Rep. Bob Etheridge, a Democrat from North Carolina ought to be ashamed of himself. Listen closely to him talking, he sounds as if he's had a few drinks. Is this what we have elected in this country? Here's another one who needs to be canned.!!
June 1st, 2010: Yasmine Aida Villasana arrested for DWI driving while intoxicated speeding towards toll booth and then crashing into barricade. The car flew through the air, over another car (but still underneath the roof of the toll) to the other side, and burst into flames. Villasana reportedly kept trying to get back into her car while it was on fire!!!
He may be a low-level criminal with a taste for high end cars, but Winter Park police are trying to find the suspect caught on three digital surveillance cameras at a local car dealership. Rolling up in a luxury car, people at the Auto Sport Collection dealership in Winter Park might've thought the man on his cell phone could be a customer. But the dealership was closed and the surveillance video More.. revealed the man wandering from car to car, eventually getting into one, and then making off with free loot that he threw in his trunk. Managers said a $1,200 TV monitor was missing from a customized Nissan 240SX. Managers said a new $10,000 system of five digital cameras helped them get a good view of the suspect and his unusually nice getaway car. Winter Park police were examining the video to try to identify the suspect.
Digital Photocopiers Loaded With Secrets
Your Office Copy Machine Might Digitally Store Thousands of Documents That Get Passed on at Resale
Watching this video compilation showing the results of people running "red" lights it may get you to think twice as you approach any intersection. Just because the light is "green" in your direction doesn't mean it's totally safe to go through the intersection expecting all traffic is stopped at the red light. Some of these show that people are totally asleep at the wheel. Probably texting.
Video surveillance would not have stopped the Times Square attack. Does this mean that it would be useless? Not necessarily.
The challenge: exploiting this visual information while protecting the privacy of citizens.
It can also be used to track the progress of the bomb-laden vehicle from the its point of origin, or the point at which the truck was weaponized, to the place the terrorists have targeted. In combination with physical evidence acquired from the vehicle — fingerprints, hair, cloth fibers, soil, trash, forgotten personal items or a host of other bits of evidence — video surveillance can lead to the arrest of the bombers and to the unraveling of cells or networks and, if the attackers are foreign, the ratlines they exploited to enter the country.
The U.S., as anyone who follows the debate over privacy loss in this country knows, is studded with cameras, but most of these are in stores to track consumption habits to facilitate marketing or deter shoplifters. They’re not where they’re needed, which is on the street. The two smallest jurisdictions in the U.K., very rural areas indeed, together deploy more surveillance cameras than the San Francisco police department.
The U.S., of course, does not have to match Britain camera for camera. Surveillance can be enhanced in areas that are assessed to be likely targets, a category that can be inferred, at least in a general sense, from targeting patterns and what the terrorists actually have said about the desirability of attacking this or that; and they do discuss this in their literature and on their Web sites.
More problematic, is the need to organize our law enforcement capabilities in ways that enable this visual information to be exploited effectively, while protecting the rapidly fading privacy available to ordinary citizens. Therein lies the real challenge.
Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of the New Republic, is the author of “The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age.”
After every thwarted terrorist attack, there are predictable calls for more surveillance cameras. Before the failed Times Square bombing attempt, the N.Y.P.D. got a $24 million Homeland Security grant to install a security network in Midtown with surveillance cameras, chemical sensors, and license plate readers. Despite evidence that such a system wouldn’t have prevented last Saturday’s attack, many will demand an even more elaborate surveillance network as a result. But all the best empirical research suggests that it will be a waste of money.
Consider how Google, Facebook and other Web services could be harnessed to surveillance cameras to monitor everyone’s movements.
Cameras sometimes play a supporting role in identifying the perpetrators after an attack has occurred. But in all the major terrorist attacks since 9/11, including the London bombings, the perpetrators would have been identified without the cameras. In the Times Square case, there was so much forensic evidence at the crime scene that the police were able to identify the former owner of the Pathfinder through the vehicle identification number, leading to the arrest of the suspect on Monday night without necessarily relying on
the footage from more than 80 surveillance cameras.
Although the harms were largely hypothetical when I began writing about surveillance cameras in the Britain and the U.S. right after 9/11 they are about to become much more tangible.
Google, Facebook and other Internet services could be asked to carry out Web-based facial recognition technologies that will make it possible for anyone to snap a cellphone picture of a stranger on the street, plug the picture into Google, and produce tagged and untagged pictures of the person across the Web, challenging our expectations of anonymity in public as camera footage proliferates.
That challenge will become even more acute over the next decades, as Google and Facebook confront pressure to post live feeds from all public and private surveillance cameras online. As the surveillance network in world capitals becomes ubiquitous, it will be possible to click on a picture of me in Midtown, back click on me to see where I came from, forward click to see where I’m going, making possible 24/7 surveillance of everyone in the system. When confronted with this not-so-hypothetical scenario, most people balk. And to accept 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance in exchange for virtually non-existent security benefits seems like a bad bargain, by any sane cost-benefit analysis.
So what’s the solution? More cops are always useful. Human intelligence is invaluable, and it’s important to keep citizens on the side of the police so they’re willing, like the Times square street vendors, both disabled Vietnam vets, to go out of their way to help. The arrest of the owner of the explosive-packed S.U.V. shortly before midnight on Monday demonstrated again that security depends on investigative work, which is not about installing more cameras.
(KMOV) --St. Louis Police are searching for two suspects accused of robbing a Collinsville hotel Saturday.
Authorities said two male suspects entered the Comfort Inn at 8 Commerce Drive armed with handguns and wearing ski masks. They bound the clerk's hands and feet and fled the scene with an undetermined amount of cash and checks. The clerk was not physically injured during the robbery and no shots were fired.
One suspect was wearing jeans with a distinct thread design on the back pockets. Police released the surveillance video Thursday.
The investigation is ongoing.