Precedent always becomes practice.
Having established as legitimate the use of cameras to robotically ticket people for speeding and running red lights timed to go red quickly, so as to ensnare as many drivers as possible it was only a matter of time before the principle was extrapolated now to include automatically ticketing people for using their cell phones while driving.
But its more than just cameras now and it will be more than just cell phone use thats targeted for confiscation (of your money, that is).
If it is okay to steal peoples money (which is what were talking about here, shorn of the euphemistic language about fines) for those things, why not this thing?
Why not anything the government and its corporate partners who profit from it decide is ungood?
Buckle-up laws, for instance? How about breaking traction?
In Australia the same place that is the first place to use the AI cameras to catch cell phone violators who will be mulcted to the tune of $344-$457 for not harming anyone performing a burnout is already a major bust that can result in confiscation (and forfeiture) of the offenders vehicle.
But an armed government worker had to witness the burnout.
The cameras witness everything everywhere.
All the time.
A network is being erected that will make it impossible to get away with ignoring any edict issued by the control freaks and busybodies who lord it over us. Pre-Panopticon, the myriad tyrannical laws on the books had the upside of being to a great extent ignorable.
Armed government workers cant be everywhere.
Cameras can. They already are.
Have a look around and up the next time youre out driving around. In most parts of the country these Creepy Cams are perched on top of every traffic signal arm, or curbside.
Armed government workers vehicles are being equipped with mobile cameras, also tied into the panopticon. There is talk and more than just talk of replacing parking meters in cities with smart meters with cameras in them also tied into the same panopticon.
Soon, wherever you drive and park you will be seen. Anything everything that is not in ordnung will be noticed. Not by a human. But by an artificial intelligence overlord that to quote an eerily predictive line from the original Terminator movie, way back in 1984 cannot be reasoned with or bargained with . . .
Literally.
Another precedent that was allowed to pass into practice with the adoption of camera enforcement was the vitiation of the governments obligation to establish guilt before fleecing. This was accomplished by shifting traffic offenses from court-adjudicated to civil administrative actions, where it became (and remains) the obligation of the presumed guilty to somehow reverse the cameras verdict.
The rules of court procedure of due process do not apply. The presumed guilty verdict is subject to reversal not by evidence or its lack but rather according to the whim of whomever or whatever the government-corporate nexus gives . . . administrative power to.
You can sometimes send in an explanation and whatever else you like but its perfunctory, like the practice in Elizabethan times of permitting the condemned to say a few words before the executioner lopped off his head. The head-lopping was never in doubt.
Today, if the government wants your money, theyll take your money (to borrow a turn of phrase from another eerily prescient movie).
There is one upside to all of this, though.
When it becomes impossible to leave your driveway (and maybe not even that) without being observed and mulcted people might begin to object. Try to imagine what it would be like if you had to obey every speed limit to the letter else payin paper. Full stop and wait a three second count at every stop sign. Never dare a right-on-red, an HOV violation or an unbuckled ride.
No aggressive acceleration, either.
Your papers all of them always in ordnung.
Thats whats coming. Unless we decide to reject the principle and establish a new precedent. Theres still time.
The clock, however, is ticking and midnight approaches.
. . .
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