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Using Speed Cameras To Send Tickets To Your Enemies
High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim's license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.
...when they usually pay through the nose or get jailtime for counterfeiting an official document (which a license plate is).
It's interesting though that penalties are apparently tied to the car in the us, not the driver. I still remember the police showing up regularly at the door showing me a (usually bad) picture of my father and asking if I knew the person. Thank god^M^M^M the constitution for family privilege.
Fleur de Sel
The legislators have thought of that. It's an infraction, rather than a misdemeanor, so it's an administrative fine -- it goes on your driving record, but not your criminal record.
Because it's a criminal charge, you aren't given the right to face your accuser.
It's a perversion of justice for the profit of the state, but right now the judges let it pass constitutional muster.
Since the cameras are generally owned by companies and not the local authorities, I think they only thing they can do is put it on your credit report.
Where I am, they recently took down some red light cameras because they were not generating enough revenue for the company and the city didn't want to pay for them. It has nothing to do with law and everything to do with profit.
If you live in that much fear of government officials, then you have bigger problems than speed cameras. In a free society, the fear, if any, goes the other way.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Replying here because it should be up at the top. Sorry.
In the UK we have cameras that face towards you, taking a picture of the driver that will be used as evidence if you say "I wasn't driving".
Take advantage of this while you can.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I haven't seen a city in California whose times aren't already unsafely short. You can't tell me that a two second yellow is EVER safe, yet I've seen them that short in Sunnyvale, and many, many intersections at only three. And I've seen three seconds with zero all-red seconds for lights that allow left turns across five lanes of traffic. If you enter at the speed limit as it turns yellow, you will be in the intersection for at least two seconds while the light is green in the other direction. I can count at least a dozen lights between Fair Oaks and Sunnyvale roads alone that are dangerous, and those aren't even the intersections with cameras....
The other dirty thing they do to try to anger drivers and make them run red lights is to time the lights so you hit every second light red reproducibly. Again, the two major roads through Sunnyvale are timed in this way for the vast majority of the day. Not only does it increase the rate of road rage significantly, it encourages people to exceed the speed limit to beat the lights, encourages people to run the lights when they change to red right in front of them, and likely wastes millions of gallons of gasoline every year in California alone, all so they can raise a little more red light revenue at a few intersections....
IMHO, we need a California-wide ballot measure to demand citizen oversight committees be in charge of all traffic light management. That's the only way the abuse will stop. And red light cameras are abuse. Every study of red light cameras has shown that increasing the length of yellow lights to a minimum of seven seconds has the same benefits in terms of sideswipe accident reduction without the increased rate of rear end collisions, without wasting tons of fuel, without causing road rage, etc. Unfortunately, the people in power are not about to admit that they were wrong, so the only way to fix the problem is to wrest control away form them through a referendum.
At least speed cameras are illegal in California. We got one right, anyway. It's a good thing, too. There's a radar sign on Highway 17 that routinely overestimates the speed of oncoming traffic by up to 15 MPH. If such a device were handing out speeding tickets, I'd have a thousand of them, all while going the speed limit, all with a confused look on my face staring at the completely incorrect speed on the sign....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
http://www.google.com/search?q=red+light+camera+accident+statistics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_light_camera
You're welcome.
Wonder what the public key field is for?