Journal twitter's Journal: Nation Wide Driver Tracking Planned for US. 6
Astute blogger, RMS, noticed that companies want to extend Big Brother tracking of all car travel to the U.S.. From the linked article:
Private companies in the US are hoping to use red light cameras and speed cameras as the basis for a nationwide surveillance network similar to one that will be active next year in the UK. Redflex and American Traffic Solutions (ATS), the top two photo enforcement providers in the US, are quietly shopping new motorist tracking options to prospective state and local government clients.
The article quotes plans and sales pitches from both companies, then cites a case of police abuse of a previous database to track and intimidate a reporter.
So now the real reason for traffic cameras comes out. The catching of red light runners was and excuse barely sufficient to overcome massive public opposition and then only for a short time. We already knew from a Virginia study that cameras actually increased injury accidents, without considering the influence of corruption. Anyone who gave the issue more than a passing thought concluded that the cameras were a nation wide spending pork barrel project that can easily be used to track and harass political opposition.
I'm pretty sure (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure Twitter's posts get promoted to front page articles more often than yours or mine.
This is an important issue, but probably not enough of an IT slant to get posted to the main page.
I've worked on some of these systems. The potentials really are scary.
Not as scary as Oregon's movement to put GPS in every car - putatively to more "fairly" charge road fees, but possibly to track every vehicle in real time. When a government proposes putting a tracking device with a wireless data link in eve
Re: (Score:2)
the plus side, you can never have enough people to sift through all the data from all the possible cameras...
so harassment of specific targets becomes the main use. those who keep a low profile will never find themselves harassed. even in the UK there are now too many cameras for them to stop criminals, criminals realized that if they walked a couple blocks with some form of mask, the police have a really hard time catching them. if they change clothes after the crime, again a block or two away, even if