When suburban moms embrace the surveillance society

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Greg Brooks <gregb () west-third com>
Date: August 4, 2006 1:36:42 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: When suburban moms embrace the surveillance society
Reply-To: gregb () west-third com

Dave, for IP if you wish.

There's an interesting piece in the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise 
[1] about
a woman who got her house toilet papered and decided to hunt down the
culprits. She didn't want to involve the police, reasoning that they had
better things to do, so she took the following steps:

* She canvassed local stores to see which one had a run on toilet paper.

* She then got the manager of the store to show her surveillance videos,
allowing her to see the personalized letterman's jacket of one of the
purchasers, as well as the license plate of the vehicle they got into.

* Finally, she used a high school yearbook (matched to the school  
based on
the letterman's jacket) and online databases to get the names, phone  
numbers
and addresses of all the teens spotted in the store tapes.

To me, this is a bit more than a "talker" feature. One takeaway,  
IMHO, is
that we're pretty far down the road to sheepdom when average citizens  
start
thinking "well, everything's monitored all the time anyway - let's  
see if I
can make use of that."

Warm Regards,
Greg Brooks
West Third Group

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/toilet_paper_caper




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