Perhaps I’m just dumb but I find it extremely easy to overlook these exits and skip right by the tollbooth. There are no “rumble strips” on the road or anything else to inform you that a tollbooth is coming up.

I have received a letter in the mail with a fine and a nice picture of my licence plate because I have unknowingly passed a tollbooth. As a result, I not only avoid tollroads in Illinois, I avoid Illinois as much as possible. Goodbye tourist dollars!

The fact is that with red-light cameras and speed-trap cameras there are an unbelievable number of ways for the government to commit highway robbery, and driving is already expensive enough. It’s just another way of screwing the average man.

That’s just the beginning, of course. I see no limit to the number of ways this technology can be horribly abused.

In other words: Government is good, the people are bad?

“Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Give 1billion $ to us islamists, we belong to your people!

Ok, there you go.

Ron said he sees these video systems as a good way to discourage crime AND catch criminals.

And I think it is not a good way to discourage crime.England (yeah, I singled that part out) and the USA have higher crime rates than most other ‘civilized’ countries, and these two are the biggest surveillance states on earth, monitoring everything you can think of (ok, almost everything).Of course, at least Europe is catching up (concerning surveillance, not crimes), it seems.

Speaking about “non-technical cultures”: Are you trying to paint people who’d like to have some privacy as primitive?By the way: Many tribal societies have (had) LESS privacy than our modern societies.And I don’t know any ‘non-technical cultures’, this being a difference in degree and not quality.

I noticed some people here claim we already have no privacy anymore, since most of us use the internet and give -through this usage- more or less of our personal information away.

To me this is akin to running around naked because normally people can see my face, and therefore concluding “there’s nothing to hide” anymore.

“What makes them right? Or wrong? Is public space not public? ”

Another thing: You make a very simplistic mistake here,trapped in words as you are.Public space is per definition public, but you didn’t say anything else by this.

What does public mean?Could you define public for me?Who is the public? What is public space, and why should it have any bearing on my right to privacy?

A provocative example to think about: If the space belongs to the public, and the representives of this abstract entity have the right to ‘document’ whatever happens there… these records would therefore belong to the representatives, right?People can sell their own possessions!?

What if they would start to sell pictures (or vids) of your wife/girlfriend’s bosom to porn sites (I decided to make it less provocative)?After all, she had no privacy anyway.Why not upload that hilarious vid of you falling over to youtube?

The difference between public space and your private space (in which you may lord over others, I don’t know your laws) is that I practically have no choice wether to enter the former or not, if I wish to live a normal life.

If something is mine, or belongs to a collective, is everything therein contained, mine/its too?If you fly with an airplane, do you belong to its owner?

Why don’t ‘we’ proclaim ‘public air’ and tax it?

Of course, in the end it is a matter of the law, but something being legal doesn’t make it right.What makes someone right?It is matter of your ‘value system’, what you are trying to optimize for and what how far “you can see” in order to do so.

This gets problematic if some groups want to force others to make concessions, e.g the fearful or the exhibitionists who always dreamed to “be on cam” trying to effectively (because we must enter “public space”) film everyone.

At some point we will not be able to forensically distinguish between fake video and real video. It will be as easy as writing

trace (‘hello world’);

to render a ‘video’ of John Doe committing crime xyz.

What we can generate digitally with our imaginations and tools will far surpass all that we can capture in real-time viewers.

;0)

Cheers.

This has some definite problems for privacy advocates. When a crime happens, can they subpeona everyone’s private logs who was in the area and reconstruct the crime? But it will also mean the watchers are constantly watched. TSA thugs and the like, abusive cops, etc. They will all be being recorded at all times as well. They may try to make it illegal with wiretapping laws, but it is ultimately unenforceable.

The authorities will have to know that their every action is likely to be being streamed to the cloud, and abuses will be out in the open for all to see.

Strange days coming.

I certainly hope the Gendarmes of Paris start wearing Google Glasses for this. Those Algerians in the McDonald’s there wont dare to assault the Cyborg Police.

So much freedom!I envy you guys…

Why am I not surprised…