senorgrand wrote:Public shaming is a punishment.
But in this case, the shaming consists entirely of information that is already in the public domain. The fact that "John" Doe was seen at 9:45 pm at the corner of Main and River streets is already publicly known. Anyone who stands at that corner with a clipboard and a watch could have determined that, and that anybody could have published this information too. The important lesson which you are ignoring here is: there is no privacy protection of one's whereabouts while one is about "in public".
There are many other bits of information that are public, and it is good thing. I can go to my county planning department, and determine that my neighbor Adam has filed a building permit application. This is important, because I can use that to figure out that Adam's house will block the view of the river from my front porch; while I perhaps can't do anything about that (if Adam's building permit application is within the law), I can arrange my life accordingly. I can also go to the county courthouse and determine that Bob has sued Charlie in civil court. Again, this is important because we all know that the legal system works better when there are many eyes on it (the sunshine principle). Even worse, I can go do to the county courthouse, and ask about my enemy David, whether he has had any criminal cases. The clerk will tell me the case numbers, and then give me the paper documents from those cases, and I can see that David was accused of rape of his girlfriend Eve, plead down to sexual assault and was convicted to 45 days in jail, and was charged with murder of my cousin Fred, but was acquitted. Note that in this case, I can use this information to shame David because it is plausible that he raped Eve and killed Fred, even though he was not convicted of either. In many areas, such court records are now searchable online, so I don't even have to get out of my chair to get the dirt on Adam, Bob, Charlie and David.
More concrete example: I want to get a phone call or post card from the county tax collector when my neighbor Zachary's property is going up for auction because he hasn't paid his property taxes in 5 years. That's because I definitely want to know who is going to be buying it, and I might even want to bid on it myself. Is it shaming when the county tells me that Zach's property is up for auction? No, it is vitally necessary that auctions are widely advertised, in particular to those who are likely to participate. Is it shaming that a person with half a brain cell can figure out that Zach is delinquent on his taxes, when they see that his property is being sold at a tax auction? No, it can not be.
The important lesson is this: Government needs to be transparent. And in this day and age of information availability, government records will become more and more available. This is a good thing. But it means that the whole concept of "shaming" becomes meaningless. Publicly available information can not be shaming.
dougb wrote:Experience with the drivers license data base has shown that govt employees can not be trusted with data. They either lose it, get it wrong, or actively misuse it-even when facing fines and legal action.
So what do you propose? That the government stop collecting all data? No, because that will make the government dysfunctional (see examples above of why it is useful that I can learn about Adam, Bob, Charlie, David, and Zach). That the government hold most records private? No, that would only cause the very real abuse you point out to happen in secret.
The correct fix is twofold. One is to slowly teach overnment that data that has been collected needs to be discarded. For example, license plate readers on all police cars may be very sensible (for example to write tickets to people with expired tags, or locate cars that are reported as stolen, or apprehend people who are wanted for all manners of crimes by identifying their cars). This kind of data is necessary for good government, and good government is useful. You might disagree if you are generally anti-government, which is a valid viewpoint, just one I don't agree with. But what the government has to understand that the location of a license plates read from a cruiser becomes irrelevant after 5 minutes, and that storing them for long periods has little value and much potential for abuse, therefore those records need to be purged or safeguarded (for example anonymized). The second fix is to make government even more transparent, to enable better checks on it.
Let me construct one example: Imagine that Zach comes by, complaining that his house is going to auction even though he paid all his taxes, but that the morons at the county keep misplacing his payments. And then I were to find out that Zach's house was already auctioned a week ago, and that the postcard reached me too late because it was mailed late, and that the person who bought it happens to be the husband of the elected county tax collector, and that the husband is a contractor who runs a thriving business of buying old houses very cheaply at auction. Wouldn't I get suspicious? And then I would chat with my drinking buddy, who is the editor of the local paper, and he starts checking into the open government records, and finds that this happens all the time, the scandal hits the front page, and shortly thereafter Mrs. Tax Collector and Mr. Flipping Contractor take a long vacation behind bars. That would be good. Even if you believe that government can be good (I believe that), you still need to keep checking on it, the more the better.
