pair of binoculars.
This coming from the same state that also tails rappers when they come to shoot their music videos.
The only reason that I'm really worried is that I like to drive without my pants on sometimes.
No, of course not. This is Slashdot, which can only mean at some point in this thread somebody will also manage to work Microsoft, George W. Bush, NSA and SCO into the conversation.
Maybe it is easier with license numbers, after all we have had character recogintion for quite some time that is very good. But what do you do with it?
Guess you could use it to tell where all of your tourists are coming from or going to.
From the submitter:
"Just one step close to Eric Arthur Blair's vision of 1984"
Sir, CCTV being used to monitor traffic is nothing new and being a slashdot reader muchless, lucky article submitter, I'd advise you to check the fastenings of your cranial mindwave protection device.
All who got the memo know quite well that 1984 conditions will have arrived in full when the TiVo records you.
Good day.
A large part of the planet has already lived through Animal Farm... can 1984 really be that bad? :)
"Eric Arthur Blair's vision of 1984"?
Surely you mean Anthony Charles Lynton Blair's vision of 2004?
Schlaep!
As usual the article spins the system as something positive to battle crime C'mon tell us what you REALLY think.
You can't spell LOLCATZPURR without TROLL.
How is this NOT something helpful in the fight against crime? How is this an invasion of privacy?
ie, "Courts have ruled that in a public area, you have no expectation of privacy,"
System scans license plate --> finds license plate is for a stolen car --> police notified of location in real time.
How is that a bad thing, again?
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
They're monitoring my car, not me. Legally there's a big difference. The court's generally held that people in vehicles have a significantly decreased expectation of privacy.
How the hell am I going to end up in Florida? Sure, there are a lot of transcendent individuals out here in California, but I never smoke the stuff.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
So, it's basically a bunch of paranoid rich assholes using technology to weed out the undesirables. Whee.
In recent years, I've come to the conclusion that negative choices are inevitable. The Government has too much paranoia about the paranoid people who elect it.
Almost anything can be a force for good or evil. Most things are pretty neutral - it's the choices the user makes that decides these things.
How can this be a force for good? Easy. And it has nothing to do with crimefighting. Leave that to Batman - he's better at it, even though he's fictional.
The ability to ID a car is the same as the ability to track a car. This would be invaluable to taxi companies and bus companies, both of whom would love an easy, cheap way to monitor where their drivers are. Customers would love it too. Know where the next bus is, exactly, and when it will get to where you are.
(GPS is horrible at this - too easily blocked by buildings, and you still need a WIFI system to get the location once the vehicle knows it. Lots of expense, which a camera system would negate.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What would happen if their system ends up catching someone on the FBI's most wanted list? Also, how would people feel if it weren't a camera but a cop sitting in place writing down and calling in every license tag? Also, do you realize your license tag has perhaps been photographed before? Automated toll booths, systems to catch people who run red lights, or speed, etc...
I'm not necessarily for or against this, I'm just asking the questions.
Fortunately, in Florida, Big Brother is 87, confined to a Rascal scooter, and has very poor eyesight.
You know what?
Sure - no question - this is very large step towards 1984.
To deal with the issue - we have to realize that when the supreme court says you have the right to privacy - you have total complete right - even if it means taking the life of another person (abortion) you have total complete rights to privacy.
However - when you do not have the right to privacy - you have didlee squat.
This strange polarization is wherein lies the problem.
We will argue in this thread that this or that is wrong - when really what we mean is that it is not porportional.
The Camera seems overkill - it also smacks of the beginning of a lie - income tax and the social security number - one was to be repealled after the war - the other was never to be used for anything other than social security (as in money you get when you're old).
The issue here is not privacy - it is unreasonable search because they are creating a public record based on the presumption of guilt when in fact the government has no right to create presumptive records.
(or do they)
The fact is they do all the time - but it is limited by the cost of private research and cannot be inflicted wholesale - automation of government process will democratize whatever problems previously existed.
In short - instead of pestering a few people - they will pester everyone - and the backlash will create a political contraint.
This constraint feedback is what is most important. Democracies will work well- only if the average voted experiences the problem.
In the end - this is not a serious threat. It is predictable, and we will test it, and find out the benefits vs. the costs and we will vote - probably for the increased security and peace of mind. Westerners have not been subjected to a totalitarian government for a very long time - while street crime has persisted - thus the balance of risk tends towards a greater police powers.
AIK
of a story my brother told me (my big brother as it happens) about a speed camera that was put on the road somewhere in england. It was pointed against the traffic and took pictures of speeding vehicles from the front. Some pictures showed motorcyclists going through at 110mph with the middle finger sticking up!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Wait a minute.
I drove somewheres else.
Nevermind.
Keep hyperventilating.
Dawn of the Dead
Flamebait? Are you kidding me? Maybe it's not that funny, and maybe, MAYBE, it's a little off topic, but FLAMEBAIT!? C'mon.
There's a lot of transient traffic and there are a lot of people who like to prey on rich old folks.
"Courts have ruled that in a public area, you have no expectation of privacy..." - That's how the "Girls Gone Wild" guy got off when he photographed that 17 year-old. Er...I mean, he was aquitted.
we already have this on all highways. I'm sure everywhere else has it too. We have cameras that can recognise car license plates for all sorts of reasons: catching people exceeding speed limits, criminals, whatever. I see nothing wrong with that. You have a license plate on your car, so what? People can't read it? The police arent allowed to read it? Gimme a break.
As usually the opening wibble brings news of a great conspiracy theory. A conspiracy to do what exactly? Track stolen cars? See if the liscence plate is on a car that matches with the car it is supposed to be on? A conspiracy to catch people with bumpers dragging on the highway? Honestly, there is no conspiracy here, there isn't even a speed sensor on this thing. /. loves conspiracies, but I wouldn't mind anyone taking pictures of my sweet brown 89 Yugo with carbon steel bumper and safety glass.
I think I liked it better when the only supposed conspiracy was the one to make people buy tin foil.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
If you read the story, you'd see that this is in no way a state-wide issue, but a single municipality. The town, as it turns out, is one of the wealthiest per capita in the United States, and its citizens have recently suffered a rash of burglaries and other crimes. They demanded additional protection to curb these problems, and their tax dollars paid for this system among other things.
If you don't like this, you have no obligation to go there - it's not like an interstate passes through it or anything like that. In fact, it's on one of the barrier islands near Palm Springs.
linkey
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The place where this stuff is being installed is a pissant little town in FL whose wealthy 341 residents are demanding that police take action after burglars netted $400,000 worth of jewelry from the area.
Here is a MapQuest pic of Manalapan. You may want to zoom in. As you can see, it is located on a peninsula with not many ways in. So I'm guessing that they will place these detectors at these few arteries. Even so, I doubt they will be effective. As anyone here knows, OCR from camera images taken in anything other than a controlled environment is dicey at best.
But it doesn't matter anyway, because reading the article and taking note of the geography of Manalapan has led me to wonder if they've considered the burglars could come in BY BOAT.
-R
Very interesting ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
...it's called living in a small town.
No bigger brother than the grapevine.
Really, why must there be a single standard for everyone?
Let them be.
Here's a link.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Now the burglars will have to steal a car before they rob your house.
FWIK such a system is already in use in London. They use is to track down uninsured cars, carowners with unpaid tickets and that kind of things.
I would think that is a good thing. I wouldn't like to get involved in an accident where the driver is uninsured and having people paying their tickets is only a good thing I'd say.
Privacy is terrorism.
So, it's a tiny speck of a town, stuffed to the gills with millionares. If you drive there right now, if the police do not think your vehicle looks like it's one being driven by somebody with legitimate business there, they will pull you over to check out who you are. I went to a small private school in the area, and got pulled over all the time while visiting friends during high school (same for Palm Beach). A beater station wagon was a bit of a variance from the normal traffic. :) Very courteous officers, however.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
There's a big difference between being in public and having everything you do systematically logged by the government. The potential for abuse of such a system is very high. To consider one scenario, say your spouse hires a sleazy private detective to check up on you, who has a contact in the Ministry of Privacy (obOrwell), who finds out that you drove your car to Ogdenville about six months ago while you were supposed to be at a conference in Capital City.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
City? It's population is under 500!
. ht ml
http://www.city-data.com/city/Manalapan-Florida
Hell, considering I'm a resident of that county, I wouldn't even call it a village! That is like an incredibly stuck up housing development!
