A woman drives with both hands on the wheel. Her phone sits face-down on her lap. No officer pulls her over. No lights flash. Weeks later, a $1,251 ticket arrives in the mail. The evidence: a single frame from a Camera surveillance app. The charge: phone use while driving.
Automated camera companies market their devices as automated license plate readers — tools for catching stolen cars, flagging warrants, and aiding serious investigations.
Sold as a Crime Tool. Used as a Fine Machine.
I’m an enemy of the panoptic surveillance state of course, but at least in this instance the all-seeing eyes of big brother found a worthy target this time. She, and a whole lot more people, shouldn’t be driving cars.
Edit: all of you who have downvoted me and castigated my words are fools and animals who do not understand or deserve the rights you enjoy. Better men than you gifted you with liberties in the vein hope that you would use them to become more enlightened than themselves, now you will allow the cabal of pedophiles to take everything from the rest of us, so that you might sleep more soundly in the knowledge that when you are slighted by a criminal, they will be found. Of course, such a criminal state would not bother to find your criminal, as its masters are all too busy using the Palantir to spy on your children as they shower.
I have come to the conclusion that nobody read my post before downvoting. Do you people think I’m pro car? Do you think I’m pro-surveillance? I said she shouldn’t be driving, I said I hate the surveillance state, what’s wrong with you people? Why are you arguing against those positions that I didon’t not advocate for, which I attacked myself? It’s genuinely distressing, I’m reading over and over my words and trying to figure out if I misspelled something, but no, I think not a single person read it, it’s incredible.
I think reading comprehension mihht be a prerequisite for being an “enemy of the panoptic surveillance state”. You should look into that.
Copying this from another reply, because it fits both:
I’m saying that it’s good that she was ticketed. I still don’t like having cameras everywhere watching and tracking your every move and every word. This was an instance of a bad system producing a good outcome, just as brutal American police officers who rape and pillage sometimes arrest murderers as well.
You people, fools, sheeps and dogs, do not have the reading comprehension to it understand my sentiment, yet you falsely accuse me of failing to read.
Calm down, Pol Pot. Before dehumizing everyone else and declaring yourself the guardian of all truth, consider this: admitting you made a basic mistake instead of going on an infantile tyrade about how people don’t deserve rights will go a long way for you personally. Do it for yourself, not for something or someone else.
Thank me later. Or don’t. Just as long as you try. There is no shame in making a mistake. Even less so in admitting it and apologising (quite the opposite actually). But there is a lot of shame in knowingly doubling down. It’s clear what happened. Just own up to it. With time, you will discover it’s almost like a super power. Your anxiety levels are also bound to go down.
Now go have a cold one and try and contemplate on the message without spewing vitriol toward the messengers.
I’ll admit to a mistake when one is made, but because I was right I will only admit to that. In not some guardian of truth, I just have a good opinion, which you and everyone else didn’t seem to understand or agree with, either because you’re illiterate or like the surveillance state.
It is no more radical a thing to suggest today than it would be two or three hundred years ago, because it was a common sentiment among the early Liberal radicals.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” - Ben Franklin.
Yet I recognized that, in this specific instance, the evil and corrupt government run by apocalypticist genocidal pedophiles did manage to catch someone doing a bad thing, which was good in that particular instance.
I thank you for nothing but wasting my time.