British Drivers Destroying Surveillance Cameras 259
miletus writes "A Wired article tells us that not everyone in Britain loves the surveillance state." The linked entry (part of Bruce Sterling's blog) quotes a story about British anti-camera groups, one of which claims its up-and-coming methods "will enable them to destroy a roadside camera in just a few seconds," and illustrates with a burned-out camera. I wonder how many Americans are similarly motivated.
Americans? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not CCTV (Score:3, Insightful)
Note: Many, many more people are killed by dangerous/drunk/stupid drivers in the UK than by murderers, disturbed burglars and demented rapists.
Re:Not CCTV (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, its a misleading article headline - these are not surveillance cameras. They take a static photo when a car passes above the speed limit by a certain margin (5-10% IIRC).
The UK government places these in accident-prone areas, and makes their locations available to the public. If you have satellite navigation in your car it will warn you as you approach one. They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right. Petrolheads claiming they are fighting back against a police state are doing nothing more than trivialising the actual civil liberty violations committed by the UK government.
Woo Hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Good Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Speeding isn't good, but it isn't the scourge of society. The fact is, governments (and the UK government especially) have repeatedly shown a propensity to never throw away any data gathered from the public (if you are arrested in the UK for any reason, your DNA is put into a database and never deleted, even if the charges are dropped.) The speeding *obsession* is a joke anyway--the only reason why law enforcement cares so much about it is it's easy to prove and tickets are an easy source of revenue. The solution to the traffic problem is ultimately a technical one--within the next 50-75 years, we should have fully automated cars anyway (if not flying.)
Despite what the evening news tells you, law enforcement is NOT the primary problem of our times. In the quest for a peaceful society, law enforcement is a merely one tool of many and it's a very dangerous and cumbersome tool at that. If our lawmakers cannot recognize this and continue to blaze a merry path towards a privacy-less society--one where surveillance is abused to persecute the law-abiding and civil disobedience is utterly impossible because law enforcement is just too damn omniscient--then the populace at large can and should take measures into their own hands.
I'm certainly not happy *at all* about the destruction of taxpayer-funded property, but this issues involve here transcend your average political quibbling. If these Brits are willing to risk imprisonment to fight the naive Orwellians in charge, good for them. (If on the other hand they're just doing this so they can speed with impunity, shame on them.)
Re:The Revolution? (Score:2, Insightful)
This story is nothing to do with surveillance (despite the misleading summary), and nothing to do with giving up necessary freedom for temporary security. The cameras in question are not surveillance cameras, they are merely automatic speed traps. They detect when people are breaking the law (unlike surveillance cameras, they do not make any record at all of people who are not breaking the law), and record only the minimum data required to prove that a crime has been committed.
Sorry, but while I don't like being spied on any more than anyone else, I find it hard to work out exactly what "right" is being infringed by speed cameras. If you want to protest about the surveillance state, protest about CCTV or something like that that actually invades your privacy.
Hypocrites (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem isn't that the machine is faulty, it's because it is always on. Cops can't be everywhere, but the camera is. The people destroying these things aren't anarchists or vigilantes, they're just dumb thugs who want to live in a world without rules and want to continue to risk others' safety with impunity.
I wonder, are there groups intent on catching these people and thrashing them within inches of their lives? Lawlessness sounds like much fun.
my safety (Score:1, Insightful)
Speeding is reckless behavior that not only endangers yourself but everyone else around you (if it only endangered the driver, actually I wouldn't care about it all. I fully support the right of people to be careless with their own lives, as long as it is ONLY their own lives.) Speed limits exist for a reason. I believe governments have the right to use every tool at their disposal to enforce them.
My life is more important that your "right" to act recklessly in public without being monitored.
Re:Woo Hoo (Score:2, Insightful)
Take two cases for example:
1) Driving at 40 miles an hour down an empty, open street at 4:30am, with a 30 speed limit.
2) Driving the wrong way down a road at 15 miles an hour in broad daylight in a crowded street.
Which of the above cases do you think should be picked up as being most dangerous?
Guess which one isn't?
Most people aren't against traffic monitoring per se. What they're up in arms about is the purely money grabbing enforcement of arbitrary limits. Mathematical analysis of the cameras has shown that at BEST, they make no difference. At worst, they increase the incidence of accidents.
Now, the technology is around in image processing to detect honest to goodness dangerous driving. Just the cameras would be a little more expensive. So guess what they don't do?
They don't put the cameras in that would actually enforce civility and good driving. They just put in the ones that get the easy buck, and do nothing at all to prevent dangerous driving.
Dangerous driving should be what they concentrate on, then EVERYONE would be happy (apart from the dangerous drivers of course who wouldn't be able to force people off the road, ignore traffic lanes, lights, crossings, cut people up, swerve across roads, and ride the wrong way up a street. And yes, all the above are pretty common on the route I take into work every day.
I don't understand... (Score:3, Insightful)
If British drivers don't want to be seen by the cameras, why can't they just engage their cloaking devices?
Signed,
Every Sci-Fi Geek in the World
Re:The Revolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
It just demonstrates that civil liberties are to these people, a rather lower concern than, say, 50 quid in fines.