--- Ãther SPOON!
- This is being installed in one little town
- That recently had a rash of burglaries
- From houses that are mostly worth 500K +
- At the insistence of the residents themselves
This is NOT, I repeat NOT 1984 and it is NOT a conspiracy to do anything but scare the conspiracy freaks.... this isn't england after all!
Exactly what does it take to be on the 'special monitoring' list? There are already protections about in what ways you can be harassed by following and surveillance, but they aren't mentioned by this article. My pessimism suspects that they aren't considered by the system.
This automated system is akin to having a police officer in each location with a camera, whose sole responsibility is to record license plates. How would you feel about living in that society?
Even if it takes a warrant to be put on this 'lookout' list, do you really trust giving up the rest of this data for the "three months" they'll allegedly have it? Who is allowed to access it while it's there? What kind of accesses are allowed? Where is the line between privacy and security? To take it a step further, how would you feel about having your every move within the whole town recorded?
I'd say that this system has too much potential for abuse.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Cause I don't even have a license plate, it fell off over a month ago!
Ybor city in tampa had facial recognition cameras in place for over a year.
I consider that a whole lot worse than this story.
wdd
I hope they didn't pay big bucks for this system:
1. Wear a mask driving into town.
2. Use a recently-stolen tag. Replace the tag when done.
Phew! It's all too easy to circumvent this kind of crap.
In most small towns, there is little real law enforcement experience. Maybe they should just hire another cop. There are only a few homes in the town.
Now, if only we had some robinhood like criminals who stole not for greed but for good...that would be nice.
..what possible belief could they have that it would actually help fight crime? It's far more believable that they would see it contributing to the traffic fine trough.
Frankly, I see local policemen and governments as only being selectively interested in fighting crime anyway. Not once ever has a policeman taken any interest in any buglary reports I've filed throughout my lifetime but they're interest every day in the speed in which I drive. One makes money and the other costs money. Seems clear to me.
...pointed at, say, oh, I don't know...how about your front door or driveway?
...In Theory this doesn't sound too evil.... but isn't this America? the bastion of liberty and freedom?
Hearing about George Bush praying to his god and starting wasteful wars, the extreme censorship campaign the FCC has gone on, the garbage laws in the DMCA, and the numerous monopolies abound from software to broadcasting-- it sounds like America isn't really America at all and has just become one giant shit hole that only gets worse with age.
That's just my opinion.
It'll be Big Brother when they start taking pictures of stuff INSIDE your car. Like when you drive by with that very attractive young lady. I'm sure your wife would be interested in that. Some enterprising young employee (Read: Blackmailer) for the government could make quite a bit of money.
I'm sure you can think of other examples. But until they start either tracking your movement about the country with this, OR looking at what's in your car, then it's got nothing on Big Brother.
What's scary about this is that the cameras to do these things will be in place. However, it would still take quite a bit of money to track people. And with budgets small, it's unlikely something that we need to be paranoid about will come along any time soon.
Isn't the reaction to this a little knee jerk? I'm curious as to whether or not this info will be given out for civil cases (say, a divorce related to adultery or the like). If this information is just used to nail drivers on a suspended license, idiots without insurance or criminals with warrants I welcome it.
Jeez, I live in Jacksonville, and I missed the article. Actually, while I'm consistently paranoid, I'd love to see cameras (preferably, on remote-control balloons, as well as at specific locations), to catch and punish stuff like
- psychos racing on 95 at rush hour ("95 on 95", as it were). This literally happens, with 2 or 3 cars swerving from lane to lane and flying past everyone, and it scares the hell out of me.
- vicious idiots who blithely drive through an intersection 5 seconds _after_ it turns red for them.
- blind and indifferent yazoos changing lanes without looking to notice that, yes, there IS somebody already there.
and even
- jerks who throw out their cigarette butts at intersections.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Driving is a responsibility not a right.
You do not have the right to drive, let alone drive anonomously.
If you don't like it, exercise your right no not drive.
Cops do random checks of license plates all the time, the only difference is this system is much more efficient.
Will you complain when the system locates your stolen car? Will you complain when the system notifies the police that a pedifile is in your area who has a restriction against being there?
The silent black helicopters are not always after you.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Manalapan is basic the south, richer end of Palm Beach. Palm Beach County. The only thing in Manalapan is ~200 $4 million+ homes, all situated on a thin strip of land between Lake Worth (the lake) and the ocean. Basically the residents want to turn their town into a gated community. This policy would allow the police to identify traffic into and out of the community as desirable or not, just as any gated community. With the synergies of information from the PATRIOT act, they can easily identify who is a "worker" "resident" or potential thief (or worse, a real estate agent).
The police in Manalapan are already looking at what color the people are who are driving, but it's difficult to tell if brown people are working there, instead of (naturally) robbing houses. As far as I'm concerned, the residents of Manalapan are a bunch of well-back rich bastards with nothing better to do than whine and complain. This is just another in a long line of questionable governmental actions/decisions coming out of Manalapan.
As far as my credibility, I've lived most of my life in Jupiter, FL (about 20 miles north).
For those who don't know, a "well-back" is a derogotory term for a transplanted New Yorker/New Jerseyite.
For instance --
Well, back in New Jersey, we got good deli...
I wonder how many of the DC sniper's victims would be alive today if there had been cameras trained on the streets there...
...those unwitting fallen soldiers in our war for "privacy in public"... we should speak their names with reverence every time we have a quick boink in a back-alley or are able to litter or speed with impunity.
It somewhat reminded me of this technology
Is there a way to mod an entire story down for being flame-bait? :P
... installs some cameras and suddenly it's the Feds giving you a "rat hat".
Put down the bongs, people.
Imagine that, up until now, license plates were not issued. In fact, the concept had never even been conceived of. You could drive anywhere anonymously. Then suddenly, the government announces that everyone must display unique numbers on their cars. The outcry from privacy advocates would be deafening. But we've had license plates for almost a century, and no one brings it up as an issue. If this technology had existed since the inception of automobiles, people would just accept as a given just like license plates.
Unknown host pong.
Hackneyed e-business jokes aside...
...this looks a lot like a variation on the old game of dreaming up ordinances to give the cops the ability to run the "riffraff" out of town. It has appeared in various disguises over the years--with a variety of names, a variety of methods, but one single purpose: to give a cop plausible reason to stop a black or Hispanic driving through town, and tell him or her to leave.
Which is, of course, illegal. In a town with an obscene amount of money (note the statistic that there are 11 police officers in Manalapan, for only 321 residents--and they only have two or three burglaries a year) fighting a traffic stop through appellate procedures would be futile. But once they establish a pattern of stopping and harassing minorities, Manalapan will be a sitting duck for a lawsuit by any number of "public interest" groups like Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH.
Radar clocks Mini at Mach 3
Picture a rubber beach sandal, stomping on a human face forever.
Honestly? Why are people getting upset about this. So the local town council records my license plate as you drive through, so what? I live in FL, so there's always the possibility I'll end up there one day).
Am I pointing out the obvious when I remind Slashdotters that
1. Law enforcement really don't care where you are if you're not actively committing a crime. They'll surely care if you do commit a crime, and as the poster pointed out, that's mainly what the system is for.
2. CCTV cameras exist in all metropolitan areas. They film your car driving by and, bingo! your license plate is on camera.
3. The Government is not out to get you, they just want your taxes! Stop being so paranoid!
As usual the article spins the system as something positive to battle crime.
And as usual slashdot spins it as an invasion of privacy.
When it is named after a shitty place in Jersey. Odds are they don't even know where Manalapan, NJ is but as with the rest of that hellhole state it is a dump. The irony is: most of Florida is nothing more than NJ mixed with Virginia in a subtropical climate. Screw 'em.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
What do you mean councilman Jones never shows up for work on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays? Let's have a talk with him
could be useful
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
9/04 GOAT SE
O
F l o r i d a
Your an idiot.
Um, wrong "your" bud, unimportant in normal conversation but calling the parent an idiot and then flunking English isn't allowed.
They can't put cameras on your property.
Are you sure about that? They can with reasonable cause, and the patriot act allows surveillance under a whole host of circumstances. Please think before you post.
Thats rediculas, this will improve law enforcement and improve public safety
And for the love of God, use the damn spell check!!!
Annoying as they are.. Troll posts usually have a grain of truth in them.
