Traffic Cameras to Scan For Insurance

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.

I’m guessing the next step is LCD signs complete with advertising while you wait for your light to turn green.

Government Chia Eradication Efforts

I love a good conspiracy theory, and I have a few myself regarding red lights and government corruption. This guy, however, needs to check his tinfoil hat for lead content. I give him extra credit for delivery and follow through. His web design made me smile, and he even has T-Shirts!

Compromise

“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?  There are a few ways we 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.

Guilty until you find out who really did it?

Perhaps the biggest place my libertarian ideals clash with my strong feeling that technology should be strongly encouraged to progress is the issue of surveillance. It seems like every year the number of ways technology keeps tabs on us doubles, and law enforcement inevitably finds a way to get their fingers on the data. Computers are getting better every day at sifting the data themselves. In a frighteningly near future it looks likely that you will be so thoroughly watched that every minor infraction committed outside of your home could be instantly noticed, tried, ticketed, and deducted from your bank account. In the video above we see another slide down the slippery slope and catch a glimpse of how fair the system likely will be. Apparently proving that you weren’t even in the state when the crime was committed isn’t good enough any more, you have to go track down the criminals yourself. Apparently your accuser can now be a not too bright machine, and your car can commit crimes you are responsible for, whether you were there or not. In the age of automated law enforcement, the burden of proof should be even more strongly on the accuser, not less, and allowing the system to be a source of revenue will be its downfall.

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