NY Man Arrested for Cutting Wires to Red Light Cameras (2016) | Hacker News Reader

NY Man Arrested for Cutting Wires to Red Light Cameras (2016)

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301 pointscrunchiebones165 comments

> Ruth pointed out some cameras that were put up have been taken down after they fell short of daily contract-quota with Xerox to produce 25 citations, per camera, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., which costs Suffolk County $2,132 per day, according to the Xerox contract with the county.

> Xerox collects $13 from Suffolk County for each ticket, which increases to $33 per ticket when a camera generates more than 90 tickets in a month.

Wow, talk about a misalignment of incentives.

> Wow, talk about a misalignment of incentives.

Even though I lean libertarian I despise most of these public/private partnerships for this reason. Profit seeking combined with governments use of force (for monopoly or as part of the business model) is almost always worse than pure public services or markets.

Private prisons are a classic example of that, but there are countless less obvious ones in every local government. And it sucks because people blame capitalism for these failures, despite the arrangement looking nothing like a traditional market.

I lean very libertarian, especially when it comes to criminal justice and sentencing reform.

Private prisons can be seen as a byproduct of over-criminalization and over-enforcement. These red light cameras are in the same world where government sees the tightening of enforcement as a valid revenue model.

Over-criminalization is a byproduct of a for-profit prison system.

Has there ever been a study that has proven this? I hate the idea of private prisons but I've always been skeptical that prison owners can influence the justice system sentencing or law enforcement policies.

In my mind public/private partnerships are problematic from a simply on the basis of debt.

Government is great at borrowing money at good rates for capital purposes, while the cost of capital for a private entity is always higher.

All traditional markets require the use of force; just its limited in effect by consent in contract.

The market may require it at some point but it's not fundamental to the organizations business-models which is very, very different. Society as a whole is structured around these forces as well, so there is no way any economic system can operate without it. And we're better off for it.

99% of libertarians are for minimal government use of force, not zero government.

And poor writing. Is that $2k/day for each camera, or for the system?

If over 90 tickets/month, is it $33 for all tickets, or each over 90?

Wow, recap of the article, lots of WTFs.

1. Cameras lowered from 5 to 3 seconds.

2. Cameras placed in low income neighborhoods.

3. They put a camera at the mans house!

4. John Lang, a traffic-light scam whistleblower in Fresno, California who posted on Facebook that police were trying to kill him just days before he was found stabbed to death in his burned down house.

You mean he committed suicide by cop. Oh wait that is another meme. He committed suicide by the tried and try "stab myself to death will burning down my house method" which is all the rage nowadays.

The coroner's report notes that firefighters discovered his home was barricaded at the time of the fire. The cause of death was not stab wounds but smoke inhalation and fire: http://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/JohnLang-16-01-222.pdf

Thats an odd document. Cause of death: smoke inhalation; contributing factor, multiple stab wounds. Conclusion: suicide.

Towards the back of the article it talks about video from inside the house where the man shows the knife to the camera then turns off the camera.

> Another vexing problem for Ruth is the coverage the issue has gotten from local news, specifically News12, which is owned by CableVision who provides the internet service to the cameras at the lights. ...... When victims of the lights went to News12 about the deaths of their family members due to the shortened lights, News12 interviewed them, but never ran the story. And while other local media outlets report from Ruth’s point of view and most of the public’s, News12 has painted Ruth a criminal.

And yet we're supposed to treat the for-profit media in this country as sainted individuals, with no biases or influences whatsoever?

I hope not. I’d be curious who’s telling you to treat them as sainted inviduals.

Here’s my media literacy guide that catalogs all the biases (contributions welcome):

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....

Comparing media coverage of death with actual causes is misleading. There are many other reasons why something may be covered, other than just frequency of occurrence. Often coverage is for things that we might do something about. For example, there is quite a bit of coverage of terrorism because much of it is preventable. When systems break down and the barriers to it no longer work, we get Syria.

> Often coverage is for things that we might do something about.

I disagree. IMO it is almost always about maximizing "engagement" to the news source itself through those ways described in that github - getting the viewer to feel emotions/outrage/etc.