I dont know if the submitter/mod put 1984 only in jest or seriousness..
But road-cameras have been around for a long time. Personally I dont like it.
But recording your license plate with a camera in public isn't really trampling on your right to privacy.
It has the possibility of it.. But I can record you with a camera on the side of my house to see you as you drive by.
The only real problem I see with public cameras is the line is more easily blurred.
Who is to say a church isn't public property? Or public housing?
If the post wasn't in jest someone needs to take their meds or keep better track of the news.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Tony Blair?
Like any other government watch system I'm all for it as long as all participating citizens have equal access to the database. Since a given citizen (ie. police officer) can access the database for any entry then I should be able to do the same.
.com scams just as their own "entreprenurial initiative" *snicker* did. If I pay the IRS then I should have as much access to their files as any IRS agent. ie. They should give me the interface and I should be able to conduct a few random searches to verify its integrity. If any of my tax dollars, in whole or in part, go to subsidize credit reporting agencies then I should have access to their lists. If my tax dollars support the FBI and CIA so that they can keep files on citizens then I should have full unimpeded access to those files and databases. I don't believe in the system of the government certifying who I can trust and who I can't. I didn't vote for those politicians. They haven't done anything to win my trust. If my bank at _all_ invests in Pizza Hut stock then I should have access to Pizza Hut's delivery list or else Pizza Hut shouldn't be able to say "I'm sorry, sir, we can't deliver unless you give a valid phone number for our database."
If I drive through that town then I should have as much access to the database as anyone else in that town including the police officers that can pan and scan the list at will. It's not my problem how they provide it but the provisions should be in place before the law is enacted or else it should be a dead law. My 401k investments funded their
I'm not talking about red tape and rigamarole FOIA access, either. I'm talking unimpeded ready public access. The type that we _don't_ have.
If the access is restricted then eventually someone's going to figure out a way to abuse it. Even if it's nothing more than using the system to time someone coming home from the grocery store on their 40th birthday in order to cover their car in whipping cream--it's all fun and games until that whipping cream causes them to drive headlong into a cafe full of casual diners.
Until I get full access then I'm going to keep saying "No. It's a load of horse dung." I'm looking out for the whipping cream covered SUV that goes headlong into a tree. I'm looking out for the bored billionaire wife who's blowing the police captain for kicks and wants to get a juicy dig on the immigrant landscaper that rebuffed her because he wanted to stay loyal to his wife.
As for the $400k in lost jewelry. Pfffft. It's more likely that gossip and insurance fraud are bigger players than actual crime. "Oh, come now dear... You didn't lose that much. Me and Betrand lost _TWICE_ that much just a week ago. We have the police report and insurance claim right here and it's been approved by our insurance agent (*under breath* who lives two miles down and is married to my cousin's daughter). Quit whining so much and go back to taking care of your poodle."
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
People seem to misunderstand that.
We've had cameras at many intersection for quite some time. Its just a matter of time before they put them to use in one way or another. For anyone in Florida contemplating any method to block the plates...don't. Anything that restricts a license plate's view is illegal. Even those simple license plate frames at the supermarket.
Somebody once asked "Why should you videotape your wedding?" So the groom can watch the video in reverse and see himself walk out of church a free man.
Apparently half the readers don't live in Florida...
They have a HUGE problem with people running lights here. I mean, HUGE. It's not a one or two car going through lights...it's like FIVE going through the lights. It's not like it's at one intersection either. Happens all the time.
Maybe this will finally cut down on that from happening, and the accidents it's been causing.
But if it's cameras checking our cars today, will we have to have RFID chips in our drivers licenses tomorrow to monitor our movements?
I hate to break the bad news to you, but...
As I've said before, let's have cameras everywhere in public, bots reading our emails and seeing our financial transactions, and a large number of humans to oversee any such operation. Then we could actually have a much more open society
check out my blog for some related material:
while_true
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
It's ironic to me that many people who are afraid of the coming "1984", could care less about the coming "Brave New World". I think it's up to decent folk to stop both.
A camera tapes you. If one tape-reviewer doesn't know you, he can ask until he finds someone who does. The tape can be matched with other tapes to see where you were and where you're going. The tape will be stored and reviewed by ever better automatic recognition tech, and those results stored in ever larger and cheaper databases.
I think this is a quantitative change in the "expectation of privacy" one has in public.
We are getting very close to "P-day" (coined by Brad Templeton): the last day of privacy, because from then on all our actions will be tracked retroactively if not currently. Or, as he puts it: "So you're already being watched. The computer that is watching you just hasn't been born quite yet."
Two good essays on why this type of surveillance hurts society and violates our rights:
"[Talking about Canada...] If these measures are allowed to go forward and the privacy-invasive principles they represent are accepted [then before long] our movements through the public streets will be relentlessly observed through proliferating police video surveillance cameras. Eventually, these cameras will likely be linked to biometric face-recognition technologies ... [indentifying] us by name and address as we go about our law-abiding business in the streets... I am well aware that these scenarios are likely to sound, to most people, like alarmist exaggeration. Certainly, the society I am describing bears no relation to the Canada we know. But anyone who is inclined to dismiss the risks out of hand should pause first to consider that the privacy-invasive measures already being implemented or developed right now would have been considered unthinkable in our country just a short year ago."
The place to stop unjustified intrusions on a fundamental human right such as privacy is right at the outset, at the very first attempt to enter where the state has no business treading. Otherwise, the terrain will have been conceded, and the battle lost...
Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do...
If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl...Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselve
While I find it interesting that George Orwell was merely a pen-name, I was one who didn't bother to look it up. 'Why,' you ask? Because I knew someone else would answer the question for me.
The fact that it was brought up in the first place, and subsequenly complained about is merely the effect of Slashdot colliding with human nature. Please, by all means, watch your Karma run down the drain, but don't wonder why some moderators agree that the original submission was annoying.
I had no doubt that I was not the only one who didn't bother looking it up. I'll bet some of the posts and positive moderations are from folks upset that they didn't find the right answer first.
--
AC (keeping my Karma in-tact)
Government agents could theoretically follow me around everywhere I go without breaking any rules; however, I have not given them a reason to do so, and they can't follow everyone around without spending so much money they'd break the entire economy. The reason why things like this scare people is because it implies that eventually it will be technologically feasible to collect large amounts of data about large amounts of people with little to no manpower. This results in a net decrease in privacy for everyone because things that used to be private only by difficulty lost their only protection.
Member of Orkut? Annoyed with spam?
http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/pluckyew.h tm
That RFID was in licence plates. At regular intervals, they'd broadcast the plate numbers.
Cop cars could recieve this data and investigate stolen cars.
For real I dreamt that idea.
God spoke to me
So what? This is nothing new. Everyone knows Pro Baseball has been tracking our automobile movements from space with their satalite network using our air bag sensors since the mid 90's and look at how much safer we all are at games?
Fuck off already. When you're in public.... YOU'RE IN PUBLIC!
/. editors and the article submitter are why legitimate claims against such systems do not get the attention they deserve.
Stop posting these fucking articles already. They're retarded.
If anything why not concentrate on what a WASTE OF MONEY such projects turn out to be. They're certainly not a violation of your privacy as you are in PUBLIC when they observe you.
People like the
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
April 04, 2004
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK (FOR THEMSELVES):
It's bad enough that they do this, but it's even worse that they brag about it. But wait, it gets worse:
So much for political oversight. So a doctor en route to an emergency is the same as a cop who's just driving too fast? Sheesh. Are these people for real?
UPDATE: Rand Simberg observes:
Indeed.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at April 04, 2004 04:27 PM
A means of identifying a vehicle while it's out and about in public. Why is this so hard to understand?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
How is this different from a cop with a laptop sitting at the gates?
We've come to falsely expect privacy because our world has grown so large. In older days, you would be recognized if you walked into town - without any biometric ID or other technology but common knowledge.
.....but only the major cases of abuse by swine make it to the papers. Did you happen to catch the latest one out of Portland, oregon? About 500 lbs of low IQ bacon on the hoof order followers "took down" a dangerous 72 year old BLIND granny terrorist because she dared to say "no" to them and wanted to keep an old family heirloom that was being removed from her property as an eyesore.She had junk in her yard and had a hard time cleaing it up all the time is the story. Beat, maced, then tasereed 4 times while she was on the ground. She got took down initially by being punched in the back of her head so far it knocked her prosethetic false eye loose by some brave "peoples servant". THEN when her 90 year old mother went to get her some water to wash out her eyes, they slammed her into the wall. The TAXPAYERS paid a 100 grand plus out of court settlement, but NOTHING happened to those fascist goons. NOTHING.
