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Cameras To Watch Cameras In Maryland
Cornwallis writes in with a story reminding cameras everywhere that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't watching you. "Many people find speed cameras frustrating, and some in the region are taking their rage out on the cameras themselves.
But now there's a new solution: cameras to watch the cameras. One is already in place, and Prince George's County Police Maj. Robert V. Liberati hopes to have up to a dozen more before the end of the year.
'It's not worth going to jail over a $40 ticket or an arson or destruction of property charge,' says Liberati."
That's a race condition if I ever saw one...
Who watches the cameras that watches cameras?
This is obviously the right way for our society to go.
expandfairuse.org
There's no possible way someone would think of destroying the camera-observing-camera BEFORE the speed camera.
Then you end up with TWO broken cameras, and didn't accomplish anything.
Doesn't a simple strobe light work?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Simply burn them. Here are burnt Gatsos in the UK: http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm
sudo mod me up
...camera watches camera!
In the United States, it's the other way around.
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Magnets, laser pointers, spray paint, stolen car crashed into pole. The list goes on.
The law is the law, and if the speed limit is 55 or 60 inside Baltimore City then that's what the drivers should be doing. If they find that objectionable rather than destroy the cameras, they should be lobbying to have the speed increased to 65.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Common sense would say, "Put each camera in the other camera's field of view."
Palm trees and 8
If anyone sees you destroying the thing you're going to get in trouble anyway, so we are assuming the people are doing it when no one is around. In which case, wear a mask, park where the thing cant see your car, and walk right on up to it lol.
...and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll look down and whisper "No."
The camera watching cameras are an easy target, and I don't think people really buy the safety crap anymore. Its a money making teacher and we all know it
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Take a tip from the Aussies. They know how properly sabotage these illegitimate revenue stealers.
Hang a old tire on the offending big brother's eye, add a little accelerate like gasoline, kerosene, or cyclohexane(charcoal lighter fluid). The shape of the tire provides a channel to hold the liquid. Add a match and walk away. Once the rubber ignites nothing will put it out, and the heat is intense enough to cook those nice expensive speed cameras and permanently foul the equally expensive enclosures that keep the cameras from being stolen. (Or from less effective means of sabotage)
Like any truly effective means of civil disobedience, it's cheap and easy and done with things readily found laying around. Everyone has something flammable laying around in their garage and you can't walk 100 yards on a country road without finding a an abandoned tire or two.
Now, you just have to put something over your face to hide you from the eyes that watch the eyes.
getting rid of revenue cameras would be easier instead of watching Americans like paranoid communists.
While I can't say I'm a fan of speed cameras, and in fact the thought of vandalizing them has crossed my mind on occasion, the two I encounter routinely in Baltimore County are right out in front of elementary schools with lots of cute little pedestrians around them. So, it's hard for me to be entirely critical of the effort - at least because it does what it's supposed to - it reminds me to slow down before I run over some kid. If instead they were everywhere, I would be much more in opposition to them.
Speeding tickets are only $40 in Maryland? Sounds like a great deal!
May 8th is National DISRUPT A CAMERA day.
Hey slashdot, lets make this happen.
The internet is about joint-effort.
Who is with me?
I am dead serious.
I propose May 8th when the first patent was issued.
Patent link
The Department of Redundancy Department.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
This is why they make sniper rifles, high power lasers, and explosives with remote detonators. I would have added artillery and other sundry indirect-fire ordnance, but I'm not a big fan of collateral damage, meatsack or otherwise.
How about voting for representatives that work to take down such surveillance?
But then they'll come up with cameras watching you in the voting booth :-(
Just mount a mirror so each camera sees itself. Then it will know when it's about to get smacked.
Or even better, a real-time monitor so it can see itself seeing itself....
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
from the "UK-would-be-proud" department.
It's September. I'm sure the local REI has ski-masks in stock. Or better yet, the Halloween store for some Obama, Guy Fawkes, Joe Stalin, etc. masks.
But then the spy-camera sales rep probably didn't bring that up when he and the town council went to that luxury resort for the weekend to discuss the camera contract.
but two wrongs don't make a right
But I was told that double negative is positive...
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Ultra Silent firearms, so they cannot be detected from the sounds.
Energy Weapons, to destroy the CCD
Electronic Warfare, to disrupt communications, and storing of the images.