Re:Not CCTV (Score:4, Insightful)
Note: Many, many more people are killed by dangerous/drunk/stupid drivers in the UK than by murderers, disturbed burglars and demented rapists.
And many more people in the UK are killed by coronary disease than by dangerous/drunk/stupid drivers. Quick! Ban McDonald's and boiled potatoes! It'll save lives!
Each "safety" measure must be balanced against the effect it has upon people's lives, liberties, and dignity. For my part, I do not wish for bored nosy strangers to record and view at their leisure my every public move on the off chance I might run a red light.
You are mostly correct (Score:1, Insightful)
You can create a police state and crush all anti-state activity. That has been done lots of times in the past and there is no reason to think it won't happen again. The trouble is that the loss of freedom also tends to remove the conditions that allow the economy to thrive and adapt. Communism collapsed because of that.
We have got where we are because of freedom. If we kill freedom, we kill innovation. If we kill innovation, we can't adapt to the changes with which we are faced. Ultimately, society will collapse.
Actually, the legal and political system works well for some people. In that respect they aren't limp at all. They are a stick with which the rich can beat the poor. It used to be that the political system had two parties that could be relied to look after their respecitve constituancies. That hasn't been the case lately. That will lead most people to give up on the system. They won't meekly accept their yokes though. They will adopt the maxim of communist workers everywhere: "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." In the long term, the powers-that-be are screwing themselves in the ear.
Re:Americans? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not CCTV (Score:1, Insightful)
The difference being that you have a choice whether you eat McDonalds or not, but you don't have a choice whether you get hit by a car travelling 20mph over the speed limit because the driver is convinced that the laws of nature and the realities of human reaction speeds don't actually apply to him.
Operating something as dangerous to others as a car in public is a privilege, not a right, and that privilege should be revoked if you choose not to obey the safety laws governing that vehicle.
Re:Not CCTV (Score:5, Insightful)
These people destroy speed cameras because they want the freedom the break the law, nothing more and I hope everyone of them gets arrested. The law is you go a certain speed if you break it ITS YOUR OWN FAULT NOT THE CAMERA THAT CAUGHT YOU BREAKING THE LAW.What a stupid comparison. Are you twelve years old or something? A McDonald's doesn't run through red lights, almost killing me. To kill me I (As in myself not some random asshole) would have to eat way too many. Just like how water kills you if you drink too much.
Re:Bad summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Dunno where you lived, but plenty of people in the UK have been fined for driving a few miles per hour over the limit, on a safe straight road in good conditions, where the limit has already been reduced to an absurd level. Caught four times and you lose your driving license, and quite possibly your job and your house.
Speed cameras have done nothing to improve road safety, they exist purely to screw over motorists and suck out money which goes to the government's mates running the speed cameras. I've never met anyone in the UK who drives (the majority of the adult population) and supports speed cameras; yet the country has been plastered with them. You may have missed it, but Britain is supposed to be a democracy, and when the majority are seeing something they don't want pushed on them by an authoritarian government, it should be no surprise that a minority decide to take things into their own hands.
Speed cameras have done more than any other single cause to destroy respect for the law among the general public in the UK over the last decade. If the government had any sense, they'd rip them all out tomorrow.
Re:my safety (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks to speed cameras, you can drive as recklessly or irresponsibly as you want provided you do so below the speed limit, as there are very few traffic police left on the roads. And if you get fake plates, or don't register your car, you can do those at any speed you want, because the speed cameras can't touch you.
"Speeding is reckless behavior"
No it's not; otherwise they'd be charged with 'reckless driving', not speeding. The only reason speeding laws exist is so that the police can punish true reckless drivers on a technicality rather than having to prove reckless driving, which is much harder; they were never intended to be applied universally because that would be absurdly stupid.
"Speed limits exist for a reason."
Yes, to give the police a means to punish people when they can't readily prove reckless driving in court.
Speed limits in the UK are regularly set wrong, often for political reasons. I used to live on a long, wide, mostly straight road where everyone had off-road parking... the speed limit was 40mph. Turn off that onto one of the narrow roads with parked cars on both sides, and the speed limit _INCREASED_ to 60mph. Needless to say, people regularly drove at 60mph through the 40 limit because it was f-ing stupid.
Worse than that, we had two speed cameras in the village where I lived. Both were on safe straight sections of road, both hidden behind trees or road signs in order to raise money rather than discourage people from driving fast. The most dangerous place in the village was a poorly designed pedestrian crossing where going faster than the 30mph speed limit meant you might not be able to stop if a pedestrian was crossing because you couldn't see far enough ahead; so why weren't the speed cameras there, with flashing lights and signs saying 'don't speed and we mean it'?
Ah, because they wouldn't have brought in any money.
And I'm always amused to see cyclists lecturing people on the need to obey road laws when I almost never saw a cyclist in the UK stop at a red light or a pedestrian crossing, and death rates per mile from cycling are similar to death rates per mile from driving; I was almost knocked flying myself last year by a cyclist racing through a 'pedestrianised' area.
