Speaker for the Living

The ultimate in surveillance technology, coming to a town near you

Is this what California is writing IOUs for?

"The mayor of the City of Lancaster in the Antelope Valley of southern California is considering a high-definition video flying platform to aid in crime fighting. The aircraft, would circle the city constantly, able to zoom in on activity spots instantly. 'You never know when you are being watched or followed. It would be stupid to commit a crime. You see it with such detail,' said Mayor R. Rex Parris, who took a ride last week in a camera-equipped airplane with pilot Dick Rutan. 'I have every hope that Lancaster will be the first city to deploy it. I've never been so excited about anything.' Dick Rutan is the same pilot that flew around the world non-stop in the Voyager, custom built by his brother Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites in Mojave."

Even supposing that I didn't object to this on privacy grounds, and even supposing that this works perfectly with no technical issues and no simple workaround (someone mentioned umbrellas) exists, and supposing that it will never be abused, it is at best a foolish nonsense which does not solve the problem it claims to.

I thought the current state of the police state of U.K. proved that more surveillance camera is not even correlated with reduced crime. Further, because surveillance can never replace actual policemen on the ground for obvious reasons (cameras can't write tickets, fire guns, or arrest criminals), there is absolutely no cost saving at all—this technical monstrosity is an additional cost tacked onto whatever budget their police departments have.

And even supposing that this police-state surveillance of its own citizens has the desired effect with no unintended consequences (hey, I started walking into this fairy land when I assumed it will have no technical issues; why not go all the way off the deep end?), what's particularly disgusting is where it is being implemented: Lancaster. It's a nice suburban town with no serious crime problem (compare the data for Lancaster with the data for Chicago, where Obama's community organizing obviously helped). So even if this surveillance could solve crimes, well, the problem doesn't really exist.

But then, I guess without these invented problems and irrelevant and ineffective "solutions", the statists wouldn't have their wedge to pry our fundamental rights away from our little grubby hands.