Traffic Cameras: Slippery Slope towards a Society of Control and Surveillance

Car ceasing to be private sphere: traffic-monitoring AI can also analyse what happens inside the vehicle.

The Report of the UK Road Safety Commission 1947 states that effective policing can only be achieved in an atmosphere of mutual understanding, and not through intimidation. “The more it is realised that the policeman is the friend of the motorist and cyclist who wishes to be a thoroughly safe driver or rider, though the deadly enemy of the deliberate offender, the greater will be the co-operation between the police and road users and the sooner will the standard of road behaviour be improved,” says the report.

Former police inspector Adrian Ward opines that today’s policing concepts, which demand a more mechanistic kind of approach, are only widening the divide between law-abiding citizens and the police. This is particularly the case, he finds, with the ‘Speed Kills’ policy, which lays sole focus on the speed limit and responds strongly to even the most marginal and infrequent speeding offences, while disregarding other factors like specific traffic situations or road conditions. Yet a discerning policeman, following common sense, would understand that a five-mile speeding violation on an empty road at night is comparable to the same by the side of a school in the morning when pavements are bustling with children.

Common sense would say: that a minor speeding offence on an empty motorway at night is an entirely different matter than reckless speeding in a town while children are going to school in the morning.

The massive use of cameras, especially where they replace police brigades on patrol, creates a situation where a family man exceeding the speed limit by a few miles on a good stretch of a road is considered more dangerous than, say, a maniacal and selfish meddler, a traffic hooligan negligent of others, whose better reaction capabilities allow him to just push on the brakes where needed, giving the automated system a misguided impression of a well-behaved driver.

Another counterproductive feature of the new system that considers nothing but the speed number on the dashboard is that people no longer concentrate on observing the traffic and reacting to the situation, but instead keep their gaze and a high percentage of their attention on a singular thing – the speedometer – so that, for God’s sake, they wouldn’t exceed the allowed limit by a notch, no matter what is happening around them. However, a skilled and good driver should constantly monitor the road and observe external factors, and analyse the surrounding traffic as a basis for his or her decisions on the maneuvers and speed. These decisions cannot be made out of fear of a single measure – the speed, says Ward.

The massive use of cameras, especially where they replace police brigades on patrol, creates a situation where a family man exceeding the speed limit by a few miles on a good stretch of a road is considered more dangerous than, say, a maniacal and selfish meddler, a traffic hooligan negligent of others, whose better reaction capabilities allow him to just push on the brakes where needed. Photo: Yeka.UK/Unsplash.

So it is hard to think how the automated use of speed cameras could actually improve the traffic culture, least of all significantly improve it. But let us now consider the possibility that the aforementioned atmosphere of fear (of speeding) in the traffic has been purposely designed to make society accept the speed-monitoring cameras, in combatting this fear. Once it is accepted that cameras are there at every step, at every mile of our everyday life, the scope of their use can gradually begin to be extended.

Ease of extending the use of installed cameras

Today, British roads are full of cameras. There are speed cameras, and cameras at intersections, to catch someone passing on the red light. Expressways are virtually covered by ‘ordinary’ police cameras, supposedly installed only to analyse traffic accidents. On top of that, there are weather monitoring cameras. Nearly at every mile, there is a chance of being followed.

A story, this time from Norway, serves as a fine illustration here. I used to be a driver of a construction van in Norway and would often pass through the Tromsø undersea tunnel in the north of the country, driving from one end of the city to the other. There were no speed cameras in the tunnel, but there were monitoring cameras, designed to detect in real time any incidents that might occur there, so as to be able to close the tunnel quickly, if necessary in case of an accident. The tunnel had, separately, two lanes in each direction. As a rule, traffic was very sparse in this spacious tunnel, and this tempted the younger drivers to somewhat exceed the speed limit when driving through.

But one day the construction company that owned the van received a letter, asking them to identify the faces of people in the photographs. It turned out that the monitoring cameras were still picking up repeated speeding and it was decided this should be reacted upon. The company was explained that this was not a rule of procedure, but that in this case the breach would be pursued (it wasn’t specified how unusual such an exception was) and the driver caught speeding the most and with the greatest frequency was fined and temporarily banned from being able to drive in the Kingdom of Norway. And this was how it came to be – the driver at the company who was found pressing on the speed pedal the most, received sanctions.

I think the story shows clearly that once the cameras are there, they will be put to use. Or at least there will be a strong and unyielding temptation to do so.

“Today, British roads are full of cameras.” Photo: David Dixon/Wikimedia Commons.

All the cameras that today function as ‘passive police cameras’ on the UK roads can probably be put into different monitoring use with relative ease, or be added to the speed camera network. It would require a small change in the law that would stop requiring the speed cameras to be clearly identifiable, i.e. currently be prominently yellow and have a large noticeable box around them.

Modern speed cameras invade privacy

In fact, this legal requirement has already been let slip in the UK through the introduction of new types of speed cameras. Measuring speed from a mile away raises serious questions about the de facto compliance with the requirement of a clearly visible officer and operation, even if the patrol is formally wearing a uniform and the patrol care and equipment have an identifiable look. From such a distance, it is usually impossible to understand what is going on or whether the persons performing the operation are policemen or not.