This crap goes on all the time since they militarized the hog forces with the introduction of the war on some drugs, you could see it change radically since then. We don't have cops now, we have rejects from some third world death squad. Over stuffed steroid crazed goons dressed in black with armor and automatic weapons. I mean, people have got to be able to see this now you would think..
Last summer, we got raided here at 12:30 am , our first night in our new place, because horror of horrors, there was a LIGHT ON in the window and someone called in a "tip". Didn't matter we were there moving in and working on the place everyday the week previous, nope, not a bit. Guns to the head, screamed at, whole nine yards. Didn't matter they didn't check with the owner, lives one house up the street. nope, all they needed was a "tip". Not fun to be awakened at o dark thirty have a glock put to your head while you are still shaking the cobwebs out. I made it as far as the door to see what was going on, sheesh, they goober would have plugged me you could see it, he was shaking and his eyes were all glazed over like he was on crack or something.
The people making the point of slippery slope are close but have missed it, it's *too late for that argument*, we have already slipped down, now all that's left is how much mud and crap we have to eat from here on out. I can't believe it's even being debated anymore like "well, if it ever gets bad..." Phooie, it got bad, now people are scared whitless because there's NOTHNG you can do about it except..well.. take it back, meet it head on when it happens. Take the country back from the ones who stole it.
The vote has been stolen, government has been hijacked, the courts are a collection of illegal kangaroo court overseers.. Let's face reality now, your incident, the old ladies incident, mine, they are tip of the iceberg, you can find examples all over the country, they happen daily. The courts routinely ignore born with rights, in favor of just protecting the elite and the status quo that keeps them that way. Sucks. And ALL this camera, biometrics ID, chips that arecoming are ALL for the purpose of finalising the takeover, all the other arguments are facades, window dressings. It really IS big brother moves by the elite, enforced by their mercenaries..
We HUNG goons at nuremberg for blindly "following orders" and being serial jerks and bullies,"just following orders from their 'superiors"" crap.
Eventually that'll happen here in the US, just like it happened in nuremberg, and as it happened in king georges time, You had the kings
agents, his goons and mercenaries then, and the quisling tories, equally disgusting. Just in the meantime and until then it's gonna get much, much worse.
On a related note from a few years ago, when various so-called "privacy" groups didn't care.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,16561,0
Change:
"Politically-active people still keep track of politically-active people"
to:
"The FBI still keeps track of politically-active people."
Doh...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Sadly, unlike your driving (home to work, and back again); the road to "total" information awareness is a vector quantity with constant acceleration.
Every year more and more companies/institutions are gathering more and more different types of information. Currently this information is separate (buying habbits for groceries and general merchandise, flying habbits, driving habbits, etc) with little or no cross referencing. As, processors become faster and more powerful, storage becomes larger and cheaper, and communication "roads" become faster/larger/more connected (WIFI, RFID, Internet, satelite, electrical, cable, phone line, etc.) this will change rapidly.
And when your cross referenced habits (read "profile") puts you on an FBI warning list? Errors of 1 or 2 percent sound great until you are the 1 or 2 percent.
Also don't forget data accidents are a fact of life, and often are hard and/or slow, and somethines even impossible to correct. I myself encountered a data accident when I refinanced my mortgage 2 years back. I was initially denied a loan because of an eronious account (not mine) appearing on my credit report. After many phone calls, dead ends, 2 written requests, 3 months, and 1/2 an interest point more I was finaly approved and refinanced. Of course when comparing notes with friends, family and co-workers my problems seemed petty.
Big Brother Has Always Watched You In Florida.
Wise up suckers.
so I would be too worried.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Seems like this takes the approach that everyone is guilty until they are proved, by a police scan of the license plates, to be innocent.
When they started doing random seatbelt and sobriety tests, they skirted the issue by making it "random", i.e. every 10th car or something, instead of based on "perception" by the officers. Since they were not checking everyone, it wasn't guilt until proven innocent, and since it was random, it wasn't targetting any specific group based on outside appearances.
Of course, in our post-9-11 loss of sensibility, I doubt anyone will seriously challenge this.
Benjamin Franklin has a couple of appropriate quotes:
All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.
And most appropriate of all:
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
That sounds like a pretty cool project your working on.
Kyle
Next phaze.. Barcode tattoos for all..
Ok.. Barcode tattoos for some.. Miniture american flags for the rest!
I hate to be the bad guy here...
KyronD, please delete your slashdot account immediately, and refrain from posting for the next sixteen(16) months.
Please limit your time on the Internet to ninety(90) minutes per every seven(7) days.
KyronD, it's time to go.
all the good criminals i know ride bikes (no license plates) and wear respirators (no facial recognition). cars are for drunk drivers, paedophiles, and cops. and people who aren't very fun. or havn't got a bike yet. says me.
start crankin!
fear is the mind killer
I think the soccer moms have infiltrated the Florida legislature.
How about filling potholes instead of decreasing privacy? Do they really think tracking cameras are necessary, that there are more bad people out there than good people?
Burn the cameras out with laser pointers.
$2 for a cheap laser pen at the 7-11 and no more camera problem..
Sure, it's an invasion of privacy! Just think about it! Your car gets stolen... you call the local police department and they tell you "No problem, sir, our OCR camera system will find your car in no time!"
Then you remember you put a phantomplate on it... and you're SCREWED!
The Constitution says nothing about a right to "privacy". What it does address are individual liberties and protection from unreasonable search and seizures. Concretely, this is explicitly expressed in two ways. 1) There needs to be a reason for law enforcement to come into your house, sniff around, and take your possessions. 2) You are responsible for yourself and have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
So technically, while public places are public, that still doesn't mean a police officer can come up to you, without provocation or prior reason and demand your papers. He might ask you questions in relation to a nearby crime scene, or if you live nearby, but these are relevant to investigation. What is not relevant is keeping tabs on everybody, everywhere.
There must be a reason for specific intrusion to your life. (Warrants) There must be a reason for them to keep track of your movements and persuit of happiness. (Taps) There must be a reason to restrict your actions and liberty. (Security check points).
Allowing a government to walk over either of these ideals strips us away from our fundamental liberties as human beings and American citizens.
An explanation of my choices for friends
They'll be shown nothing. You don't want an automated system giving you millions of "no problems found" messages. You certianly don't want it to also include personal data with that. You'd never be able to hire the staff it would take to sort through that and it would be stupid to boot. What you care about are problems, so the system only pops up a report when it picks up something wrong, like a car that is stolen.
It's like a packet sniffer. We have one at work to look for net problems. Now nothing is more useless than turning it on and just logging everything that goes in or out of the building. It's just a bunch of random shit, almost all of which is perfectly normal. We'd need 1000x our staff to stand any chance at sorting through it all. So the sniffer has rules for things it ought to look for (like Phatbot scanning). If that happens, we get an alert on it.
I'm not seeing any real problem here. A right to privacy isn't a right to ba anonymous. The government, or anyone else for that matter, is welcome to watch and identify you in public. Their right ends at your door, however. That is what the right to privacy entails, that you can't be monitored in your home. It does not mean that you can always be totally anonymous when in public.
You cite the exact text, yet seem to fail to understand what it entails. It covers searches of your house (or bussiness, etc) and seizure of your property. Searches include things like wiretaps, etc. It does NOT anywhere specify anything about a right to privacy in public because you simply don't have one. Public is just that, public. People, and the government, have a right to watch you when you are in public. If I like, I can follow you around, so long as I don't do anything threatening.
What you seem to want, and mistakenly think the 4th ammendment grants, is a right to anonymity. You seem to think you ought to be able to walk in public without being identified or watched. Sorry, not how it works. Government agent or private citizen, both can keep an eye on you when you are out in public. What the 4th ammendment says is that right ends at your door. They can't come watch you in your house or rifle through your shit, THAT violates your privacy.
"You ain't from around here? are ya boy?"
This is just great! An automated way to harass people from...
(insertstatethatbeatgators)
Yehaw! dagnabbit we got them there city slickers with this here dumbfouled thinking machine. mebee it wants a sippa hooch?