Tracking car movements sounds innocuous until you realize that when your house is empty is now a public record.
What is true: The fact that John Doe was seen at the corner of Main and River a minute ago clearly implies that he is not at home. That has always been true. It is just easier today to find that out. For example, I could ring my friend who is standing at that corner with a clipboard and a watch, and he'd tell me that John Doe just drove by in his Corvette Convertible, without his wife Jane, but with a young platinum blonde woman on the passenger seat.
But this has always been true. The fact that someone is moving about in public is part of the public record (duh). It is just easier to figure out now. Technologies such as cell phones, clip boards, watches, and big data make access easier. Do you want to stop those technologies? Consider this: These technologies actually democratize access to information. Used to be to figure out whether David is a rapist and murderer, I had to hire a lawyer to review the records at the court, and to figure out whether John Doe is picking up prostitutes, I had to hire 10 people with clipboards and watches to stand in all the right spots. Today even me, a poor person who only has a few hours in the evening to browse the web, can find these things out, for free. This is goodness.
By the way, your statement is actually false: All we know is that John Doe is not at home. We don't know whether his wife or his adult son are at home. To know whether the house is empty you'd also have to know whoever else lives in the house, or has recently been in it, and their whereabouts. This is a much harder problem than knowing where John Doe is.
The govt does not need this data to govern.
It needs quite a bit of it. I already gave examples of why reading license plates can be good. The government needs to know how many people park and drive, and where and when. To do good traffic planning, it needs to correlate that: It needs to know that the car that came from the village of WoodForest 15 minutes ago then drove down the whole length of Main Street, parked for 5 minutes at the drug store, then circled the park at the corner with River Street for 15 minutes, presumably looking for a parking spot and not finding any (because there is a jazz concert going on in the park). It also needs to know that most of cars that are registered in MountainVillage went directly from home to the park, and uselessly had to squeeze down Main street with all the shoppers. This would allow the city government to enlarge the parking lot to better serve events such as the jazz concert, and to build a bypass road that gets people from MountainVillage directly to River Street without clogging Main Street first. All this is very useful. It requires license plates scanners. But it doesn't require the full information from the plate, only a general sense of "which car registered where seen at what time", and "the same unspecified car that was at Main was later at River", not "the red Corvette owned by John Doe".
If you want to keep government dumb and uninformed, you will get bad government. Welcome to the Tea Party.
The computer organizes it and makes it dangerous.
Do you want to make computers illegal? Like machine guns?
Better idea: Recognize that information is out there, and use it.
The 1% is our aristocracy. Some by personal work, more by inheritance and paying politicians to cut taxes for the rich, making money free speech, and granting citizenship to corporations.
Are you trying to tell me that the average clerk in the tax collectors office, or the average cop on the beat (the people most likely to abuse government data) are part of the 1% or of the aristocracy?
The net effect is the 1% become richer, taking an ever larger share of the wealth of the planet. We used to tax some of the excess wealth back into the world. But somebody decided that you generate more wealth by cutting taxes for the wealthy. You generate more taxes for the treasury by cutting taxes on the wealthy. Said it with a straight face often enough for many to believe it.
And yes. I would like to be an aristocrat . A distant ancestor appears to be a Marshal of the Army in France, so I am either a hereditary aristocrat , or descend from serfs who left France when the Huguenots ran for the border. I could adapt to a life of ease, debauchery, and licentious living quite easily.
No, you don't elect the politician you desire. Money decides who can run, money decides who can win. And the person you vote for is frequently not the person who shows up to "serve". We elect representatives, but wind up with leaders.
General whining about the sad state of the body politic may be correct, but is not relevant to the question at hand, which is using license plate scanners for public shaming of Johns. Which I maintain is legal, but wasteful (I bet it does little good, and it isn't cheap). Whether it is ethical or not is an interesting question, but since there can be many opinions on that, discussion of that won't settle the question.
