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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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Fortunately, in Florida, Big Brother is 87, confined to a Rascal scooter, and has very poor eyesight.
You know what?
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
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.
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
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.
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...
Radar clocks Mini at Mach 3
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
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
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
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.
(Florida local news, approximately 2 weeks from now)
Newscaster: "And in other news, Manalapan local commerce has apparently dried up due to a sudden and prolonged lack of incoming traffic. Commuters are seemingly going out of their way to avoid the town completely, and speculation is rampant that Manalapan is about to become a ghost town. Ongoing negotiations with Wal-mart developers have been stalled for the past 3 days, and rumors of a mass exodus due to newly-proposed tax increases are running wild..."
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
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.