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Australia Mulling a Nationwide Vehicle-Tracking System
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that as political support for Australia's version of the national ID card is waning, the powers that be have found a far more effective way to catalog the populace. CrimTrac, an Australian government agency responsible for designing technical solutions to aid policing, is due to hand in a $2.2 million scoping study for the introduction of a nationwide automatic number plate recognition system (ANPR). It seems that as well as ANPR, the system will also collect images of drivers and passengers with high enough resolution for identification purposes. All ANPR data collected would be made available to participating agencies in real time, and retained for five years for future investigations."
I disagree. Anything you do to yourself, since nobody else is harmed, is not a crime.
The only reason certain "self" activities like masturbation, smoking dope, or committing suicide are outlawed is because we got a bunch of petit-dictators (aka control freaks) who want to control everybody else. There's no justifiable reason to outlaw these activities as long as the only person I am harming.... is myself.
"No person has a right to harm another. And that's all the government should restrain him." - Thomas Jefferson
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
The police in the UK already have the power to detain people arbitrarily. So that piece of the fascist puzzle is already in place for a gulag. All you need is some leader to take advantage of said legislation, but hey, by then its too late..
By the way, did you know that before the first world war, you could travel and live ANYWHERE in the world freely and without restriction? Passports were put in place to control the flow of people during the war. Guess what? The legislation was never revoked after the war. We just live with it, and it has got progressively More suppressing over the years. Do you really think governments have your interests at heart when it comes to personal freedoms?
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Agreed. The whole idea is incredibly stupid. "CrimTrak"? If they know someone is a criminal, go to his house, his parent's house or his girlfriend's house. 95% of the time he'll be there. For the other 5%, we need panopticon video surveillance of the general population! It's obvious! How ever did we make it to 2008? The criminals should have killed us all by now without this technology!
Please, somebody, somewhere cut me a f*cking break and stop this stupidity.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
The Privacy Act (1988) specifically mentions that no unique identifier issued by a government agency or corporation can be used by another entity for the purpose of identification. In practice, this means things such as driver's license number, a Tax File Number (equivalent to U.S SSN), or the medicare number can not be used by any corporation or agency other than the one which issued it in the first place, for identification.
Interesting theory, but your TFN is probably known by your employer, your bank, centrelink (social security), your superannuation fund as well as the tax office. Of course, you don't have to give it, you could just pay 46.5% tax instead. Now that's freedom of choice to keep your privacy! With the growth of the Family Tax Benefit and other centrelink payments a very large proportion of the population is on some form of government payment. Since many of them have the government take it from one hand as PAYG tax only to put it back in the other as FTB, there seems to be no purpose to it but to increase government control of the population and to force the people into a position where they are always reporting their activities, income and other personal details to the government.
Don't be fooled by the occasional head rolling and the rhetoric of liberty in this country. The liberty of the people is dependent on being able to thwart government power. We occasionally thwart the power of individual politicians, maybe even a party, but not of the government institutions themselves. The peoples power to thwart government is specific to the branch of government. For the legislative we have the power of elections, but the majority of voters don't seem to be able to understand economic theory, monetary policy, the nature of government and liberty or logic well enough to make a decision based on anything but propaganda. For the judicial we have jury trials but I find few and far between are the people who understand the concept of jury nullification, people think that jury trials are about finding the truth (which is partly right) but don't understand the importance of being able to dismiss unjust prosecutions. For the executive there is the right to bear arms and we gave it up.
All three of these citizen's powers were used in the forming of this country during the events surrounding the Eureka Stockade. The government was resisted by force, couldn't find juries to bring guilty verdicts on the rebels, and the leader was subsequently elected to the Legislative Assembly of Victoria. Can you honestly say you think anything remotely resembling these events could happen today? I think it would be almost impossible to find a jury that would find in favour of people on firearms charges because their cause was just. It seems likely that even the possession of (unlicensed) firearms would be enough to secure convictions, let alone firing of police, regardless of the cause. Even if you could find a jury to release them though, the thought that they could become elected representatives? Preposterous.
Australians in general are not the freedom loving people we once were, and the ones who are here are not present in sufficient numbers to have any real influence on an election. You can look forward to things getting worse. Just look at some of the comments on the linked article in favour of this.
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