In the implementation of stoplight cameras in my town, there are always two cameras diagonally across the intersection from each other, and each camera is in the other's field of view. I don't *know* whether they're rigged to provide security for each other, but were I designing it, that's the way I would do it. I also suspect that the image isn't actually stored in the camera housing. I have a security system at home, and when it's triggered, the images are stored locally and automatically duplicated on a server 15 miles from the house. I suspect they've got something similar.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
From the article,
Liberati says the cameras aren't a case of Big Brother nor a cash grab, police are simply trying to keep the public safe from reckless drivers.
That's a hard sell; speeding tickets (et al) pay police/transit dept budgets. This makes it hard for the public to understand that the police are there to help. The problem with speeding is that it can be done safely, and there are plenty of people who regularly speed without risk of accidents. I've encountered more near-accidents created by Highway Patrol than by speeders (which is in part a public stupidity item -- the radar gun already clocked your speed well before you slammed on the breaks and forced the guy behind you to do likewise).
I'm a stats guy. I would support these cameras if they were used for statistical purposes, and I do not support them due to the current money flow. Here is my modest proposal:
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
That's a race condition if I ever saw one...
Sounds more like an infinite recursion, if you ask me:
installMonitoringCamera(Camera cameraToMonitor) {
Camera monitoringCamera = new Camera(cameraToMonitor);
monitoringCamera.monitor();
if(monitoringCamera.observesSomeAssholeSettingFireToMonitoredCamera())
installMonitoringCamera(monitoringCamera);
}
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
It's not like targeting the cameras will put and end to them. We (society) need to target those in the media and in positions of power which get them installed in the first place. A few terrified individuals might just change there mind.
These cameras are just a means of taking money from the masses instead of the top 1% even if the top 1% get hit more often by the cameras. If everybody is targeted the top 1% are paying less because its distributed out over the whole population. Even amongst those who can't afford it.
Those of us who are caught then feel guilty when in reality everybody is doing it and there is nothing wrong with it. What is wrong is the law. But the law is not what it is right. The law is what it is because of the people in / with power.
Many police officers find civil liberties frustrating, and some officers take out their rage on citizens. But now there's a new solution: cameras to watch the police.
Maryland needs to tag every resident with GPS transponders and heart-stopping devices. If anyone even goes near a camera...
A Ruger 10/22 with a 10x40x scope.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
What about an autonomous (or remotely piloted if necessary) 'copter drone that can be programmed to fly to the vicinity, identify a camera, and spray its lens with a blast of paint? That would be pretty unstoppable.
Yo Dawg!
I heard you fascists like cameras. SO we put in cameras to watch your cameras so you can watch your cameras while you watch your cameras.
If I see someone blast an auto-ticket revenue camera into a sprinkle of little pieces at 03:00 AM with a high powered rifle, I am going to wag my finger disapprovingly at them, but I'm not going to call the cops. Just sayin'.
You must first destroy the cameras that are watching the cameras, so they'll be forced to install cameras to watch the cameras that watch the cameras.
Any person who actually has a conscience would easily understand where you're coming from, but it's still really not a good excuse for the cameras. Already, I know I'm afraid to drive past a school because the "school zones" have such drastically reduced speed limits (and high probabilities of officers lurking in the parking lot or a nearby driveway), PLUS doubled or tripled fines for speeding, it's easy to get dinged with a really high dollar ticket for going any faster than a crawl through that whole area.
I really don't need the camera there to remind me I better slow down.
Destroying the speed cameras might not be the "recommended" way to address the problem, but quite frankly? It sends a stronger message and does so more quickly than lobbying for a speed limit change.
The fact is, these things are ALL about revenue generation. If you turn them into a big EXPENSE to maintain, the revenue stops looking as attractive. It's that simple.
Ask yourself this: Would technologies costing a similar amount to implement be considered if there was no way for the police dept. and local govt. to receive profits from them? I think you and I both know the answer to that one... All their cries about the cameras being there for "safety" are just attempts to get acceptance for the automated ticket issuing system.
Lobbying for a higher speed limit is problematic because you're up against established groups in government who would lose money if it's changed. They've probably got more resources than you to push their side of the issue.
I'm not saying it can't be done (and often, it SHOULD be), but I have little sympathy for the police or local govt. when they complain about the expenses they're incurring when these cameras wind up damaged. Maybe they should have bought insurance on them? That's what they always force ME to do by law with my motor vehicle.
I'm so glad I moved away from Maryland over a decade ago...
The state acts like a police state.
