Daily Archives: Mon, 5 May, 2008

Traffic safety or surveillance?

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Any road user in the UK will know about the hordes of traffic cameras all over the country. These wonderful things are supposed to be there to prevent people from speeding – basically they are set up to trigger if you go past at a speed that is above the limit for that stretch of road. If you speed past one, it takes your photo and you get fine & penalty points through the post.

I am not going to use this post to complain about how they don’t actually prevent speeding and are little more than income generation for the local council. That is a rant for another day.

This rant is about the nature of the cameras themselves.

The idea as sold to the population is that this is not “surveillance” of the public (Thor knows we have enough CCTV for that) and photographs of vehicles would only be taken if they exceeded a certain speed (generally the speed limit +10%). However, a comical item on the BBC seems to show a difference.

Leaving aside the whining, simpsonesque “wont anybody think of the children” rant, the concern I have is why on Earth did this camera take a picture of a vehicle that wasn’t speeding? Why was a speed camera recording images of a non-speeding vehicle so the police could dream up other charges?

Welcome to 1984… (again)

Hitler was no Atheist

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(Hat tip Pharyngula)

For all those sensible people infuriated by the claims that Hitler was an atheist…

Hitler Loves Christians

The text reads:

“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life” (‘My New Order‘, Adolf Hitler, Proclamation of the German Nation at Berlin, February 1, 1933)

The Nazis burned books trying to teach evolution.

Does all this sound familiar?

Forging the past

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Martin Allen, a “historian”, is found to have based the claims in his three books on 29 amateurishly forged documents planted in the National Archives.

I googled for the author and found a blameless historian from the Fitzwilliam Museum and a lot of football managers but no mention of him in the first 5 pages of results.

The investigation found an almost amateurish level of forgery: telegrams and memos contained factual inaccuracies; letterheads had been added using a laser printer; forged signatures were pencilled beneath the ink; and the text of the 29 documents – occasionally in conspicuously modern language – was typed on just four typewriters. (From the Guardian report)

A laser printer? 🙂

This cautionary tale against taking historical “evidence” on faith led me to the other Guardian pieces on the National Archives. This little gem from the 1970s does have the ring of truth:

The US politician who was America’s youngest ever secretary of defence – Donald Rumsfeld – attempted to influence British military policy in the mid-1970s, newly released government archives showed today.
Nearly 30 years before the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld wrote to his UK counterpart, Roy Mason, and the prime minister, James Callaghan, opposing plans for large-scale defence cuts.
The message, marked “Secret” and dated July 19 1976, is a mixture of anxiety and flattery – mingled with the hint of a threat. (From the Guardian, 28 December 2007)

I don’t know how successful he was then – when UK Labour governments were a little more resistant to US pressure – but can we see a career theme developing?