Cameras to read license plates on I-90

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

Come on, this is really starting to sink into heavy grade paranoia guys. The comments about interstate permits and the 1984 stuff is so outrageous it's funny. We are not a communist nation nor will we be (at least under this or next few presidents). I hate to ruin anyones day, but your licence plate is already in a database as being registered under your name (the owner of the car), so all this secret data mining paranoia is just stupid. Look at what this actually is without projecting your own private fears onto it.

You don't see the danger because you haven't experienced the incredible hassle when the government gets a hard-on for you. When some desk jockey misinterprets some (usually erroneous) information. You'd be surprised how much power is wielded by faceless clerks in windowless cubicles. The faces you see, are just doing their job and powerless to alter even obvious mistakes. At minimum, you've got to hire a lawyer.

Think about it, how much information could someone like Google, mine from a series of cameras on the interstates. Now take that power, that data, and sift it for suspicious scenarios.

You think I have too much imagination? I think you underestimate Fearless Fosdick's imagination.
Law enforcement/homeland security types spend their entire day wondering what they don't know. When presented with a system that will give them more information, they'll recognize, seize and milk it, in a New York minute.

I see this as one more can of Crisco on a long downhill run.

[Torrere]

Coeur d'Alene isn't the white power capitol of North America anymore. They drove out the Aryan Nations about five years ago and razed the Aryan Nations compound. I think the Aryan Nations resettled in Pennsylvania or somewhere.

However, North Idaho is packed with fiercely independent anti-government types, so I'm kind of surprised that surveillance like this would start there.





Where were you living, marichiko? I grew up in Sandpoint.

[Sundae]

Is this ANPR or something new?
We've had ANPR for a couple of years now (BBC article from 2003) and I honestly haven't heard any wailing and gnashing of teeth. And this is in a country where people caught on speed camrea try to claim their basic rights have been denied because they didn't consent to the photograph of them breaking the law.

But then maybe it's not the same thing.

[xoxoxoBruce]

There you have it. It's a socialist trick.

[9th Engineer]

Communism is far more of an authoritarian system than it is an economic one. In fact, one of the big reasons why it can't survive in its pure form is that it's the equvalent of economic suicide for the country (even China has had to back WAY off on its dealings with buisnesses and capitalism to stay powerful). The two extreems of the Left and Right are communism and fascism, both are run by dogmatic idealists with no regard for how things work in the real world. America is pretty protected from communism because we value individualism in our economic dealings. That's why, of the two, fascism is the one that radical Americans tend to edge toward.
Is the possibility of someone somewhere accidently inserting the wrong name into a form worth not going forward with this? Like marichiko said, this isn't a siphon point for monitoring all movement in the corridor because you can take the backroads if you REALLY want to avoid it. It's for catching people who either don't know they're there or don't take them into account.
btw, is the stuff about my comments being due to inexperience really necessary?

[Ibby]

I still say a libertarian, democratic communist system would be the best of all of them... but nearly impossible to actually do.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

btw, is the stuff about my comments being due to inexperience really necessary?

I have to admit, I think it sometimes. But I'm pretty sure I never post it, and I find it irksome when I see it posted. (Maybe this makes me a hypocrite, or a coward?) I do disagree with you rather frequently, and have never been shy about saying so, but I would feel dickish to pin it on something like your chronological age. The whole point of the internet, to me, is to remove these superficial barriers between people.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Ibram

I still say a libertarian, democratic communist system would be the best of all of them... but nearly impossible to actually do.

Especially since democracy and communism do not actually occur together in real-world practice. This is why I've never remotely been a communist. I take this as a sign of intelligence (". . .if you're still a communist at forty, you have no brain.").

Read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. I didn't find it compelling enough to finish it (LeGuin usually isn't my cup of tea), but it is an indictment of the whole communist ethos, merely in its exposition of the kind of psychological conditioning its extremely communalist society needed merely to function. Communism is not for human beings -- and only approaches workability in an environment where possessions are extremely few.

