According to this interesting article in the Observer today, thousands of motorists are cheating the plethora of speed cameras that, ostensibly in the name of road safety, plague our highways and byways.
The scam involves offenders registering their cars at one of a network of ‘mass-mailing’ addresses used legitimately by businesses instead of at their own homes. When the driver triggers a camera, the penalty notice is sent to the mass-mailing address. Police seeking the motorist find only a shopfront where nobody lives.
Ah! I would have thought, though, that tracing the owners of the mail boxes was possible for the police, no? Maybe a job for the new model police force, then?
Anyway, that aside, the increase in scams such as this (cloning is another) are directly proportional to the attempts by the state to impose itself on our daily lives. It is, after all, human nature. And this is at least recognised in the article:
Edmund King of the RAC Foundation said the incentives to cheat could have increased because more offences were now enforced by camera: ‘It’s not just speed cameras people are trying to avoid: in London it’s things like the congestion charge, bus lane enforcement with bus cameras, and yellow box junction enforcement.’
Yes, quite. While enforcing rules is necessary – after all, if you aren’t going to enforce, then there’s no point in the rule – the reliance on technology simply means that people will take the time and effort to find workarounds. Some will themselves involve technological solutions. Others, such as this one will be devastatingly simple and difficult to resolve. And, the greater the efforts to enforce, the more valuable the workarounds become.
The home office, however, has the answer:
A Home Office spokesman said the national identity register being introduced to back up planned ID cards would help,
Now, why did I know they were going to say that? If there were doubts about function creep with the NIR, they are now dispelled. It will be the panacea for the crime du jour. Whenever there is a “problem” the home office will flash its ID card and Stasi database as the “solution”.
The last word goes the the disreputable DVLA – yes, the folk that lose your driver categories and then deny that it was their lousy database that was responsible, you know, the people with a database with around 40% accuracy.
A Department for Transport spokes-man said the DVLA database was ‘97.5 per cent accurate’.
Yes. And the Iraqi army really did beat back the Infidel Americans at the gates of Baghdad.
[Edit] I see Tim has picked up on this, too.