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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.
In a perfect surveillance society everybody does both.
Yep, its a misleading article headline - these are not surveillance cameras. They take a static photo when a car passes above the speed limit by a certain margin (5-10% IIRC).
The UK government places these in accident-prone areas, and makes their locations available to the public. If you have satellite navigation in your car it will warn you as you approach one. They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right. Petrolheads claiming they are fighting back against a police state are doing nothing more than trivialising the actual civil liberty violations committed by the UK government.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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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.
Sometimes they are both. The automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) network uses CCTV cameras to (a) enforce special road taxes like the "congestion charge", (b) make a timestamped record of every number plate that passes each camera, and (c) enforce speed limits.
This is arguably worse than non-automated CCTV systems even though a human operator may never see the pictures that are recorded. The number plate information goes into a database, where it may be stored indefinitely for "crime prevention purposes". Bruce Schneier wrote that 'It's not "follow that car," it's "follow every car."' So there are certainly valid political reasons to object to this type of surveillance beyond simply objecting to a speed limit. It is nice to see people who actually give a shit about this stuff, even if I do not agree with their methods, since most Brits couldn't give a fuck about anything the Government does.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
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.
It just demonstrates that civil liberties are to these people, a rather lower concern than, say, 50 quid in fines.
These people destroy speed cameras because they want the freedom the break the law, nothing more and I hope everyone of them gets arrested. The law is you go a certain speed if you break it ITS YOUR OWN FAULT NOT THE CAMERA THAT CAUGHT YOU BREAKING THE LAW.What a stupid comparison. Are you twelve years old or something? A McDonald's doesn't run through red lights, almost killing me. To kill me I (As in myself not some random asshole) would have to eat way too many. Just like how water kills you if you drink too much.
"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.
The flaw in your logic is that speed limits are not the same as proper laws. They are not set by politicians, debated in parliament, and you can't vote out the people who choose them if you disagree with them. They are set by mysterious quangos, with no accountability and no effective means to appeal against them when they are set wrongly.
In the UK we have a law against dangerous driving. Have you ever wondered who someone caught doing 31 mph in a non-residential area on an empty dual carriageway is charged with speeding but not dangerous driving? It's because breaking a speed limit that is only there to give revenue to a 'camera partnership' isn't dangerous.
You're right about red lights being a real danger point. Why do we have far more speed traps than red light cameras? It's because safe drivers do go faster than wrongly set limits, but they don't run red lights, so red light cameras wouldn't rake in the cash like speed traps.
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