A sport with a bright future?
By Bruce Sterling
“Motorists Against Detection, the vigilante anti-speed camera group have announced a summer of MADness which will see them target for destruction all speed cameras in the UK. It’s now going to be a period of zero tolerance against all speed cameras, said their campaigns director Capt Gatso.”
“Capt Gatso, the group’s campaigns director, said: “We have completely pulled it out of the ground, it is now lying flat. You can see some of our handiwork posted on www.speedcam.co.uk.
“He added: In many areas the cameras have not saved one life – the statistics for road deaths haven’t gone down. In some areas they have actually gone up – in Essex, for instance, which has a high density of cameras there are more people being killed. We are now planning to target any and all cameras until the Government sees sense and rethinks its road safety policy. Before we had speed cameras we had the safest roads in Europe – since their introduction this is no longer true.”
The announcement will surprise many in road safety circles since the group has publicly declared it would not attack cameras outside schools or on high streets. But Capt Gatso said: We need to focus attention on what the cameras are about. We’ve said we wouldn’t attack the ones in built up and urban areas but that’s not where most of the cameras are. There are a lot of frustrated people among our members who have seen the number of cameras increase while road safety levels have fallen. Indeed, the only thing the cameras have done successfully is to reduce the number of traffic officers patrolling our roads and lose a lot of decent people their driving licences and their livelihoods.
“MAD is the UK’s only direct action anti-speed camera group and it’s been going since summer 2000. In that time they have taken out just over 1,000 cameras. Their membership who are normally law-abiding people – vary in numbers but there is a hard core of around 200 people throughout the UK who use Internet chat forums, encrypted email and pay as you go phones to keep in touch and plan campaigns.
“The group says it has perfected a new and quick way of destroying speed cameras which will enable them to destroy a roadside camera in just a few seconds…”.
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6 responses so far ↓
Bohol Bol-anon // December 28, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I don’t understand this. The surveillance camera is supposed to benefit the whole populace for people’s safety and protection on the road. The government spent a lot of money for the installation.
dobropet // December 28, 2007 at 2:06 pm
This is the kind of resistance we need over here, we have cameras that are supposed to track high traffic areas and alert local news agencies as to any road side accidents or delays that occur during anytime of the day or night. Though I suspect they are also used to monitor certain individuals that may or may not have greater influence on certain areas of the public by recording their movements from afar and using that evidence against them unfairly and unlawfully.
pjwalker911 // December 28, 2007 at 6:17 pm
I applaud these guys and hope it becomes such a popular pass-time that eventually, the elites stop replacing them.
wil // December 28, 2007 at 6:31 pm
I have some candidates here.
And news keeps running spot about a county’s new drug tank–and more army aircraft they’re getting.
wil // December 28, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Local news does report so incredulously—that criminals are committing crimes in front of the cams here, and don’t care if being filmed or not. And the anchors act speechless and bewildered…
pjwalker911 // December 28, 2007 at 10:07 pm
All the statistics say that CCTV Big Brother cameras do nothing to stop criminals or intel-terror operative patsies, but they do make ordinary people more obedient and servile. So yes, they are working to better enslave the commoners. But I think the average person does have a special hatred of traffic tax scameras because they take money directly out of their pockets.