What am I, as a private citizen, meant to do to prevent a plane crash, random act of violence, terrorism, or whatever else that is being massively overreported?

> there is quite a bit of coverage of terrorism because much of it is preventable.

In what way do you propose I, as a normal middle-class office worker, prevent terrorism (which is already a vanishingly unlikely cause of death anyway)?

Or even more broadly, how do you propose our government prevents terrorism? Surprisingly, the unprecedented levels of spying and monitoring of our own people doesn't seem to have stopped it yet. Maybe even more spying will enable us to win that pesky war on terror.

We are not dealing with rational actors here. These are people who truly believe they are going to be martyrs and have eternal happiness just for dying in the right way at the right time. You can't negotiate or reason with that. Also you can't prevent every danger. There will always be, eg footpaths that people can drive cars onto, or whatever other ways to kill random people if you are crazy enough.

As a normal citizen, I would much prefer my government spent its resources preventing the overwhelmingly more likely (and preventable) forms of death or injury - but that doesn't sell papers, fund the war machine, or enable massive and ineffective civil rights degradation.

When he was in jail for his most recent arrest, a sheriff’s deputy even offered to bail him out.

If only real life more often played out like that scene in Scent of a Woman where righteousness wins out and doesn't end in the bad guys ruining the guy taking a stand:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtzy-l3H1g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcj1wMZRitI

Certainly the programming of the lights is public information. If it's not, a stop watch could document the setting. From there, I would imagine there are published best practices. That is, if the speed limit is X, the duration of the amber light has a very defined duration.

The town itself acknowledged the sub optimal programming of the light.

How is it that someone needs to resort to civil disobedience in order to have his/her fellow citizens properly protected; protected from their own (local) gov?

Be careful, that kind of speech could get you charged with practicing engineering^Wcommon sense without a license:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/12/0...

Is Xerox a front for the Illuminati or something? /s

How is so much power being exerted against people questioning red light cameras? Feels like there is some national entity providing support.

How reliable is this source of news? The farther I go, the less tied to the truth the content seems to be.

Here's some sources on this I found after a light search:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/man-indicted-for...

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/09/07/red-light-robin-hood...

Edit: The study linked to in the original article gives me a 404. It's a link to the 2014 annual report's PDF. I couldn't find it elsewhere, but here's a link to 2015's annual report: http://suffolkcountyny.gov/Portals/37/PDF/Red%20Light%20Safe...

Zero. Read the rest of the site. These are paranoid ramblings of mostly one individual. The fact that this is on the front page of hacker news really makes me worry about the critical thinking skills of the forum.

While true, there still remains the question of how inaccurate this particular article is.
Would definitely like to know if more accidents are caused by reduced yellow light times. And whether local police support the guy.

Actually, critical thinkers will separate ideas from their source.

I found this website after searching for the reports:
http://www.redlightscam.com/suffolk-county-red-light-cameras...
They seem to have the preserved the report mentioned in the article here:
http://nebula.wsimg.com/fcf2a132df15209b05e0822aab6046bf?Acc...
Go to page 13 of the report and it seems quite clear that they have increased.

It's very biased, but they often have audio, video, photos, or scanned public records to back up the factual portion of the story. It's probably safe to believe that traffic light cycles have been shortened, people have been injured post-shortening (though perhaps not because of it), and the subject of the article has been attacking the automated ticketing hardware in protest. Aside from that, it's all about stirring up visibility and support for the guy.
Article suggests his effort have been kept out of the mainstream news out of corporate malice, but it's probably just because a single-person protest isn't very newsworthy until there is a hospitalization or an arrest.

The shortened duration times at the traffic lights generate $32 million for Suffolk County, which is why the county allows the practice to continue despite their own study showing they lead to an increase in accidents with injuries.
This is exactly what lawsuits are for.

Lawsuits cost a lot of money.

Apparently the (very cynical) lesson in all of this is that you don't get between the State and its money.
They'll either incarcerate or kill you.

anybody ever been to Milbrae? It's a tiny town with no courts and no police of its own. The cameras at intersections around the BART station make $millions for the city, mostly for vaguely marked and unnecessary no right turn on red.

