London traffic lights rigged to win International Olympic Committee's favor
theverge.com
theverge.com
Perhaps it's just the US mentality of tremendous respect for civil liberties[1], but what they did is actually appalling to me.
[1]: Please, let's not make this a discussion of how civil liberties aren't uniformly enforced in the US. I think we can agree that things like the Bill of Rights affirm more individual liberties in the US than many other countries.
Although the collection of the congestion charge is automated, this system can be used to alert police to the location of a vehicle in real time.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24992147@N03/2644171457/
Now available in mug and t-shirt form.
http://www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/search.html?SearchTerm=watchfu...
It creeps me out.
England prevails!
The liberal agenda prevalent on Reddit etc simply refuses to believe that there isn't a huge conspiracy theory, where all those private CCTV systems installed in corner shops, all those local council run CCTV schemes, are all linked together and tunneled into the government so they can spy on people.
But just for the hell of it:
Most CCTV in the UK was installed in the 70s and 80s, when the hardware became cheap. Independent Shop owners installed it so they could catch and prosecute shop lifters. It typically goes straight to a VHS tape which is cycled through and taped over after a few days.
Also for example, you have CCTV in petrol stations to catch people not paying. For some reason this type of thing doesn't seem to exist in the US...
The only difference is the wide swath of area between CCTV installs. They don't tend to watch the roads.
But this article (I cannot comment on the claims therein) states that people sitting in the "London Traffic Control Center" "followed them using London's infamous CCTV".
So.. If(!) that's true or close enough, then outsider seem to have the right impression?
On major roadside and traffic hotspots we also have cameras to help with accidents & traffic management. I have no idea if these are blinked with london congestion charging cameras.
The only use of cameras in the US that I know of is for red-light cameras, and even those are hotly debated.
Many street corners have CCTV cameras. The vast majority of them are run by businesses rather than the government and are decentralised, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread. It is possible for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to obtain footage from the CCTV stations with warrants if they physically go to the businesses and ask for it. You are perpetuating a half-truth.
(Context: I am from London. I do not give a shit about CCTV cameras OR the Olympics.)
Given a choice between being knifed/shot/mugged etc, and having a camera watch me, I'd choose the latter.
Other countries in western Europe are fine without it, and with a low(er) crime rate to boot.
You believe in a connection between surveillance and crimes. Exactly that assumption is the part that seems debatable - even if we ignore the whole privacy argument.
It also serves to make the public feel safer.
This interpretation of yours is not proven. Opponents argue that most statistics are of the causation != correlation kind and that thinking that CCTVs stop crimes is like believing in stopping piracy by suing old ladys for downloading 3 Britney Spears songs.
It's not just CCTV, cameras are ubiquitous, in everyones pockets.
Just look at the London riots, and the mugging of a student after he had already been attacked.
It was caught both on smartphone and on CCTV. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15232750
Even faced with video evidence they pleaded not guilty. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/02/john-kafunda-reec...
They've now been sentenced to 5 and 3.5 years in jail.
The cameras didn't stop it happening. The police watch from afar and convict later.
Try living in the US for a while. Over there it happens every day.
I'm suggesting that while CCTV provides footage for conviction it doesn't actually make you safer and stop things in progress.
It doesn't matter where you live.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge#Operat...
If you think the billions of USD of antiterrorism money is somehow not funding purchase of facial recognition software, you're foolin' yourself.
Collect enough uniquely-identified John Does and you can link them statistically to MetroCard swipes, and then you've got names from the credit cards used to purchase them...
Ride the subway enough times with (a) friend(s), and then they've got part of your social graph, too.
did you consider staying within the country?
From http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/realtime/ :
"Federal law enforcement agencies have been tracking Americans in real-time using credit cards, loyalty cards and travel reservations without getting a court order, a new document released under a government sunshine request shows."
There's no hope for privacy or civil liberties in that country. The only nonviolent solution is to leave forever.
Devil's advocate here, there are countries that have had no such instant surveillance and still managed to oppress their people quite effectively. I don't want to start a flame war so I won't name a country. And many times all it took for you to get arrested was for somebody to accuse you that you were a traitor or that you were badmouthing the government.
