We all know about the mass destruction of guns in Australia but the oppression didn’t stop there and it doesn’t generally make the news here. My Australian friend emailed these tidbits to me:
http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=77&ContentID=131675
Tracks where you go, measuring your speed between two points.
Emphasis on the tracks where you go part.
And:
http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,28348,25229239-5014239,00.html
AUSTRALIA’S third largest internet service provider (ISP) has pulled out of the Government’s web filtering trials, saying the plan is “no longer just about stopping child porn”.
The Government’s plan involves a nation-wide filter that stops “unwanted material” from appearing on Australian user’s computer screens.
iiNet says the ambiguity of “unwanted material” is what caused it to pull out of the trials.
Ambiguity of “unwanted material”? Like Tiananmen square? Between the speed cameras and this, I’m not so sure I would be happy living there anymore…
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Did I miss it in the article or was there not one single mention of safety, of reducing accidents and injuries as a reason for implementing this?
I see much about revenue generation but nothing about any other reason.
Sad.
Either we fight or we are next…
A few months ago I had a conflict with a neighbor over their always parking directly in front of the only fire hydrant on our block.
I took the matter up with our PD and it seems they couldn’t find the hydrant, the dumbasses never thought to look behind the car that was blocking it at the appropriate address, so, I involved the city Fire Marshal, to the same result…
I then offered to take digital pics, timed and dated, and to send them to the police and fire officials and I was told, MY pictures were not legal and could not be accepted as evidence if there was not a certified officer witnessing the event, and that brings me to the point I am wanting to make regarding a *Police State*…
Our city just spent several million dollars installing *Red Light Cameras* and the Fire Marshal had sent me an official letter telling me that MY pics would be no good without a witness…
So, I copied his letter to me, emailed it and MY own letter to the Mayor and every member of our City Council, I asked them were they going to have an officer on duty at every one of those new traffic cameras to stand as a witness to the actual infraction or were they going to take the picture itself as proof??
Within an hour I had been contacted by 3 of our council members and the Mayor himself and I was assured that the blocked hydrant thing would be immediately dealt with…
You see, I don’t give a damn if they block the hydrant, it was the principle of the thing and the fact that MY pics wouldn’t hold up in court and that those of the city would…
I won, pissed off that particular neighbor, big deal, he’s a chump and the whole neighborhood wishes he could sell and move but the point is this, the government hates it when you use their rules and turn them back on them… I love it…
Those speedtraps are used across Europe and are quite effective.
They’re also just the starting point. Next phase will see cars equipped with GPS tracking devices that near-continuously update police databases about the position, direction of travel, and speed of each car.
Several countries are also introducing systems of personalised public transport cards that allow tracking of each person using trains and busses from entry into the system until the exit again.
As a result (given that most people don’t travel more than a few kilometers without using cars or public transport) the location of every person in the country will soon be known to within a few kilometers at all times.
With the dense spycamera systems like the one in the UK, that can be narrowed down to within about a city block, 24/7, for everyone.
.edu networks are already blocking unwanted material, like boomershoot.org and blog.joehuffman.org. We’re already on the way there. You think they’re blocking radical left-wing sites? Think again– that’s free speech, don’t you know. The rational for GPS transponders in private cars here in the U.S. is already established– to track vehicle usage so as to establish your “carbon footprint”. That was locked in when they established CO2 as a pollutant, but no one wanted to listen to the protests. That was just going to apply to “big business” right? Using the same rational, they’re also going to start controlling your home thermostat. We’re putting the shackles on ourselves and still haven’t realized it. And in case anyone thinks this is a partisan issue, the Republicans are right in there, participating in the slow destruction of your rights and freedoms. Have a nice day, suckers.
Oh, and that cell phone you carry with you everywhere you go makes it possible to track your movements already, to say nothing of your bank card records and your internet history.
The cell phone tracking can work both ways. It can “prove” you were someplace you were not.
I know a LOT more about cell phones than I am at liberty to talk about in public. Ask me in private about cell phones some time.
After spending a week in Brisbane on my last deployment, I came to the conclusion that Australia was a wonderful country to visit, but it would be hell to live in…
The taxation rates ranged from 10 to 50% higher than ours, home prices were even more absurd than one might find in Kalifornistan, the cost of living was at least equivalent to the Left Coast, and there were cameras everywhere in downtown. And, by “everywhere”, I mean mounted every ten feet in the celings of overhangs, on lamp posts, on the sides of buildings, everywhere there were those shiny little black domes.
The people were all manner of gracious and accomodating, but you could easily tell they were just going along with it, with some of them even approving of it. There were outliers that dared to disagree, but few and far between.
And here, back at home, I see that we are creating exactly the same world for ourselves here, and there is no place left to go.
@J.T. Wenting: Transperth, West Australia’s public transportation system has that system in place already. A RFID style card with a log-on, log-off system that works on a GPS footprint. Fail to log off, and it charges you the maximum charge of the journey. The lure is that you get a 5-10% discount for pre-paying on this card. Note that this card replaced an existing card that you would receive up to 25% off when you used it; they phased out that card, offering you a full priced fare or this trackable card as an alternative. In order to use the card, you have to enter personally identifyable information, under the guise that if your card was stolen they could cancel it (for the record, the cancellation process was a royal pain in the butt and had nothing to do with the identifying information – all you needed was the card number). When I went to Japan – a place with numerous subway stations that transport millions of people daily – they had nothing of the sort (the closest they had was a “buy 10 rides on a disposable card” system) so I think it was completely unjustified.
They tried to pass the GPS based speed limiter for repeat offenders for speeding, but there were all sorts of problems associated with that – most of them being safety concerns, and problems associated with tracking in tunnel situations. All that would take to turn that into a tracking system is a transmitter of some sort. The idea was shot down quickly for different reasons.
@Linoge: A significant number of cameras in downtown are either fake (i.e. only the dome, but no camera) or run by store owners trying to get photos of thieves exiting their premises. The kind that were on lamp posts were most likely run by the city. Sides of buildings is a little unusual for that to be run by the city; usually that’s run by the management of the building itself to monitor the area around the building.
Those shiny black domes are everywhere in schools as well, especially the bad ones, and that most of them are unmonitored until they need it for some reason.