a small black box near the radiator
Surveillance technologies are easy to buy and even easier to abuse, privacy experts say. Paul A. Seidler was arrested last year in Kenosha, Wis., after he installed a tracking device in an ex-girlfriend's car. According to the police report, the ex-girlfriend, Connie Adams, complained that "she could not understand how the defendant always knew where she was in her vehicle at all times."
Police inspected her 1999 Chevrolet Cavalier and found a small black box near the radiator that beamed the car's position to Mr. Seidler's computer. In June, Mr. Seidler was sentenced to nine months in jail for stalking Ms. Adams.
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Ω{Maybe you'd expect me to be all huffed up about this issue but I'm not. We're all the way past that. The idea that 100 million vehicles are on the road is it, the crux, whether they have surveillance technology in them or not. Number one it's who has access to the tracking, number two it's the road and the car, the architecture and impact of that, hybrid or hydrocarbon, the sheer mass of roadway and vehicle is failure on a gargantuan scale. So what if there's cameras at every intersection? There already were at a lot that you didn't even know about.
The horses have been living in the bunk house for the last decade and a half and you want to have some kind of debate about whether or not we should close the barn doors.
It doesn't matter about that anymore. We're past it. What matters now is the shape of the thing that rises from the ashes of this slowly building conflagration, if anything does.
It's not a moral issue so much as strategic, the guys in position already knew that, that's why they're there, but they got there out of cowardice and desperation. They're weak and they won't last. What takes their place is what's up for grabs now.
Freedom is great. But soldiers aren't free. Not at Valley Forge, not in Basra. Not on the highway. The illusion of being able to adjust a little here and there and having a comfortable world is poisonous. You got used to the world the way it was when you were young, and then it changed. You want that back. But for almost all of us alive today it was pretty much too late to pull out by the time we started tracking the downward change. It's not the black box it's the reader, the human intelligence that monitors the output of all the sensors and cameras and microphones.
The problem isn't the information, it's who's processing it.}
Surveillance technologies are easy to buy and even easier to abuse, privacy experts say. Paul A. Seidler was arrested last year in Kenosha, Wis., after he installed a tracking device in an ex-girlfriend's car. According to the police report, the ex-girlfriend, Connie Adams, complained that "she could not understand how the defendant always knew where she was in her vehicle at all times."
Police inspected her 1999 Chevrolet Cavalier and found a small black box near the radiator that beamed the car's position to Mr. Seidler's computer. In June, Mr. Seidler was sentenced to nine months in jail for stalking Ms. Adams.
John Schwartz/NYTimes Dec.29.03
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Ω{Maybe you'd expect me to be all huffed up about this issue but I'm not. We're all the way past that. The idea that 100 million vehicles are on the road is it, the crux, whether they have surveillance technology in them or not. Number one it's who has access to the tracking, number two it's the road and the car, the architecture and impact of that, hybrid or hydrocarbon, the sheer mass of roadway and vehicle is failure on a gargantuan scale. So what if there's cameras at every intersection? There already were at a lot that you didn't even know about.
The horses have been living in the bunk house for the last decade and a half and you want to have some kind of debate about whether or not we should close the barn doors.
It doesn't matter about that anymore. We're past it. What matters now is the shape of the thing that rises from the ashes of this slowly building conflagration, if anything does.
It's not a moral issue so much as strategic, the guys in position already knew that, that's why they're there, but they got there out of cowardice and desperation. They're weak and they won't last. What takes their place is what's up for grabs now.
Freedom is great. But soldiers aren't free. Not at Valley Forge, not in Basra. Not on the highway. The illusion of being able to adjust a little here and there and having a comfortable world is poisonous. You got used to the world the way it was when you were young, and then it changed. You want that back. But for almost all of us alive today it was pretty much too late to pull out by the time we started tracking the downward change. It's not the black box it's the reader, the human intelligence that monitors the output of all the sensors and cameras and microphones.
The problem isn't the information, it's who's processing it.}
