Traffic Lights
Over at Popular Mechanics Glen Reynolds has a piece on installing camers on traffic lights. He writes:
A political consultant might look for pictures of incumbent politicians speeding and running lights–and then check to see if the pictures show someone sitting in the passenger seat, and do a little more digging to find out just who that person might be. The possibilities are endless.
This criticism is a superior reformulation of an argument I have used in the past to demonstrate why using cameras to monitor public areas is a bad idea. Simply put, compiling massive amounts of data can lead to the suppresion of political voice with the the proper motivation and data mining techniques. But also, if you ask me a minor crime without a vicitim should not lead to punishment.
May 10th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Yeah, I’ve wondered about this, and I’m kinda of two minds on it. On the one hand I agree that that stuff will definitely happen and is bad. On the other hand, the desire to attack your political/religious/cultural/whatever enemies through any means possible has and will always be a part of human nature; new technology will alwas end up giving people new ways to acheive those ends, but I’m not sure we can just limit the implementation of technology because of it.
My hope would be that the culture would just evolve - ie, once every politician on the planet had been expoed for speeding and half had been caught having affairs, people would just stop caring. What happened with Clinton gives me hope that this might work out- there was a big scandal, but he wasn’ impeached, I don’t think it ultimately hurt his political career too badly, and people became very blase about the whole thing after the initial media frenzy.
May 10th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
“A minor crime without a victim should not lead to punishment.” I think you misunderstand the purpose of the camera. The purpose is not primarily to impose punishment, but to keep drivers from violating the law before there IS a victim. This is the motivation at least in San Francisco, where a number of intersections have had light-runners fatally injure pedestrians.
Your point regarding data mining and misuse of information is a good one, but don’t overlook the true purpose. We still need a solution to the problem of habitual light-runners. Our culture does not seem to lend itself to an easy fix.