Yep, total trap. The in and out is there. Be careful getting a burger and leaving, you need to watch it turning right to go back to 101

If the claim that standard 5 second yellow lights were shortened to 3 seconds for traffic cameras is true, Suffolk county officials should be ashamed. This is simply extortion.

If true, they should be ashamed and THEN go to prison. That kills people.

Fyi - light goes to yellow for 3 seconds before going to red in all of EU and people don't die because of it. I'd say 5 seconds in US is unusually long.

I'd guess consistency is more important than the absolute value.

The problem isn't the specific number, it's the intent behind changing the number and the decades of training the public on a different number.

I suspect the problem is more expectation than absolute value.

Really? Doesn't it vary depending on, say, road speed or visibility? It does in California.

It does in EU also. There's a EU-wide lower-bound of 3 seconds, I guess gp mixed it up.

It depends on size of intersection and speed limits. Are you saying all intersections in the EU are 3s?

I cannot remember seeing 5s yellow light ever (and I drove across almost all the EU). 5s yellow would certainly caught my attention in a "WTF is this" style as 5s is not just long, it's actually enormous and kinda defeats the purpose.

They shouldn't only be ashamed they should be charged personally with manslaughter. It's a big problem that both companies and government institutions always absorb resistibility from individuals and thus prevent proper responsibility for the privileged. The best outcome I could see here is the city ending up having to pay to families of accident victims that were caused by shorter lights. It should be the individuals that made the decision who pay and not the tax payer.

We need more boycotts, protests, civil disobedience, voting with our feet, delete Facebook/Google/Uber/etc, Robin Hoods.
We need a society driven by values and humanity, not the Dollar Almighty.
If not us, then who?

If not us, then who?
Probably our great, great grandkids, when things end up far, far worse for them because it wasn't us doing anything about it now.
You know, to play devil's legal counsel. Er, I mean advocate /s

I think our society is currently too vain for effective civil disobedience: if you social media post evidence of disobedience it spreads your message but makes you cheap to prosecute.

As a person outside of US, I find this interesting. In Finland, the duration of a yellow light is defined in Finnish directive for traffic lights. For speed limits of 40-50 (km per h) duration is three seconds and for 60 kmph it is four seconds and over that it must be 5 seconds.
So the three second time is a norm here in a city area. I wonder how much that affects the statistics of traffic safety. Can someone explain me, why a shorter duration of yellow light causes more accidents?
In Finland I think it is not illegal to drive pass red light if it is not safe to stop before them, so when you see the yellow light you must consider if it is possible stop the vehicle safely.

> Can someone explain me, why a shorter duration of yellow light causes more accidents?
The purpose of an amber/yellow light is to give drivers a transitionary stage.
Consider the limiting case, that a light goes from green to red with no intermediate period.
Drivers will not be able to avoid running red lights. They'll approach the junction at 30mph, the light will change just before they reach it, and they'll go through.
Now you've normalised running red lights. Drivers can't stop if they're 5m from the red (at 30mph), but what about 30m? 50m? 100m? There's no clear cutoff.
So either you make the all-red cycle really quite long, or accidents increase.

These are easy to get around though. It might depend on the State, but in Oregon, in order to actually get ticketed by those stupid things, the image of the driver in the car must match the picture of the driver the car is registered to. So if you're married, just register your wife's car in your name and hers in yours. The pics will never match, and no ticket. If you have to go to court, you can show the judge the pic and it's clearly not you driving, so no ticket.

The problem is most people won't think of doing this, and bother to actually go to court.

In my jurisdiction, they changed the laws to make it nearly impossible to fight the ticket and exempt the signor of the ticket from having to appear in court.
(Ontario, Canada)

I felt like the problem is that some people will think of doing this, and use it to drive like assholes and endanger people without penalty.

Some states are “owner responsibility” states which means it doesn’t matter who is driving.
And going through red lights is dangerous. Wouldn’t it be better to stop doing it rather than come up with a way to outsmart the system?

