Loss of Privacy

I say nothing.  She looks well attired for her bike ride.  I don’t see anything inappropriate, however, there seems to be a bike war looking in South Williamsburg between bikers, such as this woman, and Hasidic Jews, who live in the area.

Leaders of South Wil liamsburg’s Hasidic community said yesterday that bike lanes that bring scantily clad cyclists – especially sexy women – peddling through their neighborhood are definitely not kosher.

“I have to admit, it’s a major issue, women passing through here in that dress code,” Simon Weisser, a member of Community Board 1 in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, told The Post.

The existing, one-way lanes are popular with North Williamsburg hipsters – many who ride in shorts or skirts.

Hasids are forbidden from looking at members of the opposite sex who aren’t fully dressed, said local activist Isaac Abraham.

The issue of dress – or lack of it – wasn’t brought up at the meeting. Weisser and the other Hasids instead complained publicly about bike lanes allegedly causing parking problems and traffic congestion.

So, they’re either upset or not about the attire that women wear on this bike path.

Abraham later said another major concern is the safety of children, noting that cyclists “aren’t obeying traffic laws. Green lights and red lights are the same.”

Hasids last month complained about a sexy billboard promoting the teen drama “90210″ that could be seen from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and that featured swimwear-clad characters.

A few years back, some residents complained about billboards for “Sex and the City.”

I think a better way of dealing with this issue is to simply look away.  No one is making the billboards or the bike paths specifically to piss off Hasids.  It’d be better to teach their children why they think it’s wrong to look at such things, rather than try to dictate what should happen in a city.  They chose to live in a highly cosmopolitan city.  They should have known what to expect before moving in.

The Hasids have always done what they please in the city, especially obeying or not obeying laws according to their traditions.  They think nothing of driving the wrong way and blocking roads because it suits their purposes.  They do not follow the law 100% and get angry when others interfere with their traditions.  If they can’t respect the laws of the country they live in, how can they justify calling for an end to bike paths when women ride their bikes in perfectly normal clothing go by?

If the Hasids didn’t want the unclean and the gentiles living near them, then they shouldn’t have sold off their property.  The bike path is on public property.  Deal with chicks riding bikes or move someplace more in line with your beliefs, such as Kiryas Joel or Israel.

Private companies in the US are hoping to use red light cameras and speed cameras as the basis for a nationwide surveillance network similar to one that will be active next year in the UK. Redflex and American Traffic Solutions (ATS), the top two photo enforcement providers in the US, are quietly shopping new motorist tracking options to prospective state and local government clients.

The technology would be integrated with the Australian company’s existing red light camera and speed camera systems. It allows officials to keep full video records of passing motorists and their passengers, limited only by available hard drive space and the types of cameras installed. To gain public acceptance, the surveillance program is being initially sold as an aid for police looking to solve Amber Alert cases and locate stolen cars.

Oh here we go again.  We must think of the children.  They are flat out telling you that they are going to lie and say that “initially” it will be used to find little lost children and stolen cars.  The public will eat this up and you will be screwed because, if you say you’re against these sorts of things, then you hate children and you must be some sort of sick pedophile who supports murderers and thieves.

ATS likewise is promoting motorist tracking technologies. In a recent proposal to operate 200 speed cameras for the Arizona state police, the company explained that its ticketing cameras could be integrated into a national vehicle tracking database. This would allow a police officer to simply enter a license plate number into a laptop computer and receive an email as soon as a speed camera anywhere in the state recognized that plate.

What a beautiful device.  Now we can track anyone we want, guilty or not.

Such programs would be fully consistent with existing law on searches and seizures. In the 2003 case Washington v. William Bradley Jackson, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that police could not use a physical GPS tracking device to monitor a suspect’s movements without first obtaining a warrant. No warrant would be needed or restrictions applied to license plate tracking systems which do not require any physical contact. Instead, individual police officers could monitor the movements of suspected criminals or even their wives and neighbors at any time.

There you go.  No Warrant.  Track your spouses.  Hate your neighbor?  Track them too.

Records on all vehicle movements taken from a nationwide network of cameras will be stored for five years in a central government Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) server, allowing police to keep tabs on criminals and political opponents.

This is in the United Kingdom.  Imagine how easy it is to get that politician in your back pocket once you’ve followed him around town for weeks.

