Hiding in Plain Sight

When he's out and about near his Denver home, former Broncos quarterback John Elway has come up with a novel way to travel incognito—he wears his own jersey. "I do that all the time here," the 50-year-old Hall of Famer told me. "I go to the mall that way. They know it's not me because they say there's no way Elway would be wearing his own jersey in the mall. So it actually is the safest thing to do."

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1175387/4/index.htm

Heh. Briliant!

New Orleans dumping crime camera surveilance!

In seven years, New Orleans' crime camera program has yielded six indictments: three for crimes caught on video and three for bribes and kickbacks a vendor is accused of paying a former city official to sell the cameras to City Hall.

In 2004, they claimed that the cameras resulted in a 57% reduction in murders in a public housing development, turns out the sample size was ridiculously skewed. Basically it's been a fiasco and has resulted in the federal conviction of their former IT "whiz kid". One huge mistake that they made, tech-wise, was that the cameras were wireless. That takes a lot of bandwidth, and wireless bandwidth isn't that great. It was not properly deployed, it had bad tech, it had ridiculously expensive tech, and they were easily avoided.

So it's really nice to see a major municipality abandon them, it would be nice to see somewhere like London dump 'em. They say that in London you will be photographed over 200 times a day on surveillance cameras.

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/10/new_orleans_crime_camera_progr.html