*_bzzzzzzt_*
Please?! We need this agenda to be advanced, along with the mandatory DNA sampling required to buy candy from grocery stores so that we can track those candy-peddling kidnapping pervs.
I agree with you, cyberchondriac, that your perspective widens when you become a parent. That certainly is true, in particular of my personal behavior.
But I believe that larger principles, like those that center on essential libertis and personal freedoms are not made mutable by having children. If anything, it makes my belief in them stronger. I do not want them to inherit a world where they are not able to exercise their own conscience and live freely. I refuse to believe that now that I have children, an expansive interventionist nanny state is the best model of government.
This case is very different than the cameras that record my license plate when I run a red light, or I'm speeding, because they're recording my picture when I haven't done anything wrong. Unlike traffic.com, which also records my travel without my consent, this town is looking to keep tabs on me. The town also has the authority to levy fines and punishments on me, which traffic reporters cannot.
This is just a bad decision, and I'm saddened that some would support it.
Jeb is the Younger one.
He managed to get into the car with his ass exposed above the steering wheel and drive through the intersection with the license plate covered up. How he managed to steer the car is beyond me.
Can anyone confirm if this story is true or bogus?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
It's Manalapan for God's sake. Just so you get a feel for the city; 1. It is hardly a city 2.Don King lives there
Yarr
Who cares? I'm justr picking my nose and driving.
Ristroph, Einar
Einar Gibbens Ristroph
Einar Ristroph
Einar Ristroph Einar Gibbens Ristroph Ristroph, Einar But what the hell do I know?
The long-term parking in either San Jose or San Francisco, I can't remember which: your car's license plate number is printed on your receipt. This is from 3-4 years back.
I hope the airbag didn't go off. That's gotta smart...
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
use one of these covers
http://www.phantomplate.com/
modify a frame with 50 infrared leds pointing directly on the plate
for cams above normal view a addition of a multibladed shade much like the stop lights have on them would work nicely.
Got Code?
no black people
I really wish people would get modded down for abusing tired, worn out Franklin quotes... WE'VE HEARD THEM ALL ALREADY!!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Not related to the arse-showing episode related above, but recently here in Bunbury, Western Australia two cops were bumped off the force after it was revealed that several years ago, for a prank, they did a drive-by of a roadside speed camera. At the time they were doing 126kmh in a 60kmh zone, had blanked out the plate on their unmarked police car, were both wearing Klu Klux Klan style hoods and one was flipping the finger at the cam! The photo got published in the local rag a while back, and a falling out between the two cops of some description led one to squeal on the other IIRC. Funny stuff!
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselves and our actions..
I was just thinking about this issue last night, after reading stories about blog tracking by intelligence agencies and a webmaster being prosecuted for maintaining sites which allegedly advocate jihad. After reading these things, I did feel less free. I was tempted to remove my name from my journal and start using an anonymous proxy, and realize that even that probably won't help much. I must admit, I am one of the fringe, and might be tempted to say things which might get me in trouble some day. I had the urge to self-censor.
But then I thought, fuck that. Let them know what I think, if they care, for all I care. If I stop speaking my mind out of fear that I will end up with an FBI profile a mile long, they have already won. Besides, I happen to know for a fact that I have an FBI profile anyway. So let them add a few slashdot comments to it, and they can start by adding this: fuck you! Sometimes I like to look up in the sky, smile for a sattelite picture, and flip them the bird.
I don't like the idea of being watched, but it is inevitable. No matter how much we complain about it, it will be done anyway. We should fight it every step of the way, of course, but it is a losing battle. So we all need to start practicing the art of feeling free anyway, or we will lose our only true freedom, which is the freedom to think however we will.
Fortunately, at the moment the only form of speech they seem to be really going after is speech advocating violence, and I am a pacifist and never advocate violence in any form. But I think it is only a matter of time before the increased powers of surveillance are used to gradually put the squeeze on all forms of dissent. Nonetheless, until they actually come and haul me away for saying I don't like what they're doing, I will continue to say it, and, as our illustrious commander in theif put it, "damn the concequences."
My site: Free Nature Pictures
From the Best Essay Ever on why privacy is a fundamental right: [Its not too long- just go read it]
I disagree that we have all these "rights" because we are humans, and therefore must have them. Where does it say you have a "right" to privacy? Assuming that we hold the Constitution as the highest piece of material stating our rights, then privacy is in fact not a right. Also, if we hold the Constitution in highest of regards, then we are now saying that the whole world should follow our goverment system, hence taking away their own ability to be governed as they see fit.
Since the whole world doesn't agree on the Constutition as the proper way to run a government, that must be discarded as what gives us our "rights". No other document that I can think of says you get these rights. Simply being born does not give you a right. Rights are given to you by the governing body. In America, we elect people to run our government, to speak for us and up hold the laws in our best interest. We'll set aside the argument of whether this is happening or not.
The way I see it, the only right you have is to make up your own mind. That is it. Outside of that, you have no unalienable rights. There is no force that will magically stop me from video taping you, killing you, or preventing you from being happy.
So please, please, please stop assuming you have all these rights simply because you are human. It is just not the case. The universe doesn't abide by your rights because all these rights are simply a social status inforced by modern day society. 100 years ago, you had different rights then today. 100 years from now, you'll have different rights then you do now.
HEY ... if you guys want to see a REAL invasion of privacy, check out what happens when Photo Radar snaps a picture of you pickin' ... ;-)
I ment to write:
forget that not everyone not in uniform is a scum.
Meaning that police trust other police, but not the public at large. Many times with reason, true, but that opens the door to being abused by the police.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Shouldn't that be George Orwell's vision of 1984, and not Arthur Blair......?
can you think of any good reason why these should be legal to use?
Can you think of any reason to be constantly under the "protective" glare of the government?
Dude, get your ass back to Finland and fall in line with the Fuhrer.
Leading to a police state in what used to be the USA. The "Patriot" Act and similar nonsense merely nibbles away at a few rights. Just a minor annoyance or inconvenience, right? Then there are "minor" annoyances like the Prez being able to willy-nilly label someone an "enemy combatant" whether you were actually picked up on some field of battle somewhere and tossed in a cell indefinitely with no recourse. No contact with family, lawyers, judges, newspapers, nothing. Oh yeah, and it is only during "wartime". A "war" defined such that it NEVER ends (the "War on Terror"). Then there are minor plantings of surveillance cameras here and there as in the story. Nothing big. Just watching for "evil doers" with warrants out on them...then it is for minor traffic/parking infractions...then it is for odd or "suspicious" behavior. In any case, just a minor adjustment in each case. Just baby steps. Problem is, eventually we get backed into a deep, deep hole and think, "How the HELL did we get here?"
In psychology, it is termed "successive approximation". You can't get someone to outright do some thing or agree to something so you merely walk them towards the desired end by having them take innocuous, minor "baby steps" toward the desired goal. The person has no real problem taking these "minor" steps. On their own they are nothing. In the end, you have them doing something or going along with something that they NEVER would have agreed to if you'd put it to them outright.
Baby steps. Thousands of baby steps can carry us a long distance in a direction we do NOT want to go.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
It's been reported on the news a few times - a police truck with a camera and a laptop inside it can check the whole set of plates moving through it's stakeout. There are no stationary systems for the purpose though. It reportedly allowed to find quite a few stolen cars already.
This is probably not that much of a bad thing, IF the data is not kept for eternity after being collected, I'd say. And I don't know if that is the case.
In Soviet Russia... RUSSIANS comment on YOU.
Er, what about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? "Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy..."
Rights are given to you by the governing body
Not according to the Declaration of Independence. "...they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." It says that governments only exist "to secure these rights," not to bestow them, implying that the rights themselves exist outside the framework of any governing body.
But oh, yeah, I forgot, it's about time we stopped basing our society on these outdated ideas and moldy old documents and converted to pure, unadulterated Social Darwinism, right?
My site: Free Nature Pictures
I happen to agree with others that the poster was being at least slightly pedantic, if not wholly pretentious in not using the more commonly-known pen name of George Orwell instead of Eric Blair.
However, after thinking about it and reading some other posts I had to wonder whether anyone would have cared if the poster in referring to a Dr Seuss story used the the name Theodore Geissel instead of "Dr Seuss". Or if the story was referring to novel by Mark Twain they used the name Samuel Clemens. It's just that some authors real names are more commonly known than others.
