Pop Quiz – What do these three things have in common?

I’ll let you mull it over a little.

*sips pepsi*

Ok, times up.  Here’s what they have in common:

Rockwell had it right when he pined out about people watching him.  I don’t know if I can even call them “people”.  (pun alert: Rock! Well, HAL Hitler!”

So, get this.  This morning on talk radio I heard about one of the radio’s employees having received a “survey” from TXDOT in the mail.  In this survey, it basically said

(paraphrase)

Our cameras caught you on I-10, west of San Antonio, within the last two weeks.  We want to know where you started, where you were going, what you were doing, who was with you, and how often you make this trip.

Whoa.

A few more callers called in and one reported that they saw the “camera crew”, with a van parked on an overpass and looked like they were monitoring three orange barrior barrels with holes cut out and cameras in them.

This “monitoring” is taxpayer-funded.  The Alliance Transportation Group (the company that TXDOT outsourced to for the survey) refuses to disclose who owns them.  $9 million is being spent on TXDOT counter-legislature advertising.  Who knows how much was spent on the cameras, crew, surveys, etc (and who they paid – I wonder if they’re “friends” of TXDOT or not). 

Austin is already full of cameras, as indicated by all the colored paths on this map:

You can click on the map and get digital snapshots. 

It won’t be long before you can see a live updated map, with GPS-enabled feeds of all the cars you own, and RSS-like alerts so you can see where your spouse is, your kids, your employees, your friends, your enemies.  But you can rest assured that our elected officials will be exempt from the tracking, because, um, that would thwart our national security. 

Hint: anything that Congress or our elected officials deem necessary for YOU but not for THEM (ie, taxes, speeding tickets, parking fees) is probably something you should be wary of.

Question of the day: what do YOU think about this survey?