Were it that cameras reduced crime, we could have a reasonable and rational discussion about where the "privacy/security" lever could be set.
Unfortunately, they don't.
You moved out of a city because a CCTV camera got put up on a subway entrance? You're kidding, right?
US is actually not that far behind from doing this and more - Constitution or not. They'll just pass the laws and deal with it 10-20 years later. After all US still has the Patriot Act, and that never seemed too constitutional to me.
What's funny is that the Eastern Europe countries are probably the least likely to go this path anytime soon, and that's because it wasn't that long ago when they had revolutions over this kind of thing. But UK and US hasn't really done that in a long time, so neither the Governments nor the people there really get what it means to have mass-surveillance and have the Government know everything you did or want to do, and how bad of a thing that truly is.
Excuse me?
But yeah... we're not banning porn. We're not even actually going to start using an opt-in / opt-out system, either.
It's not /law/ yet, but once all the ISPs fall in line, it won't need to be law.
The UK didn't pass a porn ban. Some ISPs now offer an "opt-out" option for people who want the ISP to block things for them.
[edit] Just to clarify, by "opt-in", I'm referring to opting in to receive everything. Perhaps "opt-out" in reference to opting out of the block, is clearer.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/talktalk-to-offer-paren...
Mobile networks have always done silly blocking, and it takes a phone call to them to ask them to remove it. I assume it's more about them not wanting you to use more data than anything else.
It's a bit ridiculous (from the article) "meaning that any new TalkTalk users who require access to such content will first have to "opt-in" through a highly embarrassing call to customer services."
It's hardly "highly embarrassing" to ask them to remove a filter.
If they do go that route though, and as the article claims, ask you to opt-out once a year, then they'll simply lose customers to ISPs that don't hassle their customers.
I completely disagree. Many people would be very embarrassed phoning up to have an adult content filter removed. You can argue that they shouldn't be, but that's a different thing altogether.
For some balance, the USA didn't let someone into the country because of their tweets: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Buntin...
Is the guy a scumbag? Obviously. Should people go to jail for speaking their mind? That's probably where we diverge and think each other are crazy, but the key is: if you can be put in jail for, say, racism then a corrupt government need only make disagreement be framed as racist, for example. It's safer to just allow anyone to say what they want (with obvious exceptions like yelling "FIRE!") and point out why their argument is stupid.
Has anyone given it a name? It would be nice to call people out on this.
Then don't write flamebait.
People use fake plates all the time.
You would have to clone a number plate from an almost identical car (same make, model, colour, etc.) in order not to raise any suspicions.
In many areas of the country there are police forces with ANPR on their patrol cars, and you can bet they'll pull over a car over a mismatch. Most probably quite aggressively, on the presumption that other criminality is involved (e.g. the car is stolen, has been used in bilking of petrol, etc.)
Yeah, I do like to poke at the US, but the UK is equally fecked up. I think the one real thing we in the UK and US have in common is the notion that we the people are now seen as the enemy of the state.
Trouble is, Im yet to find a suitable country, with the same good stuff the UK has, which is not also equally fecked up. I can imagine Americans like me might think the same thing.
Frankly, I do not know of a country where one can live good and not feel like the enemy of that country.
What I want to know is when will the people, yes us privileged westerners, stand up and say we have had enough. Maybe in Greece and France it has already begun.
It part of the same system that charges people for entering the congestion charging zone, and those that drive in bus lanes.
http://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/CityPolice/Advice/TrafficT...
It's an impressive system, and despite being an ardent supporter of civil liberties, I don't have any problem with it myself.
Vehicles are only stopped if the police have good reason to do so, i.e. they have reason to believe the driver is committing a categorical offence (e.g. the car has no insurance or tax), or if the vehicle/owner has previously been involved in serious crime (e.g. there is a marker on the vehicle linking it to drugs or firearms)...
The focus should be on having a healthy criminal justice system which is completely free of political interference and effective in enforcing sanctions on the police when they behave unjustly and neither Britain or the US can claim that at the moment.