I don't know, I am sure that quite a few people missed the reference the first time reading it. I had to read it twice before it clicked for me.
At any rate, I think he is twat.
we've got that in the germany, too. it's called "toll collect". right now, the same system (cameras scanning every license plate driving on german autobahns) is applied here. it's sad, that it will only used to collect tolls from big trucks, but the technology will be build that "other things are possible".
PS: for a good laugh, and an interesting cultural experience, try reading The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Nigerian Pidgin English. It's beautiful.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Wouldn't it be much easier to get a bunch of false or stolen license plates instead? No way you get ID'd if the plate says it's a red 1982 Pinto belonging to a Utah salesman... unless you are, indeed, one. Brilliant, eh? Think I should patent this novel idea?
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
First off, who gives a shit. This is being installed at the local city/county level. Why the hell would 99.9% of slashdoters care about this? How many people reading this live there? That said, the potential for abuse of this system is far to great. Will the people operating the databases be held accountable for the REASONS the license plates are being tracked and tagged? Say I admin the databases and I want to track my daughter, wife, girlfriend's ex-bf..what's to stop me?
In the UK (in London, at least), the police have these devices in their cars. They check the numberplate of every car that goes past in the opposite direction against car tax databases and suchlike, and if the police are good enough drivers, I guess they can identify a criminal realtime and then go off and chase them. I've also heard there are cameras with a similar purpose in petrol stations - and to catch people who have previously driven off without paying for their petrol.
The police chief has a point, if any of you had bothered to read the article - the cameras are being placed in public areas and are taking pictures of public places - you have no right to privacy in the public.
I am a Christian. Personally, I think Jesus would fight oppression, tyranny, and injustice in any form wherever he found it. That's what he did in his own life, not by violence, but by inspired words which opened people's eyes to the tyranny being imposed upon them by the leaders of their day. I think he would tell the government to start thinking about the log in their own eye, and not worry so much about the mote in their brother's eye. But I take a fairly unusual view of Christianity, which is that it's mostly about the life and teachings of a carpenter named Yeshua.
love and blessings,
freejung
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Wonder how much IR you could generate by heating the plate from behind, maybe in an uneven fashion to distort the numbers?
How about if they inserted a RFID tag (with a range of a few meters) in all driving licenses, passports, credit cards, debit cards, etc and then introduced RFID scanners everywhere and I mean every 10 meters throughout the city, and recorded the ID of every single person walking by every single scanner 24/7. Would that be an invasion of privacy? How is that different from what they're doing in this Florida town?
And if that's not enough, how about if they required a RFID sub-skin implant for all US citizens (remove it and go to jail) and placed scanners everywhere again. Would that be enough to call it invasion of privacy? How's that different, umm? What would you have to fear if you haven't broken their law?
This is just public space, and a machine doing what a human could do - you've got no reasonable expectation of privacy in public space.
A system such as you describe would be a reasonable system.
So, if I live in a town with such a surveillance system, can I read the source code that you describe and verify it for myself? Can the town's newspaper reporters obtain this source code and write stories about it?
Are there any mechanisms to ensure that the object code running on Big Government Computer was actually built from the source code that you describe?
I want the same protections from the 21st century surveillance state that the American constitution gives me from harrassment by the courts and their officers. If a court tries me, I have a right to a jury of my peers, and any other citizen (usually) has the right to observe the entire proceedings and print them up in a newspaper.
Yes, until a few centuries people didn't have anonymity if they stayed in the towns they were born in. They also didn't have voting rights, freedom of assembly / press / religion / petition / etc. That doesn't make those rights any less real- it just makes olden days seem barbaric. Privacy might be a younger right- but rights don't have an age of majority. And technology today can be used to take away other rights- but that doesn't make those rights "falsely expected," just in need of more guarding.
Yet even two centuries ago they knew the value of anonymity: from A Watched Populace Never Boils"
[and anecdotally, all those Westerns with the "tall dark stranger" coming to town couldn't have happened if you never had strangers. People could see you come to town or go to someone's house. But once you left town, or went around the corner- even the best gossipers weren't going to know too much more about you.]
But privacy is far more than whether or not you are recognized... quoting from my favorite essay...
"...But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being...
...A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
heh, well if that's your attitude towards invasion of privacy then I suggest you never visit Mexico until you're at least over the age of 45. It's quite routine here in Guadalajara for the police to simply randomly stop young people walking around late at night and completely search them. I've been here 3 months and I've been lucky as it's only happened to me once. Couple of my friends down here have had it happen 4 or 5 times each. Course then again bribing the police if they find anything is routine here as well so...
A few quick points.
First: being watched by automated systems may be an unavoidable aspect of the future. Crying about it is as fruitless as being upset about the increase in population. In books by Zindell, a favorite sci-fi author of mine, he takes it for granted that in the future, noone will venture outside without a face mask on. In his world, revealing your face is a very personal gesture. It may sound bad and dehumanizing, but it may be something we can adapt to fairly painlessly.
In other words, we will get used to being watched, just as we've gotten used to all of the cultural changes that have occurred in the last 10,000 years.
Here in the UK, people have gotten used to the idea of there being cctv's all over the place in public. It hasn't fundamentally altered the way they live their lives.
Second: Moving from human-based memory to machine based memory has a number of advantages, not the least of which is fewer faulty arrests. I imagine that wrongly incarcerated people (and their loved ones) would take great issue with your stance that reliance on human memory is a "good thing".
looks like they have Interlingua and Esperanto both of the "planned international auxiliary language" category. But nothing says universal like "planned interplanetary auxiliary language," and it looks likes there's as many Klingon speakers as there are Matsés speakers, so where is it? But I guess they haven't finished the Klingon Shakespeare yet.
Superb post.
As to going from human to machine memory: I don't know that the number of faulty arrests will drop, either as an absolute or relative number. For example, if we relied on machines, not traffic officers, for speeding violations both the absolute and relative number of speeders would go up in the machine world. Of course bad work by humans is terrible. But I'm thinking that faster, automated and weakly controlled (at least as Ashcroft wants it) work by machines isn't better. As its late I'll just quote:
"But there also will be tangible, specific harm.
The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
Several years ago, after the existence of Human Resources Development Canada's "Longitudinal Labour Force File" was brought to light by my predecessor, many people demanded to see the information that had been held about them. They were astonished by the number of factual errors. That was only a research database, so its inaccuracies probably would have remained relatively benign even if it had not been dismantled.
But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm...
Those purposes, by the Government's own account, include everything from routine income tax investigations to trying to flag Canadians as potential pedophiles or money launderers solely on the basis of their travel patterns.
This is unprecedented. The Government of Canada has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so. Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society...
In fact it's utterly trivial to beat the cameras, and the criminals do it every day, in their *thousands* in the UK.
We have what can only be described as comprehensive coverage by CCTV and speed cameras here, including automatic numberplate recognition cameras for the congestion charging zone in London.
If you want to get round the cameras, simply copy down the numberplate of a car of similar make, model and colour, have a plate made and put it on yours. Simple.
Thousands of people in the UK are now automatically being issued invalid speeding tickets (and having their licenses removed) from cloned cars and are being charged for driving in London when they were never there. And it's up to you to prove your innocence because they have photos of "your" vehicle.
Static, automatic camera systems are useless, it needs police on the ground manually checking license plates and even that only catches a miniscule fraction of them.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Car cloning is a *huge* problem with automated cameras, there are thousands of appeals a year against the congestion charge and speeding tickets due to cloned number plates. It does take months to have them rectified, *if you can* and you are *assumed to be guilty until you can prove the vehicle isn't yours* because they have photos.
P.S. You want a scooter mate. You can easily fit a rackmount server on the back, take a lesson from the pizza delivery boys.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The presumption in Manalapan is that everyone passing through the rare ethers of this wealthy preserve is a criminal. That is why it is outfitting its police with the technology of presumptive guilt: until you come up clear on the scope, you're just another creep to Manalapan's finest.
This is the M.O. of the Stasi or KGB. That it's happening in America in 2004 isn't terribly surprising, even if it's depressing. Fattened on freedom they imagine will last forever, Americans in recent years have become absurdly lax about their rights--not to mention stupidly ignorant of how they were obtained. We scarcely had any significant applications of privacy in our case law until the major 20th century expansion of civil liberties by the courts in the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to this era, the cops did damn well what they pleased. It's no secret that powerfule forces want to turn back the clock, or that you can turn on talk radio and hear some fool damning "activist judges" for elaborating the Bill of Rights.
