On Mon, 3 Jun 1996, Jim Choate wrote:
Forwarded message:
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 1996 20:19:34 -0700 From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May) Subject: Re: opinions on book "The Truth Machine"
Today's newspaper (SJ Mercury News) carried a long article about increasingly ubiquitous video surveillance cameras, and singled out the U.K. as a place that is leading. Apparently even small villages have 50 or more cameras scattered around...men have been arrested for urinating in bushes outside pubs, caught by the infrared pickups (I hadn't thought about the cameras being IR, but this makes sense, as a large fraction of street crimes take place in dark or semidark areas).
Here in Austin, TX there is at least 1 IR camera located at the top of the police building downtown (8th & IH-35). Many intersections have stoplight synchronized cameras for getting license plates of red light runners (eg N. Lamar & 51st). I know the output of the cameras is cabled off-pole (can see the cables) to a NEMA style box. Don't know the format from there. It would be no technological leap to buy cable channels and mux the pictures back to a centralized site. This city is lousy with cable and fiber and the city bought in from the get-go with a project called I-Net in the mid-80's.
Defense to all photo plate takers is best found in the back of Car and Driver in the form of a polarized plastic plate that is opaque at angles greater than about ten degrees.
Jim Choate
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