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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.
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.
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.
Surely you don't believe a '3 month' promise on this particular issue counts for much.
There is no problem with the act of people's number plates being scanned in Florida (its not even a place I am going to visit in the next few years.)
The only problem here is the fact that as technology lets people do this, it will happen more and more. The 3 month rule could change next week.
Fortunately, in Florida, Big Brother is 87, confined to a Rascal scooter, and has very poor eyesight.
You know what?
The problem is not the act of watching. The problem is the fact that a computerized system is able to record *everything*, and people are able to search through that data long after.
What this effectively means is that I either give up privacy, or the right to travel freely. Before, with the human watching things, I could always choose to drive at nighttime, or in a convoy, and assume that he'd quickly forget I was there.
The problem with data collection is that computer memory never forgets, and it is frighteningly easy to cross-reference with other data. *That* is the real problem. If it would only compare the license plate to a list of stolen cars, and then discard the data, no problem.
But keeping data around allows people to get insights into private lifes that you don't want to share.
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
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...
You people seriously need to stop playing Illuminati!
I write software that does similar things to this, except way more indepth than just a license plate scan.
You know what hapens when you do a lookup on a plate that has no crime associated with it? Nothing! No one is reading your biography or analyzing your porno rentals just because you drove through their town. The only info that will pop up is if the Vehicle is actually the subject of an alert. These alerts are generated one of two ways. #1 The vehicle was witnessed at a crime scene, or #2 the owner called 911 and reported the vehicle missing. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who commits a crime just voluntarily exposed themselves to public inquiry. And if it was your car that was stolen, I'm sure you'd be quite happy that the plates were being scanned. The only people who have anything to fear are those that are trying to hide something.
Just last week, our software allowed all the police officers in Utah to have access to the citations history of the highway patrol...including warnings given out. The very next day after we activated it, a kid got pulled over doing 94 in a 65 and gave the patrollman the usual BS story of "honest officer, I've never been pulled over...I was just trying to pass someone." Turns out he had been warned twice in the past month for 76 in a 65 and 82 in a 65. Tell me how he didn't deserve the reckless driving citation they gave him after seeing his apparent complete disregard for speeding AND BEING WARNED TWICE about it.
1984 My A$$! God forbid the folks who risk their lives to provide for the public safety actually have some decent tools to help them out.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
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
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.