London Surveillance

Here's an interesting article which has an unstated privacy/state surveillance angle.

London gov't is working on setting up a plan to charge cars by the mile. All well and good, so far as I can see: Users pay, non-users don't.

The potential problem comes when the bad guys are running the government. Wouldn't Saddam or Joe Stalin have loved to have info on where all their opponents car's were?

Nothing to do about it, the idea makes too much sense. But it is open to abuses, especially in conjunction with all the other public surveillance tech now coming out: security cameras with face recognition software, "Carnivore"-like telephone and email search programs, red-light cameras, law enforcement tie-ins to ATM use, U-Pass highway toll info...

Whether it is innocent or oppressive will depend entirely on who is using it, so all the more important that citizens maintain the ability to control their governments.

UPDATE: The democratic resistance is active in the US at least.

In that most representative of public assemblies - the bustling House chamber of the New Hampshire State House - there's an old rebellious notion: In matters of personal responsibility, don't always err on the side of safety...

So when a bill came up in early April to consider allowing robotic traffic cameras at the busiest crossroads, mocking laughter from the gallery preceded the measure's demise.

"The idea that we were going to be photographed [by the government] was anathema to most of us," says Neal Kurk, a Republican from Weare, N.H...

"The opposition to red-light cameras isn't that they're not useful, but the problem is they're too useful," says Neil Richards, a constitutional law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. "This is part of a trend where [lawmakers] are seeing there's a political advantage to not living in a police state."

Patrik Jonsson, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor has the story.

Both above thanks to DRUDGE REPORT 2005®