From "Video Justice" TV show: "The video camera has evolved from passive observer to active
participant" (in the war on crime). Golly gee, government wants to use video cameras to monitor citizens everywhere, all the time, and now we have a primetime TV show dedicated to convincing the citizens that the surveillance camera is their best friend. What a coincidence! With a dozen TV shows already championing law enforcement personnel with neatly pressed uniforms saving the citizens from bad guys wearing T-shirts, its refreshing to see fresh propaganda which informs us that surveillance technology is our new best friend. It was so enlightening to hear criminologists and prosecutors praise the emotional charge generated by seeing perpetrators "laugh" as they "terrorized" people by shooting them with paintball guns resulting in their receiving four years in prison instead of the one year that the prosecutor expected. ( 4 perps x 4 years x $65,000/year = > $ 1,000,000.00 of taxpayer money spent to incarcerate people who splatter someone with paint and laugh about it. If Tim May owns a paintball gun, then I guess that he can add to his list of potential felonies.) We also learn that surveillance cameras are "Invaluable weapons of enforcement in government stings" and that "The evidence they provide is incontestable." It sounds like we will no longer need judges and juries once the citizens are fully monitored. We are told that John Law is protected from claims of entrapment by the irrefutable evidence provided by their video taping of the government sting. Naturally, we only see a selective two minute tape of the entire operation. No video/sound recording of the setup of the victim/criminal is shown. There was no video shown of police brutality (ala Rodney King) and no questioning of why the technology is only geared toward showing what goes on in front of the camera, leaving the citizen unprotected once the officer takes him or her out its visual range. (Of course, any deviation from the "Sainthood of Authority" script would result in the show's producers losing access to the cheap source of their video propaganda.) Where is the legislation being put forth to require law enforcement personnel under video surveillance to prevent them from engaging in crimes against the citizens? Harassing them, beating them, becoming the source of crack flowing into their neighborhoods, spending hours and days manipulating them into a two-minute video scene which is staged to provide "incontestable evidence" of their guilt. Video cameras are commonplace to watch the citizens in banks in case someone tries to "steal" a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. Where are the video cameras that watch the bankers in order to provide evidence of their possible criminal actions? Video surveillance technology is the same old story. Provide a few emotionally charged scenes to scare the citizens, offer them a form of "protection" and then institute the technology in a one-way vector which points only at those on the bottom of the food chain. Same technological shit, different day. TruthMonger