“A lot of people don’t realize what’s really going on”*…
While public debate about the license reading technology has centered on how police should use it, business has eagerly adopted the $10,000 to $17,000 scanners with remarkably few limits… But the most significant impact is far bigger than locating cars whose owners have defaulted on loans: It is the growing database of snapshots showing where Americans were at specific times, information that everyone from private detectives to insurers are willing to pay for… Unlike law enforcement agencies, which often have policies to purge their computers of license records after a certain period of time, the data brokers are under no such obligation, meaning their databases grow and gain value over time as a way to track individuals’ movements and whereabouts…
Read more about this nebulous network and how it’s being used at “A Vast Hidden Surveillance Network Runs Across America, Powered By The Repo Industry.”
[TotH to Dave Pell]
* “Miller” (Tracey Walter) in Alex Cox’s wonderful Repo Man
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As we reconsider public transit, we might recall that it was on this date in 1818 that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published. Shelley had begun writing the story two years earlier, when she was 18 and on vacation near Geneva with her husband (the poet Percy) and their friend Lord Byron. The house party set itself the task of each writing a gothic story; only Mary finished hers. The first edition was published anonymously; Shelley was first publicly identified as the author on the title page of the 1823 second edition.
The work has, as Brian Aldiss argues, a strong claim to being the first true science fiction novel. As the sub-title– “The Modern Prometheus”– suggests (and like all great sci fi), it treats the philosophical, cultural, and psychological ramifications of scientific and technological progress.
