On an average day in this country, if you walk in public areas in towns and cities, there is an increasing chance that at some point you'll be filmed by closed-circuit TV cameras. It does not stop things like bike theft, but you can't catch everything. Not yet, anyway. Also if you happen to be in a nightlife district, you could get stopped and searched for no other reason than being there. Now the fearless Dutch government is planning the next step in keeping tabs on you: more intensive speed checks on highways. (The reason the Dutch government is fearless is because the Dutch population isn't exactly well-armed and assertive in defending against abuses, but I digress.)

The plan involves doing away with stationary cameras and replacing them with speed checks over a distance. You get logged at the start, and again at the end, and the system then calculates your average speed. If it's over the limit, you get a ticket. This is obviously a far more intrusive system than a solitary camera, which is only triggered by a speeding violation. This system, by necessity, has to keep track of all traffic passing through. And the plans are to introduce it on a wide scale too: after an initial trial at a half a dozen locations, the plans are supposedly for a minimum of 55 such catchment areas.

Of course, this will work to reduce speeding. And of course, it will do very little to increase safety. And of course, it will provide a nice cashflow to the government. This is again one of those cases where there is a significant loss of privacy for a marginal benefit. But perhaps people have become so used to being watched that it does not come as an imposition anymore. That is really a scary thought.