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.

Comments

Good Idea

[foreverdisillusioned]

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.)

Re:my safety

[0123456]

"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.

Re:Not CCTV

[Andy_R]

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.