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So tell me what that second camera is going to do if someone with a rifle caps both of them. What will happen if the people who trash these cameras just simply wears a mask? Absolute Trash and a complete waste of money. I would love to see both pairs of cameras trashed. Double their loses.
Its better to kill the people servicing them. Then no one will want to do it.
or demand so high a pay it is no longer profitable.
Anything is worth it. We are not your cities personal piggy bank.
I hope they go to the house of the people who make them kill the family and cut the eye lids off of them so they have to watch.
The start with the feet and cut them up with a cutting torch then take all the parts and feed them to hogs.
I had a friend who had a job working for a speed camera company that was contracted by Howard County (just west of Baltimore). He was paid to drive a speed trap van to a site (often near on and off ramps of Rt 70 outside of Baltimore), setup the laser radar equipment and then monitor the computers. It was a boring job which had him sitting in a van with little to no climate controls for up to 6 hours a day. He would call me every now and then to stave off boredom and all you could hear in the background was the windows ding every fraction of a second. That ding was played every time a car was going 10-12 MPH over the limit. Each ticket was something like $150 and from what he guessed he would catch anywhere from 200 to 500+ speeders a day. That coupled with the fact that the county had ten such vans deployed at any given time. Each van grossed upward of 100,000 a day. I bet the contractor made a pretty penny (and paid their workers shit) but the county made out like bandits. They easily pulled in a million a week. So they can cry me a fucking river.
Now it looks like they cut out the middle man and bought the actual equipment. I bet it paid for itself within a week.
It was only a matter of time... I am one of many unhappy residents of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Maryland that despise the police state that Chairman O'Malley has created. Before he was Governor of Maryland he was Mayor of Baltimore and had cameras installed all over the city in order to reduce crime (read spy on citizens). While the "official" crime rate in Baltimore may have dropped, if you speak with anyone within the city they would tell you otherwise. As one poster said earlier, he also had red light cameras installed and yellow light timing shortened to the point that it violated federal law, yet he was still elected Governor. As with most other Democrat dominated states right now, the state is running a huge debt even though he has increased sales and income taxes while funneling money to his buddies pet projects. The taxes were raised under the guise of having the top income earners pay their "fair share" but the only thing it accomplished was causing those income earners out of the state along with any revenue that would have been generated from taxing their income or the income of people they would have been supporting through their purchasing power. What most people don't realize about Maryland is that there is very little industry that isn't directly or indirectly tied to the federal government (government contractors or suppliers of said contractors) which is the only thing keeping this state afloat. And to think, Chairman O'Malley is the head of the Democratic Governors Association and was a key speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. These cameras were a warning sign, combined with the recent domestic use of recon drones the Democrats are desensitizing the public to blatant spying on law abiding citizens. The only thing they have left to do is get rid of the ban on ex-post facto laws and they will jail anyone they wish for anything they wish whenever they want.
I mean if I go by this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year I'd notice that the total number of traffic deaths is right about 35k. (Sorry, no stats for 2011 yet) So basically you're arguing every traffic death was because of speeding. Note - depending on who you read between 2 and 30% of accidents are caused by speeding.(Not the same thing but does imply that deaths due to speeding is no where near 35k)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
In British Colombia, the government intruduced speed cameras, mounted in Astro Vans parked on the side of the road. They were parked in random placed of course. Foolishly, they left the vans unattended. After several vans were vandalized and a few were torched. Due to public outrage, the whole program was scrapped.
The people won....
By the description it sounds like that camera got me about a week before it was burned down. Robbed by the Police on my way to get a new motorcycle tire. As I recall it's a two lane highway, with a 30 MPH speed limit. Seems to me I was doing 43. Should be 50 along there. However if they did that, they wouldn't be issuing any tickets. So they use the fact that there is a school nearby, lower the speed limit to put up this camera. I didn't even know it was there until I got the ticket. Lucky it wasn't on my daily drive. I think that was $40.
Need to stop the maddness. Ban those cameras. They don't increase safety, they compromise it. I've seen people lock tires up through an intersection - obviously a victim of a red light camera in the past. Others have lost control trying to stop in the rain. All so the government can collect another illegal highway use tax. Maybe some smart lawyer out there can do a class action suit against governments and get the government officials locked up.
Give it a cataract.
...cameras to watch the cameras that are watching the cameras? And then we'll need cameras to watch those cameras. By the time we're done, we'll have the most thoroughly watched security system in the world. If anyone does anything, we'll feel much better knowing that they'll be caught on camera on camera on camera on camera. Take that, criminals! Big Brother has nothing on us!