Since the 1980s, Americans have learned to do as we are told. We have been trained to pee in a cup as a condition of employment. We have made nary a noise as our health records have been divulged to corporations. We have meekly submitted to increasing searches of our persons and cars (and, in a hideous irony, have even been sold back these humiliations on TV in shows like "COPS"). We have sheepishly allowed the weed of the Patriot Act to take root and spread. And we have even eagerly, in the thousands, volunteered to help John Ashcroft spy on our neighbors. Poll after poll in the past twenty years has shown a majority willing to give up its rights for the latest crusade, whether the "war on drugs" or lately, against terrorism. But what does it profit a nation to win these "wars" when its society ends up resembling the miserable failures of totalitarianism?
As demonstrated by its abusive new surveillance, Manalapan holds passersby in rich contempt. Maybe they're right.
Why do people get so upset about "the government" doing this?
It's worth worrying about things "the government" does if nobody else can do them. But any private company or individual can do this, and it's gotten cheap enough that many probably will, for various reasons.
You just have to assume that when you drive around in your car, anybody can track your license plate. Whether that's "anybody" or "anybody but the government, who can then buy it from private companies anyway" makes very little difference.
Generally, the judiciary only comes into play when the police want to go somewhere where you have some reasonable expectation that what you're doing is not something that the public at large is privy to - your house, your place of business, your telephone, and so forth.
If a member of the public was following you around all day, taking notes- you'd get a restraining order for stalking. And while the public at large can see "someone who looks like a Slashdot poster" walking around the mall, that public generally doesn't have the right to know your name: we don't have to wear nametags in public. People can look at us but they won't know us unless we've previously chosen to reveal our names to them.
Going back to the essay within my comment: the former privacy Czar's definition included "the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves..." Using this definition, one could perhaps have some form of privacy even without pure anonymity, if one's name was the only thing we had to reveal to other people (if such were possible: telling your true name can just about result in a credit report, nowadays)
As to 200 years ago, I'd argue that the Founding Fathers had more ability to "disappear into the crowd" than you give them credit for: they certainly seem to have had enough illegal, back-of-tavern meetings to set up a whole country. During the day they might have had smaller crowds for less anonymity, but at night streets were darker, and collars could be pulled up. The person riding from New York to Boston could probably just plunk down coins to get a room and a beer: far more private than the ID and credit card we have to show now.
Basically, cameras dotted around the place capture the registration number of the car and stored in a database. You can then pay at petrol stations, shops, by SMS using a system which is linked back to the database.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
To simply avoid the town of Manalapan? If everyone but the residents avoid the town, they will eventually do away with the system due to the lack of revenue caused by people avoiding the town.
There are other shitty little towns in Florida that have been doing other onerous things in regards to speed traps - the towns of Waldo and Lawty. And their towns show it because of the depressed economy and what-not. The only reason these two towns even still exist is because they are on the only major road between Gainesville and Jacksonville.
Oh no! They've got SCMODS. State, County, Municipal Offender Data System.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Why do so many Slashdotters think that Bush and his minions would be the ones to abuse this type of system?
Ever think it might be the crowd who wants the "village" to raise your child?
This is nothing a pellet gun can't take care of...when more legal means fail.
Let cities know that this is NOT acceptable. NOW. Five years from now is too late. Do not tolerate this bullshit.
In Bowling Green KY there are camares at 2/3rds of the intersections and on I-65,Natcher Parkway and all other roads leading into and out off town the cameras are always on. One cop sits all day long and moniters the TV sets. They are also recodered no flash live video.
They claim it is to study traffic flow. But we all know that is just a cover story. These things are a waste of taxpayer money and an invasion of privacy.
We have had them here for several years now
There's THOUSANDS of incidents like this happening all over the USA, there are SO many it's ridiculous, and easy to find them. So GO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH., just MAYBE you might shake up your own pre conceived religious cult like faith in what you *think* is reality. In other words, it's NOT paranoid if it's REAL. THEY KEEP DOING IT AND THEY KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT AND IT'S GETTING WORSE BY THE DAY, GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND.
Population (year 2000): 321
Males: 156 (48.6%), Females: 165 (51.4%)
Elevation: 4 feet
County: Palm Beach
Land area: 0.5 square miles
Zip code: 33462
Median resident age: 61.3 years
Median household income: $127,819 (year 2000)
Median house value: $943,200 (year 2000)
It's a small town on the Florida east coast where about 0.05% of you would ever travel through. Actually, you can't even travel "through" the town, looking at the map shows that it's an island seperated by some intercoastal waterway from the mainland.
Now if they implemented this in Miami, Orlando, Tampa, or Jax, then I'd be worried...
Sounds like a bunch of old paranoid geezers (Median resident age: 61.3 years).
I only mod up parents of "mod parent up" posts...
The point isn't to identify every innocent person who drives by. The point is to find a car bearing a known tag as soon as possible. There aren't many cops on the streets looking for that car, so this is all to the good. A license plate is, in fact, a method of ID, so this fits within your rather odd paramaters.
Or, do you think cops chasing criminals is just a cute little game?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Why not write George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, since he is best know by that name??
As usual the article spins the system as something positive to battle crime.
And as usual, Slashdot spins the system as something evil that's going to cause the world to end.
The cameras in question take photos in infrared, not visible light. I wouldn't be to sure of myself if I were you, until I tested that product in a non-visible light spectrum.
Needed - new, enforceable privacy law:
Thou shalt not make permanant record of the actions of private citizens without a warrant obtained on reasonable grounds to suspect they are involved in criminal wrongdoing, or informed consent. If a record is made of someone who turns out not to be involved in criminal wrongdoing, they must be made aware of it and the record destroyed, and if it was obtained without a warrant, the perpetrator charged.
"Thou" being anyone, state or corporate. If the companies want to do it, they should have to get your consent, and update you annually on what's in their files.
Cameras at the superbowl to scan for known criminals is OK if they just look for terrorists, troubling if they surveil for minor infractions, and downright scary if they just record everything so the Fundamentalist Right's next administration can go through the files looking for people who stared at the cheerleaders too long, people who sat too close to other people of the same sex, people who sat next to arabs, women with shoes on who are not pregnant, anything that would embarass their political opponents, etc etc
Now I can't visit my mistress in the 500k shack. My wife will get the records. I leave my cell phone off already, now I have to take a bus.
That's what they say now. Just wait until some marketer offers the city cash for their "mailing list".
I have a friend who lived and worked in the U.S. for seven years and just returned to Canada shaking his head over the hysterical lunacy that is going on in the name of security down there. An elected prosecutor refused to use common sense to mitigate a Columbine-inspired prosecution of his son for a school-yard verbal threat.
While that was the proximate cause of his decision, he reported that the entire place is, according to plan, running scared. Fear is of-course very helpful in getting the sheeple to accept otherwise completely insane policies that conflict with their interests.
Russia and the United States are the world leaders in incarceration, with imprisonment rates 6-10 times that of most industrialized nations. So much for the land of the free.
I have already decided that travel to the Hysterical States of America under the current situation is unattractive, so this Florida spy-cam scam won't effect me at all.
Rand.
Something tells me, however, they'll be shown a lot more.
- Time
- Direction of travel
- Location
which can then be correlated with- recent bank robberies
- glimpses of same car at other locations, giving average speed, compare with speed limit
- bars closing, time for breathalyzer stop
- let out of rally against $PARTY_IN_POWER
and then correlated over time with"Provided by the management for your protection."
don't drive. then no scan.
you do realize that while driving, you are on a government-subsidized road. in fact, the government probably paid for the whole road, however many millions it cost.
Driving on the road is not a right. It is a privilege that you must earn.
You are in a public place, not the privacy of your home and must follow the rules of the road. It is the job of the authorities to enforce these rules and make it safe for everyone to drive.
If they use video in public places to identify and ticket the overabundance of idiots on the road these days, maybe it'll make our streets and highways less conjested and more enjoyable for those of us who do follow the rules.
And hell, maybe my insurance will even go down as a result.
