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[quote=Anonymous]The thing about technological enhancements to legal enforcements is that they tend to corrupt in two significant ways.

The more obvious is when an external incentive is attached to that enforcement. A fine that is meant to be, more or less, a punitive disincentive has little up-side for the jurisdiction when they are meted out a few per week, and very, very little cost (processing, the cost of which often is included in the amount paid along with the base fine).  When that gets to thousands per week, the story changes -- significant upside with that negligible cost.

This creates a perverse incentive to mete out of such punishment to a maximal extent, and can lead to things like a deliberately improper administrstion to ensure that happens.  Take the obscured traffic signage on Military Rd that eventually saw an appeals court overturn associated speed camera fines as an example.  The desparate gymnastics the city employed to try to avoid such a visible and precedent-setting judgment by repeatedly offering to void the fine in question make the perversion even more obvious.

One might imagine what would happen if there were no fine, but pay-equivalent jail time as the burden assumed from a judgement of statutory violation.  The perverse incentive would be eliminated (or nearly so, or even reversed), as the jurisdictional costs of such technologically accelerated enforcement would be hugely burdensome.

The less obvious corruption is that of the societal incentive/disincentive balance, itself, provided by the laws enforced.  Nearly all were created (or have legal basis for penalty in laws that were created) when the technology not only did not exist, but was not even envisioned.  Those penalties (fines, imprisonment or other) would have been determined with an eye for presenting an appropriate risk-adjusted disincentive to a potential violator, hopefully balancing things such that societal harm from violation is minimized without generating too great a chilling effect on legal/productive activity that might be considered close to the prohibited action.

If technological enforcement enhancements develop without similar technological evasion enhancements (which, as a side note, likely bring access-based inequities and favor scofflaws over those who tend to be more law-abiding), the risk-adjusted balance would be disrupted unless there were a commensurate lessening of the penalty.  (We know that the above perversion actually sees the [i]opposite[/i] happen in many cases, with steeply [i]increased[/i] fines associated with automated enforcement.)

Of course, one could always point to the many laws that do not hit the mark of achieving that balance in the first place -- low risk-adjusted/mathematically expected tax penalties see far too many upper income earners decide to cheat, for instance.  One can only guess why efforts toward more automated enforcement in that realm are blocked with regularity :roll:[/quote]

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