Red Light Cameras, I don't get it.

Eugene Leitl Eugene.Leitl at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Thu Aug 2 08:20:18 PDT 2001


On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, cubic-dog wrote:

> years ago, when I was a MP in Germany, I used to chuckle over the red
> light cameras and camera speed traps used by the Polizei. Neat idea,
> never work in the states, we have a 4th amendment after all.

You must have grown up in a different country, the U.S. of the 70s, last
century.

> Then the technology started moving over here. I was suprised at first,
> but then, I though about how many bank cameras had been used to build
> cases against bank robbers, and no one ever fussed about it.

Of course it's unsurprising, most people are ignorant, and like to stay
that way.

> Now, for some reason, folks are getting their panties in a knot over
> this.

It's a bit too late, but it's a good thing it's happening at all.

> What's the big deal?
>
> Yeah, big brother has a new surveillence tool, so what?

Some people have put two and two together, and finally understood what you
can do with with realtime machine vision biometrics, wireless WAN and data
warehouses, and what that means in the context of Moore's law and the
current political system.

It's not just a new surveillance tool, that thing turns quantity into
quality. And, of course, there's much more interesting stuff in the
pipeline, so what we have is just a dot on the plot.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://www.lrz.de/~ui22204/">leitl</a>
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