[wakespeak]

Originally Posted by The_Blur

Let's say every car got surveillance. Someone would have to observe all those cars, so a whole lot of people would suddenly have low-paying jobs where all they do is see if someone is speeding or driving against the rules. These people would have the most monotonous, boring jobs out there, and they'd barely be paying their bills. Do you think these guys would produce quality work? Do you think they'd be awesome at stopping people from breaking road rules, or do you think they'd be overwhelmed that almost every driver drives above the speed limit, rolls a stop sign, or fails to use their blinker at least once a day?

On top of that, there's the infrastructure investment that would be necessary. Watching every American drive every day will take more data processing than current wireless networks can handle. Even if we all put our phones down and never used WiFi again, there still isn't enough bandwidth to handle every car during rush hour in every major city, and you can forget about rural areas that have poor data connections.

That leaves us with an almost inevitable scandal. Surveillance supervisors will try to prioritize vehicles that are more likely to break driving rules. It would lead to a scandal where some whistleblower would claim that only people in fast cars or only people under 25 years old would be busted. We, as Americans, would be faced with a decision. Do we accept age discrimination the same way that we do with auto insurance or discrimination based on our freedom to choose a fast car, or do we challenge surveillance of American citizens?

I'll leave that to you.

In summary, if there is nationwide surveillance anytime soon, it'll be mediocre at best and it won't be effective. If it ever happens, though, I still expect Americans not to tolerate it.

Hate to burst your bubble but this can be done now with very little overhead. The scenario where your location, speed, and direction are sent every second is not too much overhead for mobile networks. Each data package is very small. We're talking about perhaps 64 bits (8 bytes) of data + 60 bytes of networking wrappers for a total of 124-ish bytes. Storing the data is not a problem either for the same reasons, though it could be limited to the last hour or 24 hours before rolling it over.