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.
Privacy (Score:2, Funny)
That, or get some kind of cool preditor laser thing that will somehow find the camera and shine it directly into the lens causing it to go "blind" for the brief period that you are in it.
Not CCTV (Score:4, Informative)
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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: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.
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: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.
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They wouldn't. You get an extra few percent of the speed limit as leeway to stop such silly prosecutions going through. Stop repeating the same bollocks all the other "I want to drive as fast as I like wherever I like" idiots spout.
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?
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If you are defending the system, maybe you can tell me why the safe speed for any road never varies with time or weather
In California, safe speed does vary with weather:
http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/pgs19thru22.htm#speedlimits [ca.gov]
California has a "Basic Speed Law." This law means you may never drive faster than is safe for current conditions. For example, if you are driving 45 mph in a 55 mph speed zone during a dense fog, you could be cited for driving "too fast for conditions."
Maybe you should get your government to enact something similar?
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If there are police officers there to decide whether they like you or not, then clearly you haven't been caught by an automatic speed camera, so it's hard to see what such a case would have to do with your strange theory that speeding fines are a conspiracy involving the manufacturers of automatic speed cameras. Automatic speed cameras have fixed leeways which generally
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Believe it or not, most people want to drive at close to the natural speed of a road.
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Under the guidelines [police.uk] from the Association of Chief Police Officers, someone caught doing 31 in a 30 limit would not be charged with anything at all. They'd have to be doing 35 before they were fined at all, and they'd have to be doing 50 before they'd face court proceedings.
But of course this is Slashdot, where we don't like to get boring facts get
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Secondly, these are (as you say) guidelines not laws. Individual police forces can (and do) set their own policies differently, and offciers have discretion to prosecute for a 1mph over the limit case, or ignore a 100mph over the limit case... and that's what's wrong with the law as it stands.
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The reason for the reduction is the incontrovertible evidence that reduced impact speed reduces your probability of being killed. This fact has been seized upon by local government who have been given targets for reducing road traffic accident fatalities. Elected officials now have to look as if they are doing something to stop someone suing them and putting them in jail for t
5% (Score:2)
What are the effects of putting a speed camera on a road? How do you know it makes the road safer?
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Hang on, are you suggesting that you can only get hit if you're in the passing lane? I think you should patent that discovery.
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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.
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They take a static photo when a car passes above the speed limit by a certain margin (5-10% IIRC).
For the record, the current ACPO guidelines are 10% + 2mph over the legal limit.
The UK government places these in accident-prone areas, and makes their locations available to the public.
If that were true, people wouldn't be (quite) so upset. But the fact is that many of the cameras violate the official guidelines, and are posted in highly revenue-generating but statistically very safe areas. Similarly, if the locations were reported accurately and completely, then that would be one thing, but not all police forces and "safety camera partnerships" respect this.
They are not in any way a violation of civil liberties because doing 80 through a residential area is not any kind of right.
That's one side of it. On the flip side, I b
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Re:Not CCTV (Score:5, Interesting)
This is arguably worse than non-automated CCTV systems even though a human operator may never see the pictures that are recorded. The number plate information goes into a database, where it may be stored indefinitely for "crime prevention purposes". Bruce Schneier wrote [schneier.com] that 'It's not "follow that car," it's "follow every car."' So there are certainly valid political reasons to object to this type of surveillance beyond simply objecting to a speed limit. It is nice to see people who actually give a shit about this stuff, even if I do not agree with their methods, since most Brits couldn't give a fuck about anything the Government does.
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We do have four or five red light cameras installed, and the community h
Americans? (Score:2, Insightful)
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The Revolution? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Uh, Big Ben doesn't rock anymore, (Score:2)
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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 a
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"To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt." -- Elizabe
Franklin (Score:2)
Franklin also said that he who cannot obey cannot command.
Franklin is the lone Founder identified with the life and welfare, the governance, of the city:
The reform of the postal service. Fire Insurance. The first volunteer fire Department. The first public library. The first American hospital.
He would as a diplomat in France have been exposed to the recklessness and arrogance of the nobles who traveled
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If you engage a lawyer, you'll get your due process (actually, they'll probably just waive the fine since they don't want to deal with the process if they don't have to). The trick is finding a lawyer who costs less than the fine.
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In the States, it seems common enough to pay much more for the lawyer than for the fine. The real hidden cost is the increase in your insurance premium being many time the amount of the fine itself. Your insurance company is pretty much guaranteed to make much more than the gove
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Even as a strong supporter and partaker of the right to bear arms I think it's much better if we step outside of the pretenses of party politics and not feed into the lie thus stopping the complacent at the ballot box instead of having to resort to the cartridge box.
