Via Slashdot…

High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim’s license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.

Nice.  Identity Theft takes to the streets.  Notice how there is no human involved in the process.  I’m guessing that some sort of OCR software finds the license plate in the photo and gets it’s numbers off it.  Then a ticket is software generated and dropped in the mail.  Nobody has to so much as touch the system for it to rake in the violators and their bucks.  But any software system can be gamed.  It’s all a matter of having the right numbers.  That’s all the computer knows you by.  If you give the right numbers to the computer, it assumes it’s you.  But you can at least take steps to protect your credit card and bank account numbers.  Your license plate is supposed to be clearly visible to everyone. 

Montgomery County Council President Phil Andrews said that the issue is troubling in several respects. "I am concerned that someone could get hurt, first of all, because they are speeding in areas where they know speeding is a problem," he said.

Andrews also said that this could hurt the integrity of the Speed Camera Program. "It will cause potential problems for the Speed Camera Program in terms of the confidence in it," he said.

He said he is glad someone caught it before it becomes more widespread and he said he hopes that the word get out to the people participating in this that there will be consequences. 

Idiot.  The more word gets out about this, the more people will do it.  Yes speed kills.  Yes running red lights gets people killed.  But there is a reason why human judgment is a necessary part of administering justice, even when it comes to seemingly trivial matters as traffic court.  Technology is a tool, not a substitute for thinking.  It can provide you with data.  It cannot tell you what to make of the data.  You cannot shrug responsibility for interpreting the data off onto it no matter how cleverly you try.  My most frustrating moments as a contract software engineer were with corporate managers who wanted me to write software that would tell them how to do their jobs.  It doesn’t work that way in this life.  Computers can do a lot of things, but taking responsibility isn’t one of them.  The humans are always responsible.  Even when they don’t want to be.  Especially then.