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New York Plans Surveillance Veil For Downtown
News.com is reporting that a security system modeled after London's "Ring of Steel" is coming to New York City. The plan, to include license plate readers and over 3,000 public and private security cameras, aims to aid officials in tracking and catching criminals. "But critics question the plan's efficacy and cost, as well as the implications of having such heavy surveillance over such a broad swath of the city. [...] The license plate readers would check the plates' numbers and send out alerts if suspect vehicles were detected. The city is already seeking state approval to charge drivers a fee to enter Manhattan below 86th Street, which would require the use of license plate readers. If the plan is approved, the police will most likely collect information from those readers too, Kelly said."
In fact, the police here in New Haven, CT (where Yale University is located) use license plate readers to catch people with unpaid parking tickets. They will tow your car if you have outstanding tickets past a certain period of time. The main reason this bugs me is because anything similar to a repeat of an incident which happened to me a few years back, before they started using the automatic plate readers, would now be much more serious.
I got a parking ticket, which I paid, and then a week or so later, The city sent me a notice saying that I had an unpaid ticket from three years earlier. I don't remember ever getting this ticket and I think what must have happened was that they put the ticket on my car and it blew off in the wind or some prankster took it. Naturally, it took me a while to figure out what might have happened and decide to just pay the ticket rather than complain. I sent in the payment and then, a while later, received a notice that I had an unpaid balance with the firm to which New Haven had outsourced their parking ticket collections. After more investigation, I found out that the unpaid balance was not that they had failed to recognize my earlier payment but it was a late fee because the original notice only gave a 15 day deadline to pay (which was only explained in the fine print). If something like this happens again, I could find my car missing and have to spend hours tracking it down at an inopportune time.
Combine just the right mixture of incompetent bureaucracy and high technology and you're in real trouble.