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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.
You do know Eric Arthur Blair was only George Orwell's pen name.
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.
I doubt it's pure infrared cameras - that would be expensive. It's probably a normal camera that is panchromatic and is illuminated with IR light - the advantage there is that it is also sensitive to what the eye sees, while not blinding drivers at night.
One solution is to take advantage of the limited exposure range of the camera by illuminating your license plate with lots and lots of infrared light - it'll look normal to people, but not the camera. Hopefully you can make it appear to be just a white blob. Actually, you don't even need to do the whole plate, just a letter or two.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
linkey
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Yes.
And my uncle was caught speeding by a speed trap camera here (Australia) with them fitted. I found that hilarious.
If you do feel the need to put such covers on your plates, DO check that they actually work. Lots of fraudsters selling cheap crap.
Most digital cameras are somewhat sensitive to IR. On some it is filtered out.
Take a look at you TV remotes LED though the viewfinder and a digital camera. Chances are you will be able to see the remotes LED light up.
http://www.echeng.com/photo/infrared/
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.
Nope.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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
So the real question is, what will the computer (and the human reviewer) actually be shown when they run the query on my license plate? If the computer only shows, "No outstanding warrants," then I'm fine with that.
Something tells me, however, they'll be shown a lot more.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Ummm the whole idea of an automated system is so that someone doesn't have to watch every bit of info that goes through the system.
Changes are, only people who are flagged will come up - and this will be either stolen cars, or something else associated with the registration plate that is of interest to law enforcement.
If you think that everything else will be checked and doublechecked, then you really need to get out your tinfoil hat...
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
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?
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