Loss of Privacy

Several states across the nation have enacted laws against talking on a cell phone while driving, but New Jersey has done a step further and finally gotten the law right. New Jersey has added a ban on text messaging as well. Now, both offenses are primary offenses, meaning you can be pulled over for each offense.

New Jersey joins four other states, including neighboring New York, where talking on a hand-held cell phone is reason enough to get pulled over. The Garden State is the first where text-messaging on the road is a primary offense, meaning police need no other reason to pull a driver over, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

While I usually side with the “let them do what they want” crowd, this is a matter of safety. We have seen far too many people that are distracted just talking on a phone. If you attempt to drive while text messaging, it is impossible to be paying attention to the road. That makes you an unsafe driver and a danger to other people on the road.

Drivers can still use their cell phones to contact police or emergency services, and can talk at any time with a hands-free device. But crash statistics suggest that those headsets and earpieces may not make conversations in the car any safer.

In 2006, nearly half of the 3,580 phone-related crashes in New Jersey involved a hands-free device, according to transportation officials. Five of 11 fatal accidents involving a cell phone that year also involved a hands-free device.

While using hands free devices may appear safer, they are still a distraction. It is also not that difficult to pull over to the side of the road to answer a call.

But Cataldo questioned how police would spot drivers typing out a message.

“If you’re doing 75 miles per hour,” he said, “the cop has to be right alongside to see you.”

Uh, no. Anyone who has been in a car has seen people texting by their erratic behavior. Rare is the person that can text on one hand, drive with the other, while not look at the keypad.

Twenty-One other state legislatures are also considering a ban on driving and texting. Hopefully, they will pass similar laws and help make the nation’s roads a little bit safer.

A new bill proposed at the legislature would allow for police to withhold misconduct reports from the public. Supporters of the bill believe that police misconduct should be kept secret from the public so to not discredit police testimony. Others say that a forthright police unit is essential to the community.

What? You want to sweep incidents of police misconduct under the carpet and still expect people to believe that you did no wrong? Most people already think the police lie all the time. This is only going to exacerbate the problem.

Every single thing any public official does should be and needs to be open to the public. No sealed records. No special privileges exempting you from the law. No secret hearings. I don’t care what these officials do in their private lives, but what they do on the job, when I’m the taxpayer paying them, needs to be open and accountable.

I am not advocating discrediting the police, rather, keeping bad cops accountable for their actions. Hiding their actions from the public only enables them to continue with their bad behavior without accountability.

Motorists will be targeted by a new generation of road cameras which work out how many people are in a car by measuring the amount of bodily fluid it contains.

Uh, ok.

The cameras work by sending an infrared beam through the windscreen of vehicles which detects the unique make-up of blood and water content in human skin.

Uh, yeah, ok. What if you’re covered up with long sleeves or a jacket? Will turning the heat or the A/C on affect the results? Can it detect a small child as a person? Will fat people be counted as two or three people? How exactly does this system work?

Add this new camera to the ever growing Orwellian society that Great Britain is turning in to. I seriously don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this stuff anymore.

The Raw Story is reporting a story from The Progressive that the FBI has allegedly briefed their business partners of the possibility of martial law.

“One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation—and what their role might be,” writes Matthew Rothschild in the Feb. 7 report, quoting an anonymous whistleblower on the program. “‘Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,’ he says.”

Rothschild’s report details InfraGard, a program set up between the FBI and a number of businesses engaged in maintaining elements of “critical national infrastructure,” such as agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation. The program’s 23,000-plus members provide information to the FBI and in turn receive privileged information from the FBI on threats to infrastructure.

On the one hand, such preparedness has been around for many years, however, the fact that it is now being “leaked” leads one to believe that the government is trying to placate the people by allowing them to get used to the idea of martial law because there are terrorists everywhere.  On the other hand, there are enough people in the USA with guns and other homemade weapons that full martial law across the entire country is going to be very, very difficult to achieve.

The latest innovation from Ford is the addition of RFID in their trucks so that you can keep track of your tools.  Tool Link is a system of wireless RFID tags you can attach to your tools.  A display on the dashboard lists your tools, allowing you to know immediately if your tools have been stolen.

On the outset, this appears to be a great use of RFID, however, upon further contemplation, it only makes it easier for a thief to steal your valuable tools.  A cheap RFID could detect exactly what is inside the tool box, removing the need to break into every tool box to find the good stuff.  Users can tag the items themselves, with numbers, but how many people will just tag it as hammer, drill, etc.?  You can’t underestimate the stupidity of people on this matter.  A thief could also assume, the more RFID tags, the more tools, the more money they can make from the theft.

I want to say this is a very cool thing, but I still remain a bit skeptical.