When, for example, will Britain see compulsory insurance for bikes, along with compulsory registration and number plates so they can be caught and punished for breaking traffic laws? Ah, when Hell freezes over.
Re:Not CCTV (Score:5, Insightful)
In the UK we have a law against dangerous driving. Have you ever wondered who someone caught doing 31 mph in a non-residential area on an empty dual carriageway is charged with speeding but not dangerous driving? It's because breaking a speed limit that is only there to give revenue to a 'camera partnership' isn't dangerous.
You're right about red lights being a real danger point. Why do we have far more speed traps than red light cameras? It's because safe drivers do go faster than wrongly set limits, but they don't run red lights, so red light cameras wouldn't rake in the cash like speed traps.
Re:Not CCTV (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure you do. Stay the fuck out of the passing lane unless you're overtaking another vehicle.
Whenever I see a driver who is (to use your own words), "unconvinced by the laws of nature and the realities of human reaction speeds", I want to get the fuck away from him. Sometimes that means I want to pass the doddering/inattentive old fart doing 20mph slower than me with his blinker left on -- so I can put him way the hell behind me. Other times it means I want to get the fuck out of his way, and because I'm a responsible driver who's checking his fucking rear-view mirror, when I see someone going 20mph faster than me, I've got plenty of time to pull the fuck over into a slower lane -- so I can let him get way the hell in front of me and get busted for speeding.
The one thing I do not do, when I find a driver "unconvinced by the laws of nature and the realities of human reaction speeds" is drive so as to keep him on my bumper for the next 5 miles.
> Operating something as dangerous to others as a car in public is a privilege, not a right, and that privilege should be revoked if you choose not to obey the safety laws governing that vehicle.
And if safety isn't enough of a reason to stop obstructing the passing lane, check your local traffic laws. In many jurisdictions, the guy blocking the lane is as guilty of "obstructing traffic" as the jackass is for "speeding". Two different drivers, two different offenses. If the traffic code is so precious that you've gotta enforce it (even when you're not a cop), the least you could do is obey it. Not just the parts you like about speeding, but the parts you don't like, about obstructing traffic.
Re:Not CCTV (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are defending the system, maybe you can tell me why the safe speed for any road never varies with time or weather but will always be exactly divisible by 10? Or am I right when I say that speeding is not the same as going dangerously fast?
Re:Not CCTV (Score:2, Insightful)
And please don't go accusing people of trolling just because they disagree with you. If you're old enough to have any emotional investment in speeding, you should be mature enough to cope with people holding different opinions from yours.You're right up to a point; speed limits are rounded down to multiples of 10 to simplify the system for motorists, and are (usually) fixed for the same reason. And in many cases they're set lower than some people think necessary, to mitigate problems caused by poor conditions.
But really, why do you care? So what if you have to drive slightly slower than you want to? If you want to drive fast, go to a racing track or buy a racing game or something. If you want to share the public roads, you can damn well play nice and slow down. It's really not that difficult a concept to grasp. Once you get used to not having to constantly look out for speed cameras, you might even learn to enjoy driving again.
Re:Not CCTV (Score:3, Insightful)
Believe it or not, most people want to drive at close to the natural speed of a road. Without fear of getting a ticket, most people will drive at a reasonable and prudent speed on a road. Most states use some form of 85th percentile or 90th percentile metering to determine what the speed of a road should be, under the assumption that 10-15% of people are crazy drivers, but the fastest speed of the other 85-90% is the right speed for the road. But, speed limits are set, on average, 10 mph or so below this. Either to get more revenue for tickets, or because its an interstate, and the state has set the interstate speed limit to an appalingly low number (like 65 mph in the middle of nowhere).
Putting up cameras to catch people driving above 65mph on an interstate in the middle of nowhere is a sheer money grab. It doesn't make driving safer -- driving is safest when everyone drives at the same speed. Without speed limits, most people would tend to drive all at the natural speed of the road, reducing collisions.
For example, in Shaw Avenue in Fresno, a 6 line major road in the town is artificially limited to 40mph (it's easily a 55mph road), with police doing laps around the block issuing to tickets all day long. People in the know drive with their cruise set to 40, but this results in people who don't know about the sharks in the water (and most locals avoid the road entirely due to the annoying police presence) swerving in traffic, trying to bypass people, and getting into collisions themselves.
IMO, either requiring all roads (except school zones or special cases) to abide by the 85th or 90th percentile rule would be the first and best step in eliminating the nonsense that is our speed limit system.
Second, stop localities from making money off tickets they issue. Justice should be blind -- when a judge's salary gets paid for by speeding tickets (like in Shafter -- I think it's great name for a podunk California town that makes most of its money off of nonsense speeding tickets), then you don't have justice any more. Make all tickets go into the state general fund, and pay out a flat salary to these localities based on their average ticket income for, say, 2004. When the financial incentive (which is what it is) to issue tickets goes away, I think you'll see a lot more fairness in our police and legal system. It's hopelessly corrupt right now, but most people don't care enough, since they only get nabbed by the ticket fairy once every few years, and just see it as the price of doing business.
ShakaUVM for President.