Paranoia Alert
Skipper about twenty years ago I dated a woman that lived in Bournemouth. A rather genteel English seaside town where rich people retired. Whilst visiting there I noticed surveillance cameras in the public park. I found this deeply disturbing.
Now they are everywhere. Up the road from me is a system called ANPR which stands for automatic number plate recognition. In Britain we have a yearly tax on motor vehicles. It varies on the amount of CO2 the car puts out. It can be up to £400 per year ($800 nearly!) this system reads the number plate and checks to see if you have paid the tax and if you have insurance (a legal requirement). So the police don’t have to do any work now. If you haven’t paid or declared the vehicle “off road” you get a fine in the post.
Essentially it penalises the generally law abiding. The deadbeats who don’t pay the tax or insurance laugh at it. If they were caught they would only get a slap on the wrist. Foreigners who live here ignore it as the system can’t read foreign plates. Then you have surveillance cameras in every High street. There are “speed cameras” everywhere which take a snapshot of your license plate if you exceed the speed limit and dish out a fine and penalty points. Yet another form of taxation basically.
Rather than waste money like this most people would prefer a “bobby on the beat” which would actually cut crime, but the police spend most of their time filling in human rights paperwork and justifying themselves for stopping ethnic minorities. Which is rather ironic since the police in London recently targeted a number of vehicles using the anpr computer system. They had no insurance tax etc. They had about 50 to investigate. Nearly all of them were owned by Nigerians. The police were then accused of racism, but how can a computer be racist?
Peiper, it’s not particularly the cameras a Wal-Mart I have a problem with - it is all the cameras everywhere.
But while we’re on the subject, I was in a Wal-Mart recently shopping for a carrying case for my cellphone. I was taking one after another off the display and fitting my cellphone into it to see if which one fit my Samsung best.
After a few minutes of this the phone rang at the cashiers desk in electronics one aisle over from me and suddenly the cashiers starting watching me. Eventually one of them came over and started piddling with the displays to my right while glancing at me every few seconds. Finally, she came over and asked if she could help. I let her offer some advice and finally made a choice. I decided to take two of them - one with an open top and one with a closure. She asked me why I wanted two. I said “because” and started walking to the front of the store to check out. She followed me all the way to the front checkout lanes, keeping a discreet distance behind me while pretending to adjust stuff on shelves. She never left me until the cashier rang the order up - a whole $14 of merchandise that someone in a monitor room in the back of the store wanted to make sure that suspicious buy in Aisle 16 (me) didn’t walk out with.
I realize the blame for this behavior lies with the shoplifters who brought us to this point but I also believe Wal-Mart, government and the other “monitors” are over-reacting by assuming we’re all guilty before proven innocent.
One major effect of our technological age is that we are watching a paradigm shift in law enforcement from crime detection and apprehension to crime prevention. In other words, nobody is waiting for us to commit a crime anymore. They have wired ua up so they can prevent and/or penalize is before we even commit a crime.
That’s only a half-step away from a police state as far as I’m concerned.
In 1981 while stationed at RAF Fairford, my shop chief was selected as USAFE NOC of the Quarter and as such got a trip to West Berlin for some R&R. While there, they were taken on a guided tour of Communist East Berlin. The thing that he noticed most about Communist Berlin was the surveillance cameras. He said these cameras were everywhere and a person couldn’t do anything in public that wasn’t being monitored by authorities...they were briefed on this before entering. Now it seems that this monitoring is everywhere in the Free World. You cannot go into any shopping mall or parking lot without being monitored. Most large cities have cameras monitoring the streets and sidewalks. We have become what perplexed my supervisor 26 years ago while visiting a Communist nation.
Allan,
Wow!
I hadn’t read down this far before I paused to renew my passport. Maybe they are all really out to get you. Be afraid…
Stan, in case you didn’t get the memo, today is Paranoia Day here at BMEWS. We are all looking over our shoulder and wearing tinfoil today just to confuse the Liberal-Wannabes like yourself, who will he receiving special passports with not only RFID chips embedded but also GPS tracking devices and recording mechanisms by which we can track your evil butt while you smuggle Mexicans into Texas to work on your hawg farms and marijuana gardens.
All I want to know is ....
If Britain has all these cameras, combined with all those fancy gun laws… how come they still have a rising violent crime rate ???
Posted by l j
04/30/2007 at 04:35 AM
04/29/2007 at 04:12 AM
