Like I said, you claim don't care what I post, but just can't stop yourself…

Knock it off-

Now you are getting on questionable legal grounds.  This is nothing more than a camera and computer doing what cops have ALWAYS been allowed to do.  GPS is a world apart.

Well, lets be honest here. Them folks hardly sat down and thought to themselves, 'OK, this tech is cool, but lets only think about a small overseas market'… They would have had their eye on the main chance all along and the potential market in the US is huge!  

as long as they assured us (the public they are spying on) that it wasn't "big brother" like behavior then i guess its OK.
  surly they would let us know when it was some kind of big brother shit. rite??

I know this is a total tangent from the original posters point... this is a reply to  Ky_Bob

Taxation based on use and consumption makes sense in this case.  One's driving contributes to the wear and tear on roads whether you drive a mile or a thousand miles.  If you use more, why not pay more?  Electricity isn't flat rate.  Neither is water.  While it may not be quite the same as electricity, a road is a public good that is a finite resource.  Eventually it will have to be repaired and those repair funds will have to come from somewhere.  If you contribute to the degradation of a resource you should be charged an appropriate fee to provide for its maintenance.  Currently, this comes from the federal and state gasoline taxes.... the more you drive, the more gas you use, the more you pay.  This is not a new idea.

The problem with simultaneously promoting government regulations requiring increased fuel efficiency AND keeping the gasoline-tax for funding road repairs is that, Ceteris Paribus, revenues will drop and road repairs will suffer.

I'd be totally down for scrapping "value-based" ad-valorem taxes for vehicles.  Lets replace it with a system that bases your vehicle registration fee/taxes on 1.) Vehicle weight and your impact on road maintenance 2.) Engine size and your impact on air pollution, and 3.) Your miles driven in the last year.

I'm not a big fan of new taxes, hell, I don't like taxes at all.  But they are a necessary evil.

And there you have it.  Instead of cops driving around pulling people in for 'vehicle checks' or 'I thought you're driving was erratic' to do document checks to catch the occassional bad guy but annoying a lot of people going about their lawful occassions, now they get 100% hits on people with irregular documentation/warrants/no licence etc.

Fuel taxes are supposed to already take care of wear and tear on roadways. It is based on usage of gasoline. Why do they want to track miles you may ask? It is because the very regulations that forced the higher mileage vehicles has resulted in the decreased revenue on gasoline taxes. We are using less fuel to go farther. Gas prices are high and will get higher, so now they ant to tax not only the gas you buy but every mile you get out of that gallon of gas you have already paid taxes on. This is not a replacement tax, it is an add on tax.

Fuck that.

This is also in use by repo dudes.

-Z

Check my sig line

These systems have gotten a TON of stolen vehicles back to thier owners in my area.

I get to work with some of this technology on occasion...

It's fucking scary....

It is only scary in what people can make it do to their ends.

We have one and I drive it occasionally, of course I'm in the auto theft unit, so that's what it's for. It has other capabilities, but the tin foil factor is high here. For starters, it takes a picture of the front of the car, and the driver is not visible; the top of the picture is below the windshield, so it snaps a picture of the car, NOT THE DRIVER. We have a PIPS/Federal Signal system, and it's comparable to others out there.

All it does is look for a license plate shaped object in it's field of vision and converts the picture into an alpha-numeric character set, then compares it to a database that we load into the computer. Because it's an official piece of equipment and takes pictures, we cannot legally delete the pictures because it's now a public record, and subject to public records laws. I think we have to keep the pictures for 5 years.

Our purpose for having this car is to find stolen cars, and it's worked well for that purpose. Because criminals also drive, we can search for known vehicles involved in felonies, amber alerts, etc.... There are static cameras at some major shipping ports to scan vehicles going in/out, scanning for stolens, cars on terrorist watch lists, etc... It can also be used 'after the fact' to check alibis and to search a specified area during a specified time frame. There are a lot of possibilities, but basically this system to remember where it saw a CAR, not a PERSON.

Is that a bad thing?

who are you?
The ARF union rep?

Those of you with dreams of "revolution" would do well to take note of just how much technology you'd be up against.

nope

+1

This technology is NOTHING.

Welcome to Orwell's 1984 -
have you seen the gunshot locator yet?
And yes, this is only the beginning of technology to be used against US citizens.
oh there's more, sonic crowd control, microwaves, FLIR, and more.............................get used to it, unless there's a total colapse w/ no fuel or elec. It's for the children, ofcourse............