Remember, the cameras that were put in place for the Republican convention in NYC in 2004 are still there, with Mayor Bloomberg advocating the use of more cameras.  The cameras from the Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota are, conveniently, still there.  I suspect the ones from the Democratic conventions are still there too.

Please, tell me again why we need at least four CCTV cameras at every intersection?  Is it really to prevent crime?

Unwarranted mass arrests of protesters during this year’s Republican Convention shows just how easy it is to install martial law in America.  The police in the United States appear to have no problems with arresting people for no reason at all.  A press release came with the video  (Download higher res here).

BURIED TAPE REVEALS USE OF FORCE AND AN UNWARRANTED MASS ARREST OF BYSTANDERS DURING THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION

ST. PAUL, Minnesota (September 18, 2008) Video released today shows the indiscriminate arrest of a crowd of two hundred at the waterfront across from a concert on Harriet Island Regional Park during this month’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The video includes multiple angles of the event as well as an interview with the cameraman who buried his footage and was one of almost two hundred people arrested for rioting without probable cause.

More than eight hundred people were arrested in St. Paul during the Republican National Convention. This video shows that at least twenty percent of the eight hundred plus arrested were seized without due cause.

Let me quote another important document that we should all be heeding right about now.

When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

Remember, the US Army wouldn’t even be able to secure and hold the 20 largest cities in the USA.  Currently, 90% of our troops are overseas.  Even if they were fighting here, they would, most likely, be fighting a guerrilla warfare in mostly urban settings.  If 2% of the US population revolted, the US Army would be still outnumbered 12 to 1.  Most deaths would result in civilian deaths, creating millions more angry US citizens who would rise up in revolt.  The US government even admits that, if a civil war were to erupt, only about half of the armed forces would actually kill their fellow Americans.  That number will decrease the longer the fighting continues.  If the US military used artillery and air support, they would have an all-out, open rebellion on their hands.  A rebellion would win.  America is simply too big for the current military to control.

Now that you know you are a slave, act accordingly.

The US Army is developing thought helmets so that military personnel can communicate with each other without speaking.  Eventually, they hope that they will able to control military systems only by thought.

The Army’s initial goal is to capture those brain waves with incredibly sophisticated software that then translates the waves into audible radio messages for other troops in the field. “It’d be radio without a microphone, ” says Dr. Elmar Schmeisser, the Army neuroscientist overseeing the program. “Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.”

The military’s vastly more sophisticated system may be a decade or two away from reality, let alone implementation.

Thank God.  After they implement it for the military, they will move to the civilian sector.  With any luck, I’ll be dead by the time the thought police become a reality.

The five-year contract it awarded last month to a coalition of scientists from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland, seeks to “decode the activity in brain networks” so that a soldier could radio commands to one or many comrades by thinking of the message he wanted to relay and who should get it. Initially, the recipients would most likely hear transmissions rendered by a robotic voice via earphones. But scientists eventually hope to deliver a version in which commands are rendered in the speaker’s voice and indicate the speaker’s distance and direction from the listener.

The problem with this is, how do they overcome the problem that we think a lot of things before making a decision?  How will a fellow soldier be able to decipher the random thoughts in someone’s head and understand which thought is really the command he should be following?  And is it even possible for adults to retrain their brains to think in this way?

Both scientists pre-emptively deny expected charges that they’re literally messing with soldiers’ minds.

Yet.

And don’t overlook potential civilian benefits. “How often have you been annoyed by people screaming into their cell phones?” Schmeisser asks. “What if instead of their Bluetooth earpiece it was a Bluetooth headpiece and their mouth is shut and there’s blessed silence all around you?” Sounds like one of those rare slices of the U.S. military budget even pacifists might support.

There, you see.  They’re already thinking of ways to sell it to the public.  That way, it will seem normal when the police use it against you.

There’s some scary information about US drones that might already have the capabilities to find targets even when they are behind walls.

The drone war over Pakistan is escalating.

Boom. Sept. 4: Seven people killed in a strike on Chaar Kehl, near the Afghan border.

Boom. Sept. 5: Six to 12 more killed in a hit on Al Must.

Boom. Sept. 8: 23 dead and at least 18 wounded in a five-missile barrage on Daande Darpkhel.

Boom. Sept. 12: Twelve more dead in an attack on Tole Khel.

That’s about 50 fatalities in four strikes in a single week, all at the hands of unmanned vehicles.

Several Slate users have been digging into the research.  The important thing to remember is that, once this technology is perfected in the field, the military will bring it home and use it here.