Orgiastic Spending on Technologies of Political Control
September 27th, 2007Via: Reuters:
Americans are facing a brave new world of post-September 11 technology marvels that could soon find their way into billions of dollars of projected homeland security spending.
Gee-whiz know-how — from swarms of tiny airborne sensors to ever-sharper satellite imagery — is being developed by companies chasing potentially lucrative federal, state and local deals to address 21st-century security threats.
Already in use are such things as infrared cameras with built-in brains that capture license plate images and match them in milliseconds to police records of vehicles of interest to the authorities.
Such license plate recognition systems, fixed and mobile, already are stopping criminals in cars in New York City, Washington D.C. and 23 states, according to Mark Windover, president of Remington ELSAG Law Enforcement Systems, which is marketing its product to 250 U.S. police agencies.
“Seventy percent of all criminal activity can be tied to a vehicle,” he said. “Had to get there, had to go home.”
Remington ELSAG says its algorithms — which turn images into data in the blink of an eye — could guard airports, military bases and other federal facilities as well as crack down on the drug trade, robberies and other crime hinging on stolen cars.
In other surveillance developments, the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, is defending a plan to make broader use of eyes in the sky that, until now, have mostly fed military and scientific needs.
“The use of geospatial information from military intelligence satellites may turn out to be a valuable tool in protecting the homeland,” Democrats on the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff this month.
One might wish for a collapse just for the sake of truncating progress on such devices. But I just watched The Killing Fields for the first time last night, and in that case a collapse simply released all the goons in the country who went on a prolonged killing spree. They only stopped when more disciplined goons from Vietnam came over and stomped them into submission. So what do you want, a collapse and goons on a killing spree, or business as usual and cops with nefarious tools against which the comparatively unarmed citizen has no defense? What we need is a way to pit the goons against the cops, and let them rid the world of each other. But good heavens, hasn’t that been the order of the day for a couple of millenia now?