Sure, one should never intentionally run a red light, and I wasn't suggesting that they do.
The article specifically talks about them shortening the duration of a yellow light from 5 seconds to 3 in order to increase revenue by catching more people running the (shorter) light. They purposefully are creating a situation where people feel the need to speed up to make it through the shorter duration light and more people are getting killed because of it.
I don't know about where you live, but in a lot of places if you cross the crosswalk and are now in the intersection and the light just changes from green to yellow, 3 seconds isn't enough to clear the intersection before it turns red unless you were already traveling the speed limit and the lane is clear ahead of you. Imagine yourself in rush hour traffic and you're the first car stopped at a green light because you can't safely clear the intersection. The car ahead moves and you start to enter the intersection because there is now space to clear the intersection without having to stop in it. Just as you start to accelerate it turns yellow, and then red 3 seconds later before you clear it because they shortened the time. If the light stayed at a 5 second yellow light, you would have made it through. Is that genuinely your fault if you did everything according to the book but only got caught because they artificially lowered the yellow light time?

Shortening light cycle times to increase revenue is evil. But one thing that is not widely known is that it is illegal to enter an intersection while the light is yellow. The only time it is legal to enter an intersection is while the light is green.
So if the light turns yellow, you enter the intersection and leave it while the light is still yellow... that is just as illegal as if you entered the intersection when the light was red.

You must be living in a perfect world where people finally won laws of physics.
In my world, if you driving at speed limit near intersection you have zero chance to stop before the line. And even if you managed so, there is a very good chance that a driver behind will not have so good brakes and reflexes.

Not true in the first few states I checked. The closest is Wisconsin, where the motorist "must stop at a yellow light except when the motorist is so close to the intersection when the light turns yellow that it’s unsafe to do so" [1].
In other words, you're wrong. Also, there are multiple degrees of illegal, and I'm certain the punishment for running a yellow light isn't of the same magnitude as the punishment for running a red light.
It seems that you like correcting people enough that you're biased towards believing in unintuitive things.
1: https://www.drivinglaws.org/resources/wisconsin-red-light-st...

Running a red light, say, 0-2s after it's just turned red is much, much, much safer than one that's been red for minutes already.
But these laws don't prevent the latter, since those are usually oblivious or impaired drivers.
They just find a way to monetize the former. Which isn't in itself wrong -- it just sets up these perverse incentives that history has shown various jurisdictions cannot handle without transparency.

Germany is like this for its speed cameras: the ticket must go to the driver.
None of this “let’s blame someone not responsible because it’s easier than finding who is really responsible” business.

Most other states these are civil infractions, not criminal, so the burden of proof is much lower for the state. Hence, they just mail a fine to the owner of the vehicle. You do not earn points against your license, and you insurance usually won't go up, but they can prevent you from renewing your registration if there are unpaid fines.

He's probably right about being a scheme... goes about it entirely the wrong way to stop the scheme.

What approach can a normal, non wealthy, non connected citizen take?

Get the local news to make a stink.

Seems like he tried that, and other venues and was ignored.

In America? hahahahahahahahaha

Idk. Also, a bit crazy, but maybe called to say he was going to do it with news coverage, but not actually do it?

Any way to get a law in the books that specifies a minimum yellow light duration for a given speed limit?
www.shortyellowlights.com/standards/ has a formula.

I know there is a state wide rules in California. And because of complaints about red light cameras, they even increased some of the limits by 0.5s. I'm not sure of the exact numbers right now. I know my own city was caught doing some of these games but after the changes were made, they saw a 77% drop in red light tickets at some locations.

Seems like he would have gotten away with snipping the wires if he didn't ask the news to report on it...

what way would you suggest? keep in mind that the longer it takes the more people will die/be injured.

I may not understand how these cameras work but how does cutting the power to these prevent those people from being injured/dying? Sure people aren't going to get tickets from them but the yellow light is still going to be shortened. So even if they take the cameras out, unless they put the yellow light back to 5 seconds, the injury/fatality rate is still going to be elevated.