Age, and relative experience of the world beyond the family and the neighborhood, very strongly influence how people think, and therefore how they speak. Persons with experience are likely to
know what they're talking about. Persons of inexperience... wellllll....

For a well-reasoned argument that communism and fascism are in their fundamentals both creatures of the Left, see the writings of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. They were competitors for aggrandized government controlling all things, not antitheses. Some say this is one reason they fought so bitterly, and a shame it was they couldn't both lose utterly.

Leftism Revisited, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

And I suppose Coeur d'Alene can go back to its fame in the piping world for hosting a major bagpipe seminar/school there every August.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

Is the possibility of someone somewhere accidently inserting the wrong name into a form worth not going forward with this? Like marichiko said, this isn't a siphon point for monitoring all movement in the corridor because you can take the backroads if you REALLY want to avoid it. It's for catching people who either don't know they're there or don't take them into account.

You still don't get it, do you? This is not a one shot deal in the boonies of Idaho. It's the beginning of a coast to coast, border to border, network on every major roadway in the country. They'll be able to tell approximately where every car is most of the time. Where everyone goes and when. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned the information that could be mined from that data with high powered programs like Google has developed.

btw, is the stuff about my comments being due to inexperience really necessary?

Absolutely, I feel your comments reflect lack of experience with what happens to people the government takes notice of.
Don't feel special, however, you are not alone in that respect.
Oh, it's got nothing to do with age, my mother is in the same group.

I don't care how old anyone is, you get snatched-up, roughed-up, by some pigs because they don't like how you look, and no other reason... you learn to KNOW how easy it is for them to take over.
It happened to me more than once.
Cops have long forgotten who they work for. They need a reminder.

[Torrere]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Both fascists and communists were fundamentally Leftist

Leftism Revisited, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

UG, you may not have noticed this, but your link says that the Neoconservatives are Leftist. Not only that, he's also fiercely anti-war:

From the middle of UG's article
The French Revolution typifies (grandiloquently) the Left at its best. The influence of de Sade and materialism is made clear as we find the French influence on the Utopians, Marx, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and I suspect, to make current, (and further analysis is needed of which I am currently not capable of rendering), the mindset of the Neoconservative of today.

LEFTISM AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

Kuehnelt-Leddihn examines the War Machine, which, he makes clear, is of Leftist origin.

[footfootfoot]

Maybe I'm all washed up here, but these things which, to some, seem harmless at first are like weeds that don't do much above ground until the have established a tough and deep taproot.

Consider ATM cards if you were banking as far back as the early 80's. The cards were free, you could use them to your heart's content anywhere, no fees regardless of balance, or bank at which they were used.

After cards became essential to people's day to day lifestyles, in creep the fees. I know plenty of marketing people who use similar strategies to get folks accustomed to a new paradigm, then habituated to it, then the rules change.

The same techniques are in place here. "It's just gonna be for this only."

Once it becomes so familiar as to be part of the psychological landscape, its uses can be expanded to support all manner of nefarious applications.

The travesty of it all is why use such sophisticated cameras to read license plates when they could be photographing Labrat's ass?

[Flint]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

The same techniques are in place here. "It's just gonna be for this only."

Once it becomes so familiar as to be part of the psychological landscape,
its uses can be expanded to support all manner of nefarious applications.

This is the perfect rebuttal, that I couldn't figure out how to state so eloquently, in a thread I've forgotten everything else about...

[footfootfoot]

thanks. I forgot what we were talking aobut too.

[JayMcGee]

Take heed and resist with all your might.


I guess most of you know that the UK is the most CCTV'd county in europe, if not the world. We've had number-plate recognition camera's and software for some years now, mostly operating out of Police camera vans. Then they put it into central London for the 'congestion charges'. Now the plan is to link all the CCTV's around the country into this system. For National Security reasons, of course..... and, if you