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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."
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
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.
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
So now that they have these cameras set up to "protect our rights", who is going to stop them from pointing them into your homes? Are you going to? I doubt it, they'll put a guise over it and say there have been cat burglers or something and they are trying to catch them. Pretty soon you will be under surveillance in your own home.
It's not what they're doing right now, but what they CAN do. This is just one step towards that direction.
Really, why must there be a single standard for everyone?
Let them be.
There are two problems with this, and they are both problems that require looking backwards and forwards simultaneously, something that is extremely difficult.
/.ers will disagree) that mandatory instruction on gun safety should be a prerequisite to purchase a firearm or a hunting license. But this is a subject that reasonable people can disagree on; those against argue that it will lead to an abuse of power in the form of the government collecting our guns.
/.er to a Nazi!) did not go from election to Final Solution overnight; it took a gradual dehumanization of the Jews to get there. 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? Those could help catch speeders -- but at what cost?
Problem 1: ABUSE. Every example wherein more power has been given to the "authorities" has led to abuse, either personal (as in Bill Clinton's use of FBI files) or institutional (the FBI keeping many of those files to begin with). Certainly, giving up some power is necessary and good; this is the basis of democratic theory for everone from Locke to Mill. But every new power taken by the authorities must be met with a benefit-cost analysis of the risks involved versus the potential rewards. I think we will mostly agree that letting the state enforce rules about who may drive is generally a good thing; it means that you have to show competence in driving before being set loose to potentially hurt innocent people. I believe (tho' many
Problem 2: SLIPPERY SLOPE. This is somewhat overused as a cliche, but it's a valid point. Once we are desensitized to one thing, it becomes that much easier for the next thing to happen. The Third Reich (Godwin's law does not apply; I am not comparing any
The adage that "if you're not doing bad, you have nothing to fear" only works if 1) there is never any abuse of police power, and 2) the criminals all obey the rules.
Unfortunately, these two conditions are never possible.
Knowing something is one thing. Being an absolute asshole about it -- trying to confuse people to look smart -- is something else. I know German. I don't post in it.
Did saying "Eric Blair's 1984" have ONE IOTA of PURPOSE that made it perferable to "George Orwell's 1984?" No. Because the submitter is a twat.
If I wrote this post in German, would that make for a clearer discussion, or would it make me look like a pedantic jerk? The latter. Like the poster.
PS - The same goes for people who quote Cicero in Latin in their sigs.
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
You can always come up with a way that infringing on my liberties will Save the Children.
That doesn't make it a good idea.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Yeah, and lemme guess, the only people who have anything to worry about are those who have something to hide, right?
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, but any time you are a government and you track everybody's movements by the aggregation of license plate image data, you are infringing on my liberties.
Specifically, the presumption of innocence and the freedom from unwarranted search.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
You might think that "I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear!" is a good recipe for a civil society, but the American founding fathers disagree with you. And I agree wit them.
Police power is ALWAYS abused. Always. That's why we need to be very careful when we extend that power.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.