Sometimes, civil disobedience can be the right way to solve a systemic problem

Civil disobedience is sometimes necessary. Good on him. I hope he brings more attention to this story so that action may be taken to change the system.

Going through proper channels failed completely, so all he can do at this point is try to bring attention to it. He's certainly succeeded at that, since this article is the first I've heard of it.

The ability / desire / necessity to break laws where those laws are dysfunctional is, at the very least, important, if not essential to a healthy society.
We call this civil disobedience. The article draws attention to this.
From the article: The shortened duration times at the traffic lights generate $32 million for Suffolk County, which is why the county allows the practice to continue despite their own study showing they lead to an increase in accidents with injuries.
The wrong people have been arrested here.
If you can't offer a comprehensive alternative to his actions then your comment lacks substance.

You sue. You don't go destroying property.

A private middle class citizen suing a $7B company... Yeah, right...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action

lol, Yea...
You do know the government has sovereign immunity right, and a cause of action around Traffic Management would be tossed almost instantly

"You" don't have standing to sue unless you have been harmed. He got a traffic citation, which is an extremely small harm. No lawyer would pick that up on contingency. Small claims court would throw it right out as frivolous without even considering the larger issues.
Now what?

Well if this is such a large problem, you go set up a class action lawsuit. If any law firm saw this and thought, wow, there's actually significant damage going on here, there'd be a dozen at the gate waiting to represent the thousands of people affected.

Yeah, I won't be shocked if that happens eventually, but in the meantime wouldn't it be nice if the people who are paid by the public to serve the public interest and have also sworn on bibles to do that would actually just do that without being forced to do that? Besides this is yet another example of private profit and public risk. None of the judges, prosecutors, city managers, and cops who receive consideration from Xerox will ever answer for their corruption. Xerox execs will never answer for their corruption. Instead the families of some poor bastards who died of T-boning will just bankrupt a few counties and municipalities. That's not really going to fix the problem. Eventually, Xerox itself will go out of business whether they get sued or not. Nothing says "no innovation here" like the trivially venal schemes described in TFA.
Meanwhile, we seem to have drifted a bit here. Re-aiming cameras and cutting wires is still a much more available remedy for the average human being than running a successful class action lawsuit against a corrupt conspiracy of huge corporations and unaccountable civil servants. The difference between those two alternatives is so vast...

Actually, civil disobedience is simply knowingly breaking the law and sucking up the consequences to make a point. It does not stop at refusing to go to the back of the bus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience#Violent_vs....

Sibling comments nail the issue as to why he doesn't just sue. So now he's doing something with much more bang for the buck, and is shouldering the risk entirely on his own.
The man's a hero in my book.

The Cato Institute has been pushing for class action suits for exactly this type of situation
https://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-daily-podcast/libertari...

What if the actions are perfectly legal?

This is classic civil disobedience. He actually did it in public and asked to be arrested. That's the way it's supposed to be done.

The legality of issuing tickets without being able to identify the driver is beyond me. I"m sure there is a "reason" it just seems inherently unjust to me.
Heck I'd rather just have humans deal with it as a sort of jobs program even ;)

A ticket is a summons, not a conviction; the owner of the car can, of course, argue that they were not driving, and present evidence to that effect.

A summons for a person based on "I saw your car" seems unjust too.

At a minimum, the vehicle owner should have information about who had the car if it wasn't stolen (and that it was stolen if it was.)

A summons based on the idea that the car owner might know who ran a red light seems even more absurd...

In the US most people keep pretty good track of who is using their car at any given time. The idea that the owner would not know who ran a red light using their car, or at least be able to narrow it down to a couple of immediate family members, is pretty close to absurd here.
How do car owners manage access to their cars in your country?

No he's not saying the data is unavailable, he is saying it is absurd for the police to demand your help in convicting yourself or another.

That sounds indistinguishable from being compelled to testify as a witness, which isn't absurd at all.

That's not what the summons actually is though.

Are there people driving your car that you could not recognize from a photo?
Now, there's a separate debate about whether you should be compelled to name that person...

