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British Drivers Destroying Surveillance Cameras
miletus writes "A Wired article tells us that not everyone in Britain loves the surveillance state." The linked entry (part of Bruce Sterling's blog) quotes a story about British anti-camera groups, one of which claims its up-and-coming methods "will enable them to destroy a roadside camera in just a few seconds," and illustrates with a burned-out camera. I wonder how many Americans are similarly motivated.
To be fair, these groups are targeting speed cameras (or "Safety Cameras" as they are laughably called by councils) rather than CCTV cameras.
All of these actions have me wondering if the revolution is happening, and nobody in the public mind knows it?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
In a perfect surveillance society everybody does both.
Let's celebrate destruction of public property. These heroes are standing up for their right to break traffic laws and they need our support. Let the road be free of the tyranny of civility.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
There are certain to be plenty of replies saying how this is a bad thing, people should write to their lawmakers instead, etc. Let me offer a preemptive rebuttal: Fuck that. The information age has made permanent archival cheap, and improvements in pattern recognition are fast giving us the ability to rapidly search through those archives. There isn't a single government in existence today that's responsible enough to handle such data. Certainly, Britain's (and to a much greater extent, the USA's) extremely self-destructive War on Drugs is evidence enough of that.
Speeding isn't good, but it isn't the scourge of society. The fact is, governments (and the UK government especially) have repeatedly shown a propensity to never throw away any data gathered from the public (if you are arrested in the UK for any reason, your DNA is put into a database and never deleted, even if the charges are dropped.) The speeding *obsession* is a joke anyway--the only reason why law enforcement cares so much about it is it's easy to prove and tickets are an easy source of revenue. The solution to the traffic problem is ultimately a technical one--within the next 50-75 years, we should have fully automated cars anyway (if not flying.)
Despite what the evening news tells you, law enforcement is NOT the primary problem of our times. In the quest for a peaceful society, law enforcement is a merely one tool of many and it's a very dangerous and cumbersome tool at that. If our lawmakers cannot recognize this and continue to blaze a merry path towards a privacy-less society--one where surveillance is abused to persecute the law-abiding and civil disobedience is utterly impossible because law enforcement is just too damn omniscient--then the populace at large can and should take measures into their own hands.
I'm certainly not happy *at all* about the destruction of taxpayer-funded property, but this issues involve here transcend your average political quibbling. If these Brits are willing to risk imprisonment to fight the naive Orwellians in charge, good for them. (If on the other hand they're just doing this so they can speed with impunity, shame on them.)
George Orwell was about 25 years too early in his predictions.
My rights don't need management.
This speed camera vandalizing is nothing new. It's been going on for at least seven years now. It's usually idiots who've been caught by the camera that day who go back to destroy the evidence. Thankfully the new "digital" speed cameras that transmit pictures back to the base instantly will resolve this.
However, I think this sort of cowardly attack on public property is nothing new in the UK. Whereas citizens of other countries will attempt to use the law to defeat things, the British are typically content to moan and be passive aggressive about things rather than effect real change. One curious development in the last several years here has been the increase in attacks against firefighters and paramedics. You can't go a week without hearing about firefighters getting rocks thrown at them and their tenders by gangs of feral teens. Even paramedics rushing to people's aid have been attacked and beaten up for no reason at all. Why? The British underclass is powerless, and aggression is all they know, because our legal and political systems are so limp wristed that the ordinary man on the street cannot effect change.
"The cameras don't snap you the moment you slip over the limit briefly, they only catch drivers who are breaking the law by a significant amount."
Dunno where you lived, but plenty of people in the UK have been fined for driving a few miles per hour over the limit, on a safe straight road in good conditions, where the limit has already been reduced to an absurd level. Caught four times and you lose your driving license, and quite possibly your job and your house.
Speed cameras have done nothing to improve road safety, they exist purely to screw over motorists and suck out money which goes to the government's mates running the speed cameras. I've never met anyone in the UK who drives (the majority of the adult population) and supports speed cameras; yet the country has been plastered with them. You may have missed it, but Britain is supposed to be a democracy, and when the majority are seeing something they don't want pushed on them by an authoritarian government, it should be no surprise that a minority decide to take things into their own hands.
Speed cameras have done more than any other single cause to destroy respect for the law among the general public in the UK over the last decade. If the government had any sense, they'd rip them all out tomorrow.
PETHW (People for the Ethical Treatment of Hardware) strongly condemns these senseless attacks on the completely innocent pieces of perfectly fine hardware.
What harm have the cameras done to these afwul people? They just take photos, that's all. They don't care what anyone does with the photos. If you have a problem with those photos PETHW suggests you either drive slower, or take it up with the local constabulary, who are, after all, ultimately responsible for taking the photos and placing the cameras where they stand.
We urge all citizens to act upon this travesty and rise against these lawless individuals. How can they sleep at night knowing what they've done???
Join PETHW in fighting hardware abuse at http://pethw.org/
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
"As a regular cyclist who has almost been killed on numerous occasions by speeding, reckless, and/or irresponsible drivers, I fully support the use of any and all technology (surveillance or otherwise) to FORCE people to drive safely and within the law."
Thanks to speed cameras, you can drive as recklessly or irresponsibly as you want provided you do so below the speed limit, as there are very few traffic police left on the roads. And if you get fake plates, or don't register your car, you can do those at any speed you want, because the speed cameras can't touch you.
"Speeding is reckless behavior"
No it's not; otherwise they'd be charged with 'reckless driving', not speeding. The only reason speeding laws exist is so that the police can punish true reckless drivers on a technicality rather than having to prove reckless driving, which is much harder; they were never intended to be applied universally because that would be absurdly stupid.
"Speed limits exist for a reason."
Yes, to give the police a means to punish people when they can't readily prove reckless driving in court.
Speed limits in the UK are regularly set wrong, often for political reasons. I used to live on a long, wide, mostly straight road where everyone had off-road parking... the speed limit was 40mph. Turn off that onto one of the narrow roads with parked cars on both sides, and the speed limit _INCREASED_ to 60mph. Needless to say, people regularly drove at 60mph through the 40 limit because it was f-ing stupid.
Worse than that, we had two speed cameras in the village where I lived. Both were on safe straight sections of road, both hidden behind trees or road signs in order to raise money rather than discourage people from driving fast. The most dangerous place in the village was a poorly designed pedestrian crossing where going faster than the 30mph speed limit meant you might not be able to stop if a pedestrian was crossing because you couldn't see far enough ahead; so why weren't the speed cameras there, with flashing lights and signs saying 'don't speed and we mean it'?
Ah, because they wouldn't have brought in any money.
And I'm always amused to see cyclists lecturing people on the need to obey road laws when I almost never saw a cyclist in the UK stop at a red light or a pedestrian crossing, and death rates per mile from cycling are similar to death rates per mile from driving; I was almost knocked flying myself last year by a cyclist racing through a 'pedestrianised' area.
When, for example, will Britain see compulsory insurance for bikes, along with compulsory registration and number plates so they can be caught and punished for breaking traffic laws? Ah, when Hell freezes over.