An Arizona man attacks a freeway speed camera with a pick ax.

He was fined $3,500.

Speed-cams and red-light cams are used to meet budget shortfalls; not safety. They take a picture as you drive by and the next thing you know you have a ticket in the mail. It’s amazing to see all the ways we will be tracked and taxed in our cars.

Big Brother is Worse than Dad.

The government has the the ability to track everything you do, everywhere you go. All in the name of safety. And you pay if you do not conform. In his article, The War on Short Yellows, Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal opines on the abuse of traffic cameras and other technologies by governments, all in the name of safety. Local and state governments set traffic timers to increase the number of tickets. You ain’t seen nothing yet. Read on…

Britain has gone furthest in using cameras for comprehensive auto surveillance, and now says it’s capable of monitoring every car trip in the U.K. and keeping a record for five years. Most traffic cameras are “on” all the time, and capable of being networked with plate- and even face-recognition software.

Never in America, you say? Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is moving ahead with a plan for mandatory GPS devices in cars that would be read at gas pumps and automatically charge drivers for miles driven… the quality of your emissions, etc. In Britain, the data yielded will be incorporated in a database of all kinds of personal information and camera observations to enable “data mining” to let the government know who’s doing what, when and where.

Your car already contains electronics that could report on, say, the quality of your emissions. How long before government knows not just where you went, but how fast and how much CO2 you vented in the process, and thanks to your email and phone records, whether you were visiting somebody or doing something that might warrant a further look?

In the former Soviet Union, if you were suspected of being a poor citizen, your home was bugged with listening devices, monitored by the KGB. Of course, the state also defines what a good citizen and who is one. With cameras everywhere, and tracking through GPS, when can be monitored very precisely. Not for imprisonment, but to be charged for behaviors. Officials who now call paying taxes, our patriotic duty, will want you to see all this monitoring and taxation the same way.

Smile, you’re a patriot!

Read the article in the Wall Street Journal here…

Will robots be chasing us one day?

Yes, soon. Very soon.

The most recent movie that advanced this topic was iRobot starring Will Smith. The robots had brains and killing power. Then they got emotion and went out of control. See the trailer here.

Reported in AlertNet, Killer robots and a revolution in warfare, a whole host of machines have been used with great effect in IRAQ, primarily helping our soldiers as pack mules, doing recon and bomb diffusion. The are now being developed to kill.

Ground-based robots in Iraq have saved hundreds of lives in Iraq, defusing improvised explosive devices… The first armed robot was deployed in Iraq in 2007… . Its mounted M249 machine gun can hit a target more than 3,000 feet away with pin-point precision.

And, it won’t take long before they make their way into law enforcement here in the USA.

Robots will not have emotion any time soon, but the people who operate them do.

It’s sooner than you think.

Watch this video of BigDog and imagine being stalked through the woods. Creepy, especially when you consider where the technology will evolve to over the next 5 to 10 years…