> Now, there's a separate debate about whether you should be compelled to name that person...
Maybe, but even in criminal cases (which traffic violations often are not) there is no general right to not give evidence against third parties.

"which traffic violations often are not"
I think that's kinda the road we're going down with some of these arguments... doesn't make a lot of sense.

That separate debate is my point.

It seems reasonable that an individual should bear at least some responsibility for who they allow to borrow their car.

If they know the other person is going to commit a crime yeah.
Otherwise, no it is not reasonable at all.

Not in Ontario Canada. The law says the owner is guilty. It doesn’t go against your driving record/insurance though, so it’s a free-for-all if you’re wealthy.

More creative would be to inject an altered video feed with the license plates changed.

Did I just a read an upcoming movie script?

Painting the lens black might be a better balance of quick and effective.

But you'd have to reach the lens. The wires might be handier...

Ahh, I had assumed the wires were only exposed at the same height, but protected at ground level. Maybe not?
I wonder if putting a bag over it is a lesser degree crime.

Ahh, I had assumed the wires were only exposed at the same height, but protected at ground level.
In some red light camera installations you can use an Allen wrench to open an oblong metal panel at the base of the camera pole and expose the power circuit.
...said a friend.

trivial. you don't need to climb the pole, just a spray can (or a wet mop, etc) on a broom stick.

Vertical integration in law enforcement is coming. Some components are already here - private cameras, private prisons, that judge getting kickbacks for sending children to the private prison...

> Vertical integration in law enforcement is coming.
It's been around for a long time, it's called “the state”.

I stated it badly - I meant that private components of law enforcement start to form their own structure instead of being just a separate components embedded in the state structure.

What a patriot...

Is this a crime?

A few years ago these claims would have been considered conspiratorial, and would have yielded public outrage. Now it's just banal and accepted that a municipality and private company got together to manipulate and effectively rob their own citizens.
How have politics become so corrupt? At the early days of the broadly available internet I was sure it would lead to a more informed public, and from that a more accountable, responsible leadership. If anything we have gone in the opposite direction.

>How have politics become so corrupt?
Anonymous dark money being funneled into politicians pockets, a complete lack of oversight on many departments and overall complacency from many people who now view the security state as a safety measure for us all.

This. Citizens United's effects are just beginning to be felt.

Oh Christ. Why is Citizen's United bad? All it says is you can make a political film leading up to an election and the production of that film shouldn't count as a campaign contribution. It's a perfect example of freedom of speech.

Because in practice it circumvents all the campaign finance laws that tried to somewhat level the playing field between candidates backed by the super rich and those not.

That might say more about how well the laws were written.
It’s tricky to make campaign finance laws that don’t result in censorship. If the law would have prevented someone from making and distributing a documentary ... I believe it was a documentary critical of Hilary Clinton, which is interesting ... the law wasn’t well written and could easily be abused.

It allows corporations, non-profits and labor unions to make electioneering communications. That's it.
I find it quite shocking that public service unions can spend millions of dollars electioneering for the people with whom they will be negotiating their contracts, but I'll accept the free speech rights of a voluntary association outweigh my concerns.

What public union is spending millions of dollars on elections?

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000061&cy...
American Federation of Teachers https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000083&cy...
National Educators Associantion https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals.php?id=D000000064&cy...

In addition it also says the PAC and politicians cannot work together. Yes, that's a valid read of the situation. But it's also naive. What Citizen's United is in reality is a loophole that allows politicians and monied people to wink at each other (without explicitly saying anything). The whole point of one person one vote in democracy is to prevent the sort of power that money and resources can bring in. A limitless amount of money pouring into elections ruins democracy. If that means a restriction on speech in a very narrow sense, so be it.

It really depends on your perspective. From one perspective, it was terrible that the least sympathetic defendants they could come up with were like Thomas Paine's great-grandsons targeted by a tyrannical FEC, so the courts really had no choice but to throw out the terrible law. From another perspective, it was really convenient that all the rhetorical noise and political effort that went into McCain-Feingold could be neutered so easily. Why did Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart really start out with such an absolutist argument? The "even one sentence" formula was fairly shocking in that context, but the public may never know why he used it...

