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1788 messages, Last post on Nov 14, 2009 at 3:43 PM
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Replying to: vcheng (Jul 23, 2009 3:21 am) I suggest that the politicians try using cameras to capture drug dealers and buyers, prostitution areas' participants, politicians on the take for money and deals, and other things that our society actually needs cleaned up.
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Replying to: imidazol97 (Jul 23, 2009 7:14 am) Let's campaign to get live web cams covering all of the hallways 24/7 in the US Senate and House office buildings. These are public buildings paid for by we taxpayers and we deserve to see who is coming and going. Obama promised us Transparency and this would be a good start.
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Replying to: xrunner2 (Jul 24, 2009 8:14 am) 
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Driving past my favorite construction zone doing 55 (speed limit) the inaccurate radar speed board told me "Your speed is 68, SLOW DOWN". I'm SO glad we don't have photo radar here. 
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Replying to: andys120 (Dec 16, 2008 10:54 am) |
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Replying to: oldfarmer50 (Jul 26, 2009 3:29 pm) I love this new fangled technology. 
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From the land of the Union Jack, where automatic speed cameras are legion, one wonders what could be the next step? Well, wonder no more, here is an interesting story about how certain families deemed to be "anti-social" by their local councils will be monitored by cameras 24/7. This raises a deep issue: Once we go down the path of automatic enforcement of the law, and once technology makes 24/7 monitoring of the citizenry possible, the desire to market ever increasing levels of safety and "it is all for your own good" is much too strong for the powers-that-be to resist. We will lose out big time if that happens, please be forewarned! We have to make sure that automatic blind photo enforcement of the law does NOT happen in the US of A. from: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/115736 UK NEWS SIN BINS FOR WORST FAMILIES Thursday July 23,2009 By Alison Little THOUSANDS of the worst families in England are to be put in “sin bins” in a bid to change their bad behaviour, Ed Balls announced yesterday. The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction. Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far. But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two years, with each costing between £5,000 and £20,000 – a potential total bill of £400million. Ministers hope the move will reduce the number of youngsters who get drawn into crime because of their chaotic family lives, as portrayed in Channel 4 comedy drama Shameless. Sin bin projects operate in half of council areas already but Mr Balls wants every local authority to fund them. He said: “This is pretty tough and non-negotiable support for families to get to the root of the problem. There should be Family Intervention Projects in every local authority area because every area has families that need support.” But Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “This is all much too little, much too late. “This Government has been in power for more than a decade during which time anti-social behaviour, family breakdown and problems like alcohol abuse and truancy have just got worse and worse.” Mr Balls also said responsible parents who make sure their children behave in school will get new rights to complain about those who allow their children to disrupt lessons. Pupils and their families will have to sign behaviour contracts known as Home School Agreements before the start of every year, which will set out parents’ duties to ensure children behave and do their homework. The updated Youth Crime Action Plan also called for a crackdown on violent girl gangs as well as drug and alcohol abuse among young women. But a decision to give ministers new powers to intervene with failing local authority Youth Offending Teams was criticised by council leaders. Les Lawrence, of the Local Government Association, said they did “crucial” work and such intervention was “completely unnecessary”. |
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Traffic cameras, be they of the red light variety or of the speed camera variety, are just the thin end of the wedge. Big Brother is not far behind. Paranoid you say? Here is a story from the UK, the world leader in photo enforcement. Will it ever happen here? All I ask that one looks for the potential issues related to our system of governemnt and law that would be posed if such a system were to be created here while reading the story. Notice how "it is all for safety" and the distinct lack of public input while implementing the system, not to mention grave privacy issues. from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/6011285/Average-motorist-caught-on-came- ra-100-times-a-year.html Average motorist caught on camera 100 times a year The average motorist has their car journeys recorded and stored by police almost 100 times a year, new figures show, furthering concerns over the growing surveillance state. By Richard Edwards, Crime Correspondent Published: 7:00AM BST 12 Aug 2009 Forces across the country have expanded a car surveillance operation that will soon record up to 50 million licence plates each day. The images captured on CCTV cameras - many of innocent motorists – are stored on a police database for up to two years, enabling officers to reconstruct journeys. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that more than three billion licence plates may have been recorded nationwide in the past year. It means that the 34 million vehicles registered in Britain were captured and stored on average up to 100 times in 2008. Thousands of CCTV cameras across the country have been converted to read number plates, taking pictures of people's movements in cars on motorways, main roads, airports and town centres even if they are not suspected of a crime. Police say the system, called Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR), has proved an essential tool in fighting crime. Latest figures released yesterday showed that in Sussex police cameras read and stored more than 233 million vehicle number plates last year - a five-fold increase compared to the year before. Police registered "hits" on one in every 36 of the vehicles of "interest" - ranging from those with no insurance to ones linked to known criminals. However, the huge growth of ANPR has raised concerns from civil rights campaigners, who question how long the details are stored for and who has access to the material. Charles Hendry, Tory MP for Wealden, said: "There is a balance that needs to be struck between fighting crime and infringing the freedom of the law-abiding public. "We all accept number-plate recognition enables the police to track and arrest a significant number of criminals and to make our communities safer, but these increases are really startling. "But we need to know what use is made of this information and how long is it kept for? "Law-abiding people should feel they can go about their business without being snooped on by the State. "They should be able to do their shopping or drive to the railway station without their movements being tracked on a police computer." The director of Privacy International, Simon Davies, said the database gives police "extraordinary powers of surveillance". "This would never be allowed in any other democratic country," he said. "This is possibly one of the most valuable reserves of data imaginable." Recent figures in Devon and Cornwall, which showed that 64 million images were captured in 2008, were described as "astonishing" by the local MP. Colin Breed, the Liberal Democrat MP for South East Cornwall, claimed that the ANPR system had been expanded "by stealth". Geoffrey Cox, Tory MP for Torridge and West Devon, added that the cameras were part of an "invisible network of surveillance" that had been constructed over the past 10 years. Nationally, the latest figures from that 27 of 43 forces able to supply comparable data, showed that more than 2 billion number plates were read and stored last year. The combined figure for all forces is like to be in excess of 3 billion. The highest number of records were created by the Metropolitan Police with 342.8 million, followed by Sussex, then West Midlands Police with 267.6 million. Avon and Somerset logged 21.6 million registrations last year and Dorset 16.6 million. Police have been encouraged to "fully and strategically exploit" the database during investigations ranging from counter-terrorism to low-level crime. Officers can access the database to find uninsured cars, locate illegal "duplicate" licence plates and track the movements of criminals. For the first 90 days any police officer with the appropriate authority can check the information. After that period it is only accessible to serious crime and anti-terrorism detectives.
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Replying to: vcheng (Aug 17, 2009 8:24 am)
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For all the lofty claims about how cameras help enhance our safety, there is just no evidence that that is indeed the case. Take a read of this story from the Land of Big Brother: from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6081549/One-crime-solved-for-every-- - 1000-CCTV-cameras-senior-officer-claims.html One crime solved for every 1,000 CCTV cameras, senior officer claims Just one crime is solved a year by every 1,000 CCTV cameras in Britain's largest force area, it was claimed today. Published: 1:59PM BST 24 Aug 2009 A senior Scotland Yard officer, Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, warned police must do more to head off a crisis in public confidence over the use of surveillance cameras. DCI Neville said officers need to improve their results to make captured images count against criminals. He said there are more than a million CCTV cameras in London and the Government has spent £500 million on the crime-fighting equipment. But he admitted just 1,000 crimes were solved in 2008 using CCTV images as officers fail to make the most of potentially vital evidence. Writing in an internal report, Mr Neville said people are filmed many times every day and have high expectations when they become victims of crime. But he suggested the reality is often disappointing as in some cases officers fail to bring criminals to justice even after they are caught on camera and identified. DCI Neville said CCTV played a role in capturing just eight out of 269 suspected robbers across London in one month. Critics of Britain's so-called ''surveillance state'' will seize on DCI Neville's comments as further evidence CCTV is not working in the fight against crime. The Government is considering whether every camera should be registered on centrally-held CCTV maps. Earlier this year a Home Office report found camera schemes have a ''modest impact'' on reducing crime. Researchers found cameras were most effective in preventing vehicle thefts and vandalism in car parks. Some local authorities have been forced to make freedom of information requests to police forces to try and work out if CCTV cameras are effective. The Metropolitan Police is piloting a scheme, known as Operation Javelin, to improve the use of images from existing cameras. Staff in 11 boroughs have formed dedicated Visual Images Identification and Detection Offices (VIIDO). They collect and label images before passing them to a central circulation unit that distributes them to officers, forces and the media. Some 5,260 images have been viewed so far this year with identification made in more than 1,000 cases. DCI Neville said the scheme should be expanded to force-wide as officers make the investigation of CCTV evidence as professional as fingerprints and DNA. David Davis, the former shadow home secretary said it is ''entirely unsurprising'' that the report highlights some shortcomings of CCTV. ''It should provoke a major and long overdue rethink on where the Home Office crime prevention budget is being spent," he said. ''CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security. ''The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV, something true both in London and across the country.'' Detective Superintendent Michael McNally, who commissioned the report, said improvements in the use of CCTV can be made. He told Sky News: ''There are some concerns, and that's why we have a number of projects that are on-going at the moment. ''CCTV, we recognise, is a really important part of investigation and prevention of crime, so how we retrieve that from the individual CCTV pods is really quite important.'' A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ''The Metropolitan Police is currently the only police service to employ this method of CCTV tracking.'' |
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