They said CCTV is going to help fighting crime. They just didn’t mention what kind of crime.
The beautiful city of Nice, on the French Riviera, will soon start using its CCTV cameras to issue parking tickets (click on image for the story). That could prove to be a significant source of income for the city hall, especially considering that a lot of it could be automated with license plate recognition and data mining. In fact, the system has the potential to be so efficient that CCTV might soon become short for Cash Cow TeleVision.
The icing on the cake? This system was paid from local taxes. Much like London’s famous surveillance network, which managed to do almost nothing at all to deter crime – defeated, as it were, by that high-tech piece of clothing equipment popularly known as “the hoodie”. How long until Boris Johnson warms up to the idea of turning that public embarrassment into a sizable boost to its coffers? How soon will other cities follow suit? New parking meters in Holland already require that you enter your license plate number to buy parking time. It would be ridiculously easy to couple this data to a CCTV system and mail you a fine the minute your parking expires. I could probably do it in 500 lines of code or less.
Meanwhile, I predict that spray can sales will soon skyrocket in the sunny city of Nice. As well they should. No matter what is said about the French, they do have a talent for civil disobedience.