The Allegator

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Traffic Cameras to Scan For Insurance

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There is a reason I put up so many posts about traffic cameras, they are the front lines of the coming privacy apocalypse. Moore’s Law dictates that processing power of computers doubles every year and a half on average. They do this by becoming smaller, more interconnected, and lower in energy consumption. This is in contrast with government, which gets bigger, more intrusive, and less efficient over time. In traffic cameras, the two meet. Government has found a source of revenue in crime, and a way to automate the process through private industry. The cameras pay for themselves fast enough to create their own explosive growth, and government expands to consume the new source of revenue. If crime drops off, government will seek to find or create more crimes in order to avoid revenue starvation. This started with red light cameras, and now according to the Chicago Sun Times, Chicago is considering trying to pay for their budget deficit by having traffic cameras scan every car on the road for current insurance and automatically send the owner of each a $500 ticket, regardless of whether they were driving.

This isn’t about cars or insurance, and it isn’t about my desire to get away with breaking traffic laws; I haven’t driven an automobile for over a decade. As Moore’s law kicks in, we will see surveillance become extremely cheap, and integrated into everything. Imagine you had your own personal thundercloud over your head that followed you around all day and zapped money out of your pocket every time you did anything not government approved. This isn’t some hypothetical slippery slope, this is the nearly inevitable path we are on. We can’t, and shouldn’t, stop the tech. If we don’t make it, someone else will. If we don’t make it, we don’t progress to the good it can bring. The Amish strategy of hiding their heads in the sand is a recipe for being conquered by those willing to use buttons. What we can do is make sure the government isn’t allowed to profit from its use.

There are several things people are doing to try and circumvent the cameras, from polarized licence plate covers that can only be viewed straight on, to clear reflective spray paint to blind the camera with the flash reflection, to GPS based traffic camera detectors.

What will be next once they get traffic cameras to scan for insurance? I’m guessing the next step is LCD signs complete with advertising while you wait for your light to turn green.

Compromise – How do we Break the Deadlock?

“The fellow who says he’ll meet you halfway usually thinks he’s standing on the dividing line.” –Orlando Battista

When you hear the top political candidates speak, one of the more common qualifications you hear them push is their ability to get compromise between democrats and republicans. What does a bipartisan compromise mean in America?

These are a few ways we compromise to break the deadlock:

  • One is when individual representatives decide to sacrifice their convictions on the current issue in exchange for pushing through their own pet project they know would never fly otherwise. We call this pork.
  • Another is to remove all the parts of the bill that are offensive to anyone, usually removing the taxes that will pay for the project, or the regulations on how it will be used.
  • Or they can just spread panic and try to push it through under public pressure before realization and regret set in.
  • Or they can just reallocate the money from something vital and force the other side to re-fund that (as seen with the Iraq surge, and California budget under Schwarzenegger)

None of these are helpful. The second example, splitting the difference, is what most often appeals to the public. This is like having each party with a hand on the steering wheel. The Democrats wanting to turn left, the republicans right; meanwhile the media is in the back seat rooting for the underdog.  We will hit the center divider every time.

There are ways to affect compromise that aren’t dirty. An example would be this plan put forth by Bob Ingles. He proposes starting up a carbon tax (democrats want), but offsetting the tax by reducing taxes elsewhere, such as income taxes (republican opposition evaporates). I’m a fan of taxing problems to fund solutions. Pollution is a much bigger problem than income.  If we give the free market incentive to clean up, they will do so. Since this is as much a behavioral issue as a technological one, I would consider it progress. Imperfect progress (for much the same reason as traffic cameras), but still far better than the business as usual methods of compromise.

Speed Camera Pimping

It looks like people are now taking advantage of this new, guilty until proven innocent folly in order to hurt their rivals. ‘Speed Camera Pimping“, as it is being called (Plate Cloning in Europe) is the act of putting a printout of someone else’s licence plate on your car and then intentionally zipping through red lights in order to rack up tickets. The city has a conflict of interest in this case since it is far easier for them to continue to accept these vast revenues than to solve the problem.

Traffic cameras

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time – using ticket revenue from traffic cameras to help pay for government. It would seem to fall right in with the views of this site; Tax the problem to pay for the solution, right? The problem arises when you mix the government’s inability to shrink with the conflict of interest of needing to feed itself by creating the very problem it was designed to fix.

I know someone who was recently ticketed by one of those traffic cameras they put at intersections. They snap a picture of your license plate, your face, and take a video (displayed big screen in court) of your violation. They never sleep or decide to let you go with a warning.

There is a huge amount of data online about these traffic cameras, and after some research I came to the conclusion that this particular camera was making around a thousand dollars an hour.

Obviously a lot of cities saw dollar signs and started installing traffic cameras all over, and seeing immediate revenue boosts. The traffic cameras are so effective in fact, that people have actually quit breaking the traffic laws they police. According to dallasnews. Dallas has seen a 50% drop in camera revenue due to lack of crime. Great, we can reduce our traffic patrol now that the cameras have reduced violations, right?

Unfortunately, once government creates a job and gains a source of revenue, it is reluctant to let go. It doesn’t want to lay off employees, it just wants its revenue back. The city is starting to turn off the cameras on a rotating basis. Since the infallibility of the cameras is such a key to their success, I expect this will put people back in a gambling mood and increase violations again. I suspect the city knows this. The traffic cameras are run by a company called Redflex. Redflex receives 80% of the ticket price for the first 95 tickets each month, after that they split the revenue with the city. Where does that money go? It is an Australian company.

Related Posts:

Guilty until you find out who really did it?

Speed Camera Pimping