Chad's Miniblog

Hi Arizona. You are being watched.

There are some things I would just rather not be right about. This is one of them. You may recall my article from about a month ago called The Aussies Are Coming To Get Us!. In that article, I described the nefarious possibilities that come with the glut of “speed” and “red light” cameras. From that post:

Traffic cameras, which were initially built and maintained for speed enforcement, can easily be upgraded to monitor red-light violations, tire tread depth, right-turn violations, and just about any application you can think of.

With the open admission from Redflex regarding optical character recognition upgrades, it has become blatently obvious that the foreign-owned company will stop at nothing short of becoming a full-fledged quasi-police/government agency, right in the footsteps of Blackwater.

Based on this article in today’s Arizona Republic, it appears that my only mistake in that post was that I didn’t go far enough in describing the sheer, overwhelming end of freedom of movement that these cameras are bringing about in this country. It is going way beyond catching speeders. For the last two years, cops across Arizona have been using infrared cameras, pointed into the stream of traffic, to scan every license plate, turning every driver into a suspect. From the article:

Every plate is photographed, time-stamped, labeled on a GPS map and automatically logged into an Arizona Department of Public Safety database. An electronic voice alerts [the officer] to stolen vehicles within seconds after they pass, giving him the ability to make quick arrests.

That’s right. With no reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or any of those other pesky things that cops had to worry about back in the old days, every driver on that stretch of road has now been added to a DPS database.

But, it gets much worse. While it is done in the name of preventing auto theft (it would also stop auto theft to have checkpoints on every intersection, by the way), what they are really trying to do here is create a massive, location-based database of who is going where at what time. From the article:

U.S. plate readers were introduced as an auto-theft deterrent, but investigators talk about using the cameras to create a virtual Arizona crime map, widening the scope beyond stolen vehicles.

By logging the daily location of thousands of registered automobiles, investigators may be able to narrow down the locations of people they are looking for.

The automated technology, for instance, gives officers the ability to check the license plate of each vehicle parked outside a known drug house or note what cars were parked outside a bank before and after a heist.

Sure, in the article they say drug house but that could just as easily be substituted with anti-war protest or gun show. Why wouldn’t they want to scan the license plates of everyone who is at a gun show or peace protest? Those are potentially dangerous people who should be tagged and tracked, right?

Hidden in the sidebar is possibly the most bizarre part of the whole debacle:

Tempe: Police use two license plate readers to track down motorists with unpaid parking tickets in addition to using the technology to hunt felons and stolen vehicles.

So parking tickets are such a serious concern that it is worth tracking the locations of thousands of innocent people just to catch a few people who double-parked? Is this the world we want to live in?

One of the things that creeps me out the most about these issues is the moronic responses from small-minded idiots who support anything and everything that is done to invade and destroy their privacy, as long as it is in the name of safety. It makes me sad when I read the comments from these readers on the azcentral.com article page. Leading this cavalcade of morons is someone named PDAZ who says:

I always find it amazing that people complain about these things. Just what are you people doing that you don’t want others to know? They can take all the pictures they want of my plate — in fact, they can focus a camera on my house 24 hours a day — as long as it reduces crime, I’m all for it.

This imbecile actually wants a camera pointed at his house, monitoring his comings and goings, just so he could feel safer? Well, I have good news for him and his ilk. I have a feeling his wish will come true sooner rather than later.

I wonder if Americans and Arizonans will wake up to the slow, steady erosion of our most basic human freedoms. I hope that the voices of reason and the voices of freedom will be able to drown out the voices that cry out for safety by giving up the very things that are supposed to matter most to us.