Generally, I'm not wont to get overly paranoid about supposed government schemes to invade our privacy and control our lives. But I have to admit that this paragraph in Holman Jenkins' column in yesterday's WSJ raised the hair on the back of neck a bit:
Britain has gone furthest in using cameras for comprehensive auto surveillance, and now says it's capable of monitoring every car trip in the U.K. and keeping a record for five years. Most traffic cameras are "on" all the time, and capable of being networked with plate- and even face-recognition software. In Britain, the data yielded will be incorporated in a database of all kinds of personal information and camera observations to enable "data mining" to let the government know who's doing what, when and where.
Cameras monitoring EVERY car trip in the U.K. and having it recorded for five years? As my wife noted when I mentioned it to her yesterday, that's a lot of nose picking captured for posterity.
No comments:
Post a Comment