The NYPD is installing 505 surveillance cameras around the city - and pushing to safeguard lower Manhattan with a "ring of steel" that could track hundreds of thousands of people and cars a day, authorities revealed yesterday.Turning America into a prison: one cellblock at a time...
Oh, good, now we can watch defenseless New Yorkers get mugged in real-time.
ReplyDeleteThe cameras capture images of license plates and drivers' faces. Officials then run the license plates through a database of stolen cars and terrorism suspects.
ReplyDeleteI predict that New York fashions will shortly return to men's fedoras and ladies' millinery.
Too bad Grampa's head was smaller than mine.
Guess they didn't learn from jolly ol' England, eh? (Or, maybe they did?)
ReplyDeleteBlind leaders of the blind. Both shall fall into the ditch.
I think everyone should read "1984", by George Orwell. And if thats not modern enough for you, try "The Prometheus Deception" by Robert Ludlum. It gives a pretty good reasons for not doing this.
ReplyDeleteRemember when the police told us several years ago, when traffic cams started popping up, that they would never be used for crime control -- only for traffic control?
ReplyDeleteRecently, in the Denver paper, there was a story about a guy who got a traffic cam ticket; and there, emblazoned with the story, was a picture of the two men who had stolen his car as they went through the red light he had received the ticket for violating. The story asked for the "public's help" in identifying the perpetrators.
It will be especially fun when the Dept Of Homeland Security issues a "National Security Letter" to NYC to obtain photos from their big brother cams in order to identify people at...say...protests against the patriot act. All the better to get new names for the "terrorist watch lists" that some politicians want to be used to deny the right to purchase a firearm.
ReplyDeleteThe cool thing about the National Security Letters is that we never know that the pictures were demanded or surrendered; likewise the terrorist watch lists which we never know we are on (or why) until we get denied access to an airline flight or some such nonsense.
"Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable."
--Helen Keller
"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon Johnson