Do you have a link to General Malcolm Stewart's argument? I'd like to read up on it to learn more about this perspective.

Sorry to take so long. The following contemporaneous NYT article discusses the argument, but it doesn't contain the phrase "even one sentence". It does give a flavor of the justices' skepticism at the absolutism of the deputy solicitor general's argument:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/washington/25scotus.html

>At the early days of the broadly available internet I was sure it would lead to a more informed public, and from that a more accountable, responsible leadership. If anything we have gone in the opposite direction.
I've always thought the same. I suppose what may have happened instead is that exposure to corruption has been increased to the point of banality and normalization.

I'd argue politics has probably always been just as corrupt, if not more corrupt than it is now. We just know about it because they found out that when exposed the average person just doesn't care.

One of many reasons we are seeing a crackdown on free speech and internet freedom in general. In the information age, having a monopoly on information is the grand prize. The ruling class is going to do everything in its power to regain that monopoly, and with it, control over an easily-influenced population.

Exactly! Panama papers, koshoggi murder, arab spring, occupy movement, etc. there is a ton of light shone upon corruption. The problem is that the light does nothing to eliminate the flow of money being made from said corruption and thus that money is used to quash oppress and extinguish the light.
Id say the most successful attempt in the US was the OWS movement, given how quickly it was brought down.

I don't think OWS reached anywhere close to the level of influence that the WUO/SDS movement had.

What was WUO/SDS?
But occupy had the feds working with local LEOs with a supposed "kill list" to "take out leadership.
They remodeled the front steps of the SF fed reserve due to them, and we're working with Oakland pd on how to deal with the protests and wound up planting agent provacatuers in the midsts to foment vandalism and sway public opinion against ows.
But I am not familiar with what the ones you mentioned accomplished with respect to influence. Interested to know.

> The Weather Underground Organization (WUO)... was a radical left-wing militant organization founded on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan ... Weatherman organized in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
There are a number of books about the group (some by former members) that are worth reading, and there's also a documentary:
-- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343168/

Perhaps being exposed to lots of information does not make us informed in any meaningful way.

It makes us informed, but so much information saturates us and we end up not caring.

Two things, public consumption and interest of local news has gone down, and local newspapers etc. have gone out of business/severely curtailed their coverage of local town hall meetings etc.

The consolidation of news means less local news and a single point of view pushed to many markets.

I don't think this is a good example of government corruption. It's just a population stunned by lack of education trying a feel-good solution to a problem that works against their best interests. It's the same as most laws in our society - gun control, marijuana prohibition, the list goes on and on.

How is this an example of a feel-good solution? This is in Suffolk County, Long Island - a county with a median income almost twice that of the nation as a whole. It's not a completely uneducated populace.

Yes I know - I grew up in Suffolk County. The people continue voting for politicians that allow these initiatives to occur. It's a feel good solution because at least some people believe the traffic light cameras solve the problem of car accidents at red lights. If they were educated everybody would know about the study that said that auto incidents increase and take it into account at the polls. But unfortunately they do not educate themselves on these issues and vote accordingly to fire the people responsible, instead they almost always just vote party-line no matter who is on the ballot and what they stand for.

> instead they almost always just vote party-line no matter who is on the ballot
This is a really hard single issue to run on. You’d probably have to have a law enforcement or prosecutorial background, to avoid looking soft on crime. And you’d have to tell wealthy voters how you’re going to replace the lost revenue. In a wealthy county like Suffolk, these are tough sells.

Somebody actually ran on this ticket a few years back and lost - their campaign signs said something along the lines of "RED LIGHT CAMERAS ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL". The revenue question is more a matter of ideology. You could always tell them that before the sixteenth amendment the only revenue our government needed came from excise taxes and tariffs... it's not like there's no precedent for funding a country without red-light cameras, or income tax for that matter.

> The revenue question is more a matter of ideology
Practically, it’s a matter of raising taxes or cutting services. That’s what makes it a tough platform to run on.

Citizens United.

Not really it has been pretty much been publicly know from day one of their implementation.

