I was ticketed in Houston for not having a front license plate circa 1992. But, I think he mostly gave me the ticket to have an excuse to go on a fishing expedition for drugs or whatever.
So many 'laws' have that as a prime directive Things like 'improper lane change' etc Hell most drug charges are just to put bodies into the system right about now. . . Rocket River
The 2 license plate law has been around for quite a while...at least since mid-90's when I was in college and had Rockets vanity plate on the front of my car and was ticketed.
I agree that it would be wonderful if this technology could be used with good intention i.e. specifically designed to capture crime and delete - without anyone ever seeing it - all other collected information. I have nothing to hide, so I am concerned only with manipulation of mass data to serve other motives for infinity amount of time. The problem is: that technology either doesn't exist or is not being used. As far as we know there's no technology which can robotically and automatically and without human interference determine a sound strategy to collect data for the right amount of time, exactly for a high risk situation and delete any data captured erroneously. Therefore there is massive human interference in the collection of data, and this interference is based on opinions rather than scientific decisions. This leads to a strategy which puts everyone at risk. I call this the PPP - Persian Passport Problem. It is extremely illegal to have dual nationality if you're Iranian and the Iranian government knows about everyone who has dual nationality but doesn't do anything about it.... EXCEPT when someone does something which annoys them and that person has dual nationality. Then you could be tried for espionage, and with the government's vast array of data collection they can build a strong case against you by manipulating that data, and this is data you would never have access to if you wanted to defend yourself. This data collection puts you in a kind of legal debt. There is not anyone in the world who has not done something which they don't mind everyone in the world knowing about at some point. There are thousands of stories of people who have suffered because of this. Lastly and most importantly, the human interference we're discussing is powerful and made more powerful by collecting this data. Human history has shown that power will always seek to expand, ALWAYS. Expansion of power is a move away from democratic values. It's what keeps a military regime in power for decades. It's what gives intelligence agencies power over executive and judicial branches. It's what makes it possible for the few bad apples to abuse the secrecy of data collection to engage in mass crimes such as torture by marrying data collection to (ironically) state privacy. The abuse of human rights on a large scale is far more worrisome than the burglary near your house. There is no ideal situation where what we want out of this technology can be achieved at this moment in time. If the authorities had demonstrated that they have the technology to achieve this and the willingness to eliminate a ot of the human error and bias from this, then we'd have no problem. We don't have a problem with the technology itself. It's the people running who you cannot trust. Not because they are all bad people. But because they are a collection of people in power and therefore they tend to stray from democratic values because of the nature of human in those positions in groups.
Well spoken, comrade. I'm sure big brother agrees... privacy is overrated. Young people with 1.5 offspring units are probably in no danger whatsoever of this becoming a problem, and should willingly submit to full cavity searches, immediately and regularly, for the sake of the state. "Go Deep on 'em." Who cares if your internet activity or where you drive puts you under scrutiny and pressure from those that would seek to imply your wrongdoing and less than upstanding methods of citizenry, using it as leverage to bend you to their will for no other reason and whenever they see fit? As long as it stops the speeders. Oh wait, punishes the speeders.