After all, if you're too lazy to pull a lever I doubt you'll be much more motivated to pull a trigger.
Sweet! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Interesting)
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"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"
If a pedestrian is worth 5 points.... (Score:2)
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x 1000 =
Woo Hoo (Score:4, Insightful)
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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
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Sources please.
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Putting around at lower than the posted limit just because you like to be a prick and hold other people up? What an ass. It's people like you that make me want to put some "Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome" type apparatus on the front of my car so I can ram your ass off the road.
If you have that hard a time moving at speed with the rest of traffic, may I humbly suggest you either;
A) Get a bicycle, or
B) take the bus.
Either way, get off the road, you are a hazard to other
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The maximum safe speed is not necessarily the speed limit. Sort of like this four-lane, one-way road we've got that's set to 30 mph (and everyone does 40). Or there's this part of the I-5 that's got about ten thousand cows right by it - I remember going just shy of 100mph and being passed. We all richly deserved huge tickets for that, we were going insa
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http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/04/430.asp [thenewspaper.com]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100301844.html [washingtonpost.com]
I'll stop there, but you can google for dozens more, because every experiment with red-light cameras has had the same effect: Increased rear-end collisions when people stop fast to avoid a ticket.
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There's more to speed limits than just speed. There's also noise.
Here in Sterling, VA, the main street, a widely divided 4-lane road with only a few stoplights that late at night are almost always green, the speed limit is 30. The very same road half a mile further south, with just as much traffic and lights, is 45.
The reason for the difference?
Residential zoning. Not for kids or pedestrians crossing the street (no
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Any other dumbass questions?
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And, you know, there's the minor matter of how increasing penalties doesn't really have much of an effect as a deterrent in the first place.
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It's you that pays for the cameras through taxes, dumbass.
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.)
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Lets assume it's true (I'm only half-agreeing with both statements). So that means we should burn them, no? I know, let's burn all the computer centres. Hell, while we're at it, let's burn the court records. And the courts. Hold on, let's j
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My point is, you're being extremely naive if you think these cameras will be used ONLY to combat speeding. Hell, give it 10 or 15 years and I'll be surprised if they're even *primarily* used for speeding. A few months after 9/11, and there were law enforcement seminars being held f
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London, England - to enter Central London TODAY, your number plate is read on entry and exit, stored, and you are sent an automated bill for that day unless you pay the "congestion charge" in a London shop (or by text, online etc.). The point is that by entering Central London you have already been spotted and recorded on CCTV, your number plate automatically read and you've been charged. Not paying is an offence - no matter what you were doing. Certain except
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>>Speeding isn't good, but it isn't the scourge of society.
Don't know about the U.K. but in the U.S., traffic accidents result in about 43,000 deaths per year and hundreds of thousands of injuries, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in property damage, suffering, litigation, insurance fees, on and on.
If this isn't a scourge, I can't imagine what is. Would I surrender what little anonymity I possess on the road in exchange for capturing and de-licensing the scoff-law speeders, red
Capt Gatso deserves a knighthood (Score:5, Funny)
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This does not mean he was not right, of course.
Driving shotgun... (Score:2)
Firefighters & paramedics get attacked too (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I think this sort of cowardly attack on public property is nothing new in the UK. Whereas citizens of other countries will attempt to use the law to defeat things, the British are typically content to moan and be passive aggressive about things rather than effect real change. One curious development in the last several years here has been the increase in attacks against firefighters and paramedics. You can't go a week without hearing about firefighters getting rocks thrown at them and their tenders by gangs of feral teens. Even paramedics rushing to people's aid have been attacked and beaten up for no reason at all. Why? The British underclass is powerless, and aggression is all they know, because our legal and political systems are so limp wristed that the ordinary man on the street cannot effect change.
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The real problem is our political system. It doesn't do the will of the people (Iraq anyone?) to the point where they feel the only option is to literally fight back. Neither Labour nor the Tories, the only two parties li
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/uk/newsid_3986000/3986227.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.salfordadvertiser.co.uk/news/s/518880_firemen_attacked_by_firework_yobs [salfordadvertiser.co.uk]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/7139876.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/6974095.stm [bbc.co.uk]
All found within 60 seconds. This literally happens all the time so the news.bbc.co.uk archive is full of stories like this.
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 t
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The real problem is that the fines and point penalties were set up in the pre-camera era. So they're far too harsh for the frequency people are caught nowadays.