> How have politics become so corrupt?
It's an election year for New York's aspiring Attorneys General. If there is a better source for this man's claims, it might be possible to bring it up at upcoming events. As it stands, it's hard to differentiate this source's anecdotes from those of a nut job.

Last time I got one of these "tickets", it came from the red light camera company and informed me that as long as I paid the fine on time, I would not be reported to the authorities and therefore would not receive a moving violation (and so points on my license). The money went to the red light camera company.
So, as a private entity, they collected evidence of a "crime" I committed, and threatened to expose me to the authorities unless I paid them off. How is this not extortion?

Have you contacted your state's attorney general? This sounds like exactly the sort of case that their office would be interested in pursuing.

I actually considered that but wasn't able to gauge how realistic an option that might actually be.

>How is this not extortion?
because it's authorized the state (municipality).

That sounds suspiciously like a phishing scam, they had photos and everything?

In Portland someone did a fantastic statistical analysis of how their yellow lights are chronically undertimed per state regulations. He mentioned that he was an engineer in the report submitted to the state to try and overturn his wife's red light ticket. They tried to fine him for practicing engineering without a license.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/12/0...

If you think Ruth may be paranoid, consider the case of John Lang, a traffic-light scam whistleblower in Fresno, California who posted on Facebook that police were trying to kill him just days before he was found stabbed to death in his burned down house.
Police ruled his death a suicide.
Wow Xerox don't play.
[EDIT:] after a bit of online research, it seems plausible that Mr. Lang's death was actually a suicide. That doesn't change the fact that a three second yellow would be unsafe at most normal automotive speeds...

This is the part of the article that stuck out to me, too. I sure was thinking he might be acting a little dramatic, but this paragraph makes the paranoia sound more plausible.
Seems like a plot out of Hot Fuzz to rule being stabbed to death in his own burning house a suicide...

John Lang was severely mentally ill. And police didn't rule his death a suicide: the coroner did, because the stab wounds he experienced were superficial and appeared self-inflicted, and his cause of death was from smoke inhalation. Firefighters had to chop down barricades that had been constructed from the inside of his house.
Plus, the police aren't going to kill you by stabbing you and then burning your house down (at least, if they're acting as part of a conspiracy). There's no benefit and huge potential costs for them.

> And police didn't rule his death a suicide: the coroner did,
The coroner is a police employee in Fresno.

The first Google result for "john lang fresno" brings up this r/UnresolvedMysteries thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/4z1kk9...
A top reply links to the autopsy report, which notes among other things that Lang had barricaded his doors and also had functioning indoor cameras, which showed him "sitting in the living room area of the house with a large knife" the day before his death: http://dig.abclocal.go.com/kfsn/PDF/JohnLang-16-01-222.pdf
It's not unheard of for a corrupt police department to commit crimes or tamper/fabricate evidence. But generally, it seems counterproductive to silence a critic by murdering him at home and burning his house down, which draws a lot of attention and complicates the number of agencies involved.

>> That doesn't change the fact that a three second yellow would be unsafe at most normal automotive speeds...
Lights go to yellow for 3 seconds in all of EU and the only EU country that has more fatalities per 100k citizens than US is Lithuania[0]. If anything, it seems to me like the American 5 seconds is unusually long.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Yeah, if all yellows in the nation went to three seconds it would probably be a wash in terms of safety. Well, first there would be a couple of years of bloody carnage, but after that most drivers would re-calibrate.
The attentive reader will note that that is not what happened here.

Fatalities per distance driven is probably a more useful metric, since the US has more cars and typically longer commutes (when you check this the US is behind 4 European countries). 3 seconds seems like a really short time for a yellow. If it takes 1 second to react, make a decision, and physically push the brake pedal, that only gives you 2 seconds to come to a complete stop. If I'm doing the math right for a 25 foot wide intersection (enough room for 1 lane in each direction), at 60mph (~95 kph) that gives a stopping distance of about 150 feet / 46 meters.
Lots of cars are barely capable of that in test conditions with new tires on dry roads.

Why is an article from 2016 a top story now?

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