In addition to the above, the UK traffic police have found another new panacea against ‘lethal speeding’ which are the unmarked patrol cars that can record all the road users within a mile radius and can analyse any breach of law with the help of artificial intelligence – and not just a breach of the speed limit, but also, for example, the direction of the driver’s gaze. This means the motorist is put in an awkward position in two respects at once – first of all, the surveillance is undetectable to the one being monitored and secondly, these cameras can detect the private space of the car in the greatest detail, essentially erasing the concept of a private vehicle as an extension of one’s private space.

Cameras that can record each detail of what’s happening inside your private vehicle are now the new trend that is here to stay. The new cameras no longer simply record the speed of the vehicle but monitor your seat belt use or mobile phone tapping habits. All of this, however, will be monitored and analysed on a daily basis, allegedly by artificial intelligence, which in theory would alleviate some of the concerns about privacy and legitimate requests for anonymity.

But the question remains: if boundaries of privacy have continuously been reduced on British roads over the past years, who is to say that we have not reached the summit and the only extension of intrusion that the AI will be trusted with are the matters of seat belt and the usage of a mobile phone? Guarantees that this is so are becoming ever more unclear. Technically, in the very near future, cameras with detailed resolution could well be used to identify, for example, unauthorised insignia, forbidden literature, or even the podcast one is listening to while driving. Following the current stealthy trend towards a totalitarian surveillance society, it might not be unreasonable to expect that some of the next steps could involve the detection of politically and ‘socially’ unacceptable behaviour – seeing the police interpreting some casual situations already as offensive (see here and here) it could be thought we’re already halfway there.

In the second half of last year, there was a strong rumour in the UK that the government was planning to introduce a pay-per-mile system on the roads (‘mileage-based tolls’, i.e. a system where tolls are paid for every mile driven). Mass deployment of ANPR (number plate recognition) cameras for such purpose is not only an extravagant project, but would, of course, reduce motorists’ privacy to zero and threatens to turn the UK into a ‘Big Brother welfare state’, argues Howard Cox, founder of FairFuelUK.

For it to be fully operational, the project would require a massive installation of ANPR cameras on virtually every roadside. In the meantime, according to British Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the existing cameras could also be made to collect tax data, thus extending their current conditions of use. This is the same slippery slope of extending the use of roadside cameras as outlined above, both threatening the last bit of privacy still left for the motorist.

Indeed, in the wake of last year’s riots in the country, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called for a ‘wider use of facial recognition technology’, so as to better identify political offenders. Obviously, a nationwide surveillance network using hundreds of thousands of cameras would be one of the best technical tools to put this thought into practice.

Traffic hooligans produced by artificial speed limits

A separate issue is the constant reduction of traffic speeds in Britain, which is artificially creating more and more ‘traffic offenders’ who are actually just ordinary sane citizens driving at the speed they were used to driving on a stretch of road they know. For example, in one case, the British police received ‘a shocking surprise’ when a newly installed camera caught over a thousand ‘traffic hooligans’ in a day, on a street with a reduced 20-mile speed limit.

And why not combine the check of average speed with the reduction of speed limit on a good stretch of a road, which would then provoke further cause for confiscating the vehicle? You’re used to driving at 80 mph in a safe 70 mph zone, but now, thanks to the new speed limit, you’ve already exceeded the artificially reduced speed limit by 30 mph, for the new speed limit on the same road is only 50 mph! This is already today’s reality in the UK, in the form of various pilot projects.

Motorist’s dystopian future

Now, imagine driving on the roads of the future, where cameras placed at every road crossing can easily measure the average speed of any road user at every metre of his journey, and each slightly frivolous acceleration on an empty stretch of a road that has an artificially low speed limit imposed upon it will be punished by a hefty fine, assessing every human impulse with robotic persistence.

On top of this, of course, the cameras will also determine the price tag of your driving, which is likely to be linked to your driving history and ‘chastity’, or its lack thereof, and why not to your political affiliations as well. Maybe you are ‘woke’ enough already or maybe you’re still the wacky conservative who is due to pay more!

And at last, you will also be required to carefully maintain all political correctness in a seemingly private space, so as not to wear some ‘white supremacy’ badge established as such by some new woke fad, or make inappropriate gestures that offend, even accidentally, some much-maligned social group.

And of course – you should always smile at the cameras for the joy of living in the most scientific society in the history of mankind, for being gloomy might be interpreted as an act of protest After all, maintaining a good mood may be one of the 950 points monitored by the Chinese Social Score Recognition Programme, a model for British Labour.

Dystopian as it might be, it will be no wonder if an average person will then finally shrug off the desire to own something that has been an important part of one’s private space in the last one hundred years – a private vehicle – and will instead join a car-sharing scheme or have oneself driven around in the ‘brave new world’ by a robot taxi. This seems the likely direction that self-appointed leadership like the World Economic Forum (WEF) is now nudging Western societies to take.