> Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin said the city disagrees with the ruling and is concerned about who could obtain the footage. “We were very disappointed,” Franklin said. “That means perpetrators of crime, people who are maybe engaged in domestic abuse or stalkers, they can request footage and that could cause a lot of harm.” These people are fooling themselves if they think that keeping the cameras but not allowing th…
Two such instances of police using Flock to track current or former romantic partners:
> Speed-limits typically remain grandfathered in at their original value That depends on where you are. In Texas, state highway speed limits are determined though a traffic study[1]. The monitor traffic for a while, then set the limit to the 85th percentile. People can use this to get out of speeding tickets. If you find that it's been a long time since a speed study was done on the road you were on, the judge might…
In other words, 15% of people are ALWAYS speeding, by definition. So with perfect enforcement (punish everyone over the threshold), how do you enable an 85th percentile rule?
> 15% of people are ALWAYS speeding, by definition
Not necessarily. If the data is heavily clustered around a single value, the percentile collapses to that number.
I don't mind a local AI on an airgapped security camera network monitoring a camera and issuing an alert to a security guard. The issues are internet connectivity, data retention/mining/sale, and non-local processing (ie handing stuff off to a third party that does who knows what and probably doesn't take security seriously).
Even with that, I do mind. Just as two trivial examples, even though neither affects me personally: The estimated number of heroin users in the UK exceeds the total prison population. The number of class-A drug users in the UK is estimated to be so high that if they actually followed the minimum sentencing guidelines for possession, it would cause a catastrophic economic disaster both from all the people no longer wo…
Speed cameras are a source of income, they are not for enforcement or safety.
> we also have hatching cameras (yellow hatched boxes mean no stopping, usually at junctions) Weirdly I've never encountered these in the US (only red light cameras) and do we ever need them. I'm generally opposed to government associated cameras due to concerns about turnkey authoritarianism but if we have to have cameras at intersections they could at least curb the awful self centered behavior.
Most states ban speed cameras and many ban red light cameras as 4th amendment violations. You cannot face your accuser when your accuser is a robot. As a result, speed camera tickets have always used some legal sleight-of-hand to nail you into confessing, and this has become unpalatable. If we raised speed limits (almost) across the board to the actual safe limits of modern cars, I think a lot more people would be ok…
What are "the actual safe limits of modern cars"?
Data from various states raising their limits over the last few decades is that every 5MPH increase in state speed limits brings with it an 8.5% increase in traffic fatalities on freeways. With the 70MPH speed limit common for freeways through most of the US, we're already up 25% on road fatalities over the 55MPH that was chosen for gas mileage during the oil crisis.
For cities, pedestrians struck at 25MPH are already at a 10% chance of death, which reaches 50% at 40MPH.
Indeed. 4 strikes and you are out seems fine to me (as a UK driver). You can also opt to take a speed awareness course in leu of the points, I believe
4 strikes today with current speed enforcement is fine; 4 strikes in a hypothetical where 100% of infractions are caught, I aver will catch (almost) everyone who actually drives within a month.
Where I live almost every main road now has average speed cameras, leaving only the small residential streets without, and they are generally short enough that few people are speeding anyway. In general I approve, especially in residential areas, although the surrounding area has gone through a process of downgrading speed limits for no obvious reason, such that it seems their only intent is to annoy drivers so that they want to stop driving. Almost all the country roads in the county I live adjacent to were downgraded from national speed limit to 50mph about 10 years ago. It didn't seem to be anything to do with safety, just seemingly out of spite. I heard rumours that they were also trialing drones to spot offenders (and presumably with sufficiently good cameras to read the plate from up high). Recently, many residential places have dropped from 30mph to 20mph pretty uniformly, again seeming nothing to do with safety as it's entire suburbs (but not all suburbs in the city), even on long straight roads with excellent visibility that would have been safe with limits above the original 30. Doing 20 on these seems completely unnecessary and it's hard to see it as anything other than a revenue generation tactic.
> I trust we would take action the moment something gets abused or surveillance overreaches. The thing about turnkey authoritarian solutions is that once something happens it's likely too late to take action. However there are often alternative solutions that physically constrain the system such that substantial abuse is impossible without time consuming and expensive physical modifications. The traditional speed cam…
Well I agree, and my hopes aren't very high of this actually happening. Our politicians tend to be clueless with anything tech related, their opinions calibrated by what they saw in Hollywood movies, where anything tech related always turns into "black mirror". (By contrast, allegedly over half the Chinese politburo has an engineering degree of some kind). But we could start small, with just one neighborhood, a pilot…
So you want to slippery slope your way into Nazi Germany?
I think the person requesting to access the data was doing the right thing and I agree with the judge’s ruling. The fact that they’re gonna shut it down, implies the scale of indiscriminate nature of data capture and the volume of data being captured. These cameras are popping up all over the nation and if people realize how much data is being captured and where that data is going (or who it’s being sold to) and how…
>> The fact that they’re gonna shut it down
If only; they temporarily shut off their cameras, while other jurisdictions look to change their laws removing this data from the public record. Neither of these moves are close to "wins"
If speeding is not something that happens constantly, then a radar could detect the instances of speeding, and only turn on a camera when a speeding car is nearby. This would keep the majority of passing cars from being recorded, and would record the fewer cars the fewer drivers would be speeding.
How long until the AI estimates how fast you were going based on the time you were tagged at 2 cameras? The system says travel between these cameras should take 3 minutes. You made it in 2:45. No review, just a ticket in the mail.
Several months later, the state changes the speed limit on the street without changing the ticket check. Some time after, traffic authorities add a bypass road or a fast lane to deal with the new traffic problems and forget to update the timings. Then it's reported that a rural municipality set timing thresholds just below the speed limit to cover budgetary shortfalls.
Eventually the camera manufacturers offer "easy setup" systems that dynamically adjust based on actual journey times. This works fine until the first office holiday, when the routine congestion is gone.
The government's power over its citizens should mainly derive from its legitimacy in the eyes of citizens, not from its technological and military superiority over the people.
This kind of ubiquitous surveillance is so dangerous to democracy and the ability of the citizens to do anything without the government knowing.