The Bill of Rights is so 18th century. I think you'll find that most industrialized liberal democracies have constitutional guarantees of freedom that are more modern and comprehensive than the US version. The UK is something of an anomaly in that it still relies on common law and tradition rather than an explicit bill or charter of rights. The honour system works fine and tends to be self-correcting over the longer term, as long as the government is willing to play along nicely.
If you compare those measures to the US response to Sept 11th and others, I think you'll find a lot in common. I think at the time the measures were widely welcomed by the public too, although I'm not certain.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_steel_%28London%29
"Once there was a sheik that was planning to make a £3B investment in a new real estate development in Canary Wharf [located about 5 miles east of the city centre]. Plans had been drawn up, and everything was in place and ready to go -- with one hitch: the sheik wanted to see the site for himself. Wouldn't sign the on the dotted line until he'd walked around and kicked its metaphorical tyres a bit.
"The problem is, if you're a billionaire sheik you you have to stay in a a certain class of hotel, and there just wasn't anything appropriate in Canary Wharf. So he found a nice place in the West End [about 3 miles west of the city centre]. He flew in, spent the night there, and went to see the site first thing in the morning, around rush hour.
"The other problem is, if you're a billionaire sheik, you don't just hop on the tube with everybody else. So, he hired a limousine and said 'take me to Canary Wharf!'.
"Two hours later, the limousine was still crawling past the Tower of London [about 1 mile east of the city centre]. They'd managed an average speed of 2 miles per hour. The sheik was fuming. Any property this hard to access surely had to be worthless. 'Driver!' he said, 'Change of plans. Take me to Heathrow.'
"And that's how 3 billion pounds of investment died in traffic."
You can bet that the London team pitching to the IOC were very well aware of this story.
Too many government decisions are made in order to procure glory and gratification for those at the helm. Britain has a lot to offer the world, and it has been stifled by its vain and inward-looking leadership for far too long.
To be honest 99% of us ignore it and treat it like a different world. However, if it becomes a problem en masse the shit WILL hit the fan and the accountable will be made examples of.
This was the most shocking item in that report. That blows away my usual "double the estimates" rule-of-thumb for govt related bids. Now we even have rule-of-thumb inflation.
Now the Delhi 2010 games did go vastly overbudget, possibly as high as 60,000 crore INR (about £7 billion; less than half the current estimate for the Olympics). But they also built a 4 lane highway, new metro tunnels, and expanded the airport in that price. About one-quarter of that gross estimate was budget spent on the sporting events and directly related infrastructure.
There are 302 events at the 2012 Olympics versus 272 at the 2010 Commonwealth games.
They're not exactly doing it on the cheap.
As the agreed cost before the bid was finalised, this is really rather close to the $18B figure the cited Parliamentary report comes up with.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics#Financing
> Originally expected to cost £2.3 billion (bn) over three years, in June 2006 the total cost was estimated by the National Audit Office to be £12.4bn over 10 years ... Officials involved in the programme have been quoted in the media estimating the final cost to be as high as £20bn, indicating a cost overrun of 440% to 770%.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health#Costs
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/06/international-olym...
So while it could also be done to impress committee members it's more probable that it's done to not piss off the Mittal's and the Saudi's.
The Games will be sadly for corporates and VIPs. Any non athletes or local Londoners will suffer during this Olympic period. Londoners hope the world will enjoy the games.
As a Londoner, I hope the games suck and they never come back.
On second thoughts, nowadays they would have been no doubt identified through their payment and the lights surreptitiously switched to green anyway.
Whatever happened to the Olympic spirit of fair competition?
No doubt this exploit had convinced the government more than ever about the value of mandatory online identification, mandatory financial transactions monitoring, car registrations tracking on the streets, and control of traffic on the Queen's highways in favour of the VIPs.
For those that haven't been there, it is (or at least was) a dismally grey city with little greenery outside the public parks). I know they've worked to improve this issue, but at the time of the IOC visitations it was quite dreary.