begin quoting Karl Cunningham as of Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 01:37:38PM -0700: [snip] > I saw something similar in Kearney Mesa a couple years ago. It looked > like much more of a kludge than the one in the video, with a camera in a > housing about 12" in diameter mounted on the top of the car. > > There were two officers driving this thing at about 15mph, and I stopped > them and asked what they were doing. They said it would scan license > plates and automatically check for expired registration, then alert them > in time to stop and write a ticket. > > Very big brother.
Nah. That's not a problem. It's what they do with the data afterwards that gets big brotherish. Especially if it's just looking for the right color tag on the correct location on the license plate. That's technology taking care of a tedious and boring job. Now, if they're recording every license plate seen along with GPS location and date/time, and hanging on to that to "assist in future investigations", well, yeah, that's getting into big brother territory. When they mount a camera on the dash to watch you drive... that's big brother. -- I should be writing this down to prepare for november. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
