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Comment by lr | Hacker News Reader

My response to the "I have nothing to hide," or "Don't break the law, and you have nothing to worry about," crowds is the following: If you have nothing to hide, then you should not be opposed to having a "black box" installed in your car. This way, the next time you are pulled over for any reason, the police/highway patrol can just plug into your black box, and if you have exceeded the state speed limit at any point (since it was last read), they can just give you a ticket on the spot.

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I think this is a bad example. The problem you get with this is the problem of transition.

At the moment, enforcement of speeding works a certain way and the whole culture of enforcement, punishment and compliance has grown around it. Changing one part breaks it, but given enough time under the black box regime, we'll develop new culture and it will all be ok again. Maybe you get a warning buzz when you start to speed, a $1 fine after 3 seconds and a $10 fine after 10.

Some better questions are 'what is your salary?' 'what kind of porn do you watch?'

Why wait to get pulled over? They could mail the fine the moment the infraction occurs. Actually, now that I think of it why mail it? Could just debit your bank account directly and save everyone a lot of time.

I remember watching an episode of the defunct show Seaquest DSV as a kid, and this was partially there. It was an automated checkpoint that recorded the 'speeding,' but the ticket/payment/etc all happened automatically with a notification to the user.

It's more or less like that in France. Automatic speed checks leading to mail in your box with the fine to pay.

Likewise in the UK. 95%+ of speed checks are automated cameras with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anpr

"Bzzt! You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute."

You don't even really need a black box, just a traffic camera that can read your license plate, like a red light camera, maybe combined with a radar gun. Just a camera and some basic physics could probably do it (distance / time = velocity). Once the municipalities start hurting for money even more I bet we'll see this, along with automatic parking citations using cameras.

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