Hello, I am living in Canada actually, and I am pretty happy with our current governments, the best they could do is dreg up some slightly flimsy accusations. What the hell is that? The problem is Slashdot News, Does not reach the General Public! But it should. Now my main Point is that if you want your governemnt to behave themselves. Send them MAIL or send them FAXES !! Mass e-mail they have taken to ignoring. But waste their paper!! they will sit up and take notice! I gaurantee. You know how to find your local representative, go to http://www.firstgov.gov/ Find out who to mail or fax and do it!! If this doesn't get slashdot on the news, nothing will!!! Just remember we are dealing with mindless fucks who love to ignore e-mail. Because someone could have sent 10000 e-mails etc etc. This much paper, will not be ignored. I personally gaurantee!
I say print up some plate numbers (in the appropriate size/font of course) on a big sheet of cardboard and walk them past the cameras, maybe have a bunch of people walk past all the cameras doing this all at once every fifteen minutes or so... up to you whether or not to purposely use plate numbers that'll set off all the bells and whistles in the system...
... to their lawyer being interviewed about it. The lady's mother got slammed against the door by one of the hogs when she tried to bring a tupperware bowl of water out so her blind and deaf daughter could wash her face off from the mace she took. Did you see they been killing people there at traffic stops as well?
.and the majority of the cops out there now are sieg heiling order following gangsters.. I really can't put it in any other words or sugar coat it, these are the new brownshirts. I write on this stuff because of LONG involvement with civil rights going back to "legal" discrimination against black people days, and illegalities by government in general and exposing corruption, been a major interest of mine since I was a teenager.. Seen it all. From murders on down, corruption and criminality and brutality is the soul of government now. Took my share of abuse by them bozos too, seen even worse. Someday I need to write all the stories out, I have dribs and drabs of them scattered across the net the past buncha years. I got another one for ya, I used to date a lady cop, a sheriffs deputy, worked for the de kalb county georgia(big metro atlanta county along withton county) sheriffs dept. After awhile she started telling me about the huge amount of crime being committed by her fellow cops. she was just appalled, had only been in two years and was already seeing so much of it she was scared, because they have this deal, rat on another cop no matter how crooked or evil they are, and you could get killed. that plain and simple. At a minimum your career is over, and you get harassed unmercilessly, even beat up, your family threatened, vehicle sabotageed, you name it. Anyway, she said it went from top to bottom over there, from hitmen for hire to organized burglary, you name it. Never thought a whole bunch about it till a few years later. If you want to see how bad it really was, google for sheriff, de kalb county, murder, you'll find some links to the stories about the head sheriff getting busted for a political assassination.
I remember one from I guess 2 years ago now.
There was some bad guy the fbi was chasing. Again, they got a "tip" he was in such and such a car, etc on this road. Well, so happens some kid was driving with his girlfriend in a similar car, like "a red car" something like that. They gang pull him over,all kinza cops, feds and locals, machine guns to them, etc, start yelling GET YOUR HANDS UP! the kid puts his hands up, no idea what's going on. Then another hog(who got hired because of his outstanding "service" as a sniper/assassin, now he's a cop, a HRT trainer) orders him out of the car. Well, the kid reaches down to unfasten his seat belt and he BLEW HIS HEAD OFF because "he was going for a gun" which didn't exist. That happened in virgina or maryland a couple of years ago, as usual, they got off totally scot free.
There's tons of these incidents out there, even some websites dedicated to them that document and archive them because the goons certainly don't do it, they want everyone to think it's just a "few bad apples" when it's really "a few decent honest cops left, most of them old and counting the days to get out and away from the criminality they are forced to deal with at work from fellow 'officers'",
It is not as benign as you make it sound.
The Constitution protects our right to associate freely because the Framers recognized this right is critical for the democratic process. IANAL, but I believe that removing the ability to move around anonymously, without being monitored or recorded, has a chilling effect on free association. Suddenly the government knows where you are and who you are with all the time. It opens you up to the possibility of being persecuted, either by the government or by your peers.
Anyone who knows the constitutional law better than I do want to correct me or expand on that?
Join Tor today!
So unless hoards of private Canadian citizens run about and demand (ever so politely) ID, that seems to be one society where you don't involuntarily have to show ID. You choose to do so when engaged in licenced or business activities.
Within the US it generally has been the same- although we do require carrying ID in most (if not all?) states. But you generally don't have to identify yourself if you are not engaged in a licenced activity (to the gov't) or a business transaction (to the public). If you don't return home or to your car that stalker with a clipboard will have to rely on luck (meeting someone who does know who you are) in order to get your name. Returning to your car alone wouldn't do it in CA: DMV info isn't public. And I'd argue that the instant you discovered a person was following you around all day- that would instantly be considered harrassing and alarming, absent any other activities on their part.
Of course, in California there is an explicit right to privacy built right into our constitution: Article 1 Section 1. It isn't defined there, but it exists there. And privacy as "the right not to be known against [your] will" (which is different from pure anonymity) is an implicit right - a necessary (although not always sufficient) condition - within other rights as well. Freedom of religion or assembly doesn't mean quite as much if you are compeled to reveal your religion or membership, for example.
This gives a lot of the legal arguments, expectation of privacy in public, etc. And this while not about Video per se gives a good discussion of Surveillance in general and the potential for abuse.
Test 1 2 3 4
I think the topic has veered off a bit... and though I am against the government collecting so much information...
I can't say I am against gun control. There are maybe.. three reasons why it is supposedly ok for normal civilians to have guns:
a.) Becuase they need to hunt... How many people hunt now? really?? They need maybe a shot-gun or some rifle or something like that anyway, not a machine-gun, a glock, or a sawed-off.
b.) For self-protection. I can see this one as being mildly valid, despite statistics showing that houses who own a gun are more likely to die (from some accident, etc.) from a gun than houses without. - but see below.
c.) To use against the government. This one just isn't very realistic. Explain to me a scenareo where we will have a rebellion against our federal government. Even if everyone in my city rebelled against the government, the nation-wide reaction would be "those hicks", and militia would be sent from other states to crush us. Who would decide 'oh, this is a legitimate rebellion?' - obviously, noone. Today, we would just be labelled as "terrorists". If you don't like the government, your only realistic option is to move. If you think about "Rebellion", you will end up replaying a scene from Waco, TX.
Who really needs guns? Criminals, of course! Drug dealers, hit-men, bank robbers, etc. They really have a use for them, and use them every day. We just don't happen to like that use for them.
Japan has dealt with this problem very effectively, btw. Guns are forbidden. Hunters don't have them (you don't really need a firearm to kill an animal, btw), homeowners don't have them, and the police don't have them. Very few criminals have them either. Why? Because... they are illegal to buy, sell, possess, transport, etc., for any purpose (other than maybe by the army?), and if caught with one, you will be in jail for a very long time.
Basically, not every criminal can get ahold of them, because they just aren't around. Because of that, the average person doesn't think they need one to protect themselves. Also the police don't need them to "fight back". This works surprisingly well. It's easy to tell the "illegal guns", since there are no legal ones, so *any* guns are illegal.
(btw... drugs work similarly... few will risk trafficking in them when the penalty is more than a slap on the wrist...)
Please show me which part of the second amendment mentions anything about hunting or about self defense.
You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.
- George Orwell
Drug dealers are killing people. Everyday. By the very product they push.
Politicians are killing people. Everyday. By the very products that they push (wars, death penalty). Your statement is almost a tautology. Every profession results in a deaths, by the very products of that profession. Cattle ranchers make tainted beef possible. Chemists make overdose and dangerous drug interaction possible. Cigarette companies... Etc. These statements (and yours) are certainly very emotionally powerful but they don't deal with the dehumanizing issue, unless you consider that they are dehumanizing whole categories of people.
Again, bullshit. Drug users do hurt other people. Stealing to support their habit. Lying to cover up. Accidents brought about through deminished [sic] mental and physical capacity.
This is rather nicely addressed here.
Who is dehumanizing a class of people? In no case has anyone's civil rights been violated by the passing of laws.
You, for example. You are referring to people who are repressed by the law and society as if they weren't human. Also, laws are usually passed with enforcement in mind and it's enforcement that almost always impinges upon someone's civil rights. But, then, that's the nature of the beast...
In fact, your whole post seems (to me) to be more than a little dehumanizing. Hrrrm. I think I've been trolled.
Has character recognition cameras deployed on Interstate 80 just west of Fremont. Seems to be a factor in busting carloads of marijuana.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
If you are driving you have to have ID with you, but you aren't required to have your name in machine readable type up on the dashboard.