You'd thing Bruce Sterling would know better... (Score:2)
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
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They do. From what I've been told, in some areas (typically Chav-towns), 50% or more of cars either have fake plates or are unregistered, or are registered abroad... that instantly 'cloaks' them from speed cameras, and they can drive as badly as they want.
That's fine if you're a chav who's probably in and out of jail anyway; what more do you have to lose? But when you're one of the middle class worke
PETHW condemns these senseless attack against hw (Score:4, Interesting)
What harm have the cameras done to these afwul people? They just take photos, that's all. They don't care what anyone does with the photos. If you have a problem with those photos PETHW suggests you either drive slower, or take it up with the local constabulary, who are, after all, ultimately responsible for taking the photos and placing the cameras where they stand.
We urge all citizens to act upon this travesty and rise against these lawless individuals. How can they sleep at night knowing what they've done???
Join PETHW in fighting hardware abuse at http://pethw.org/ [pethw.org]
10 Year Old Site (Score:2)
For those who haven't seen this before, the site documents obnoxious installations of GATSO speed cameras in places where its obvious purpose is revenue generation rather than safety. The result is that someone usually hangs a tire around the camera, fills it with diesel, then adds a flare. Burns quite nicely. Peruse the site [speedcam.co.uk] though for more creative solutions like chain saws.
WHOIS information
Something to remember when installing cameras (Score:2)
If were and officer pulling me over, the officer would have told me why it was unsafe, the reason he pulled me over and have a good day or at least been a small conversation with a few laughs. But i
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After getting nailed by a redlight camera when turning right .2 seconds after the light turned red.
So you ran a yellow light, instead of stopping, as you presumably have been taught as a condition for getting your license. I am afraid I can feel very little sympathy for your self-inflicted suffering. Next time you see a yellow light, remember you have at least one more pedal beside your accelerator.
Mart (motorcyclist who regularly gets almost rear-ended by cagers who think a yellow means speed up).
The Device? (Score:2)
In the US, we call this a thirty-aught-six, among other things. Perhaps these Brits are borrowing something from Russia? Molotov Cocktails would be ironically appropriate.
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.
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MOD PARENT UP!
This little bit of wisdom needs to be shouted from the rooftops, plastered on billboards, and used for the vision test at the DMV.
100% adherence to the law is impossible. Rational laws with rational law enforcement keeps the most egregious (read dangerous) offenders at bay. If enforcement becomes universal all the time every time, then why bother with adherence?
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Can you explain this?
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Instead of going to court, you are offered a settlement of a £60 fine and 3 penalty points on your licence.
If you accumulate 12 points or more within 3 years then you are banned for 6 months.
http://www.drivingban.co.uk/drivingban/tottingup/drivingbantottingup.htm/ [drivingban.co.uk] has more details
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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.
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1) Car comes to a complete stop at a stop sign, then hits the gas and runs into me (on my bike). Cause: not paying attention.
2) Accident ahead. Guy swerves inches in front of me (we're both 10mph _under_ the limit) and slams on the brakes. Cause: not paying attention.
3) Lady in minivan backs into my (non-moving) car in parking lot. Admits to being on cell phone. Cause: not paying attention.
4) Guy rear-ends me when I am stopped at a stop sign, because he was looking up
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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.
But it isn't even that. A speed camera does nothing to stop a car doing 200 in a 40 zone crashing into a group of nuns carrying puppies. A real police officer would. Getting a ticket 2 weeks after the fact means nothing when puppies are dead.
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A camera does nothing at all, by the time the second flash occurs the car is already out of the camera's area, so they can't verify speed. Of course, you do have to be travelling at 200 mph...
Didnt hurt 40 years ago! (Score:2)
What you fail to realize is that people are pissed of that the error margin is so small, doing 5% over the limit is hardly justified. 60km to 63km is easy
to do if for various reasons a speedo might be 1km out (analogue is so not accurate), different tires, and subconciously keeping up with the car ahead.
Sure, doing 75 in a 60 zone is over the top, but 63, get real.
many good ways (Score:3, Informative)
You could scrape the top of the arm with a file. Scrape very near the pole, but not right above the little brace. Go deep enough to get through any galvanization or other rust-resistant coating. Optionally, wrap some salty gauze around it, or apply a gel that collects water. Such gel can be found in feminine napkins and disposable diapers.
HERF stuff need not be a gun. Walk right by, hold up a coil, and discharge away.
A cattle prod should do nicely.
Get a buddy. Put on refl