“Obnoxious autocrats”

From Alan Rusbridger’s Guardian interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt: He decided against exploiting facial recognition, which he sees as wide open to abuse, and warns of the dangers of combining such technology with London-style traffic cameras. “You could imagine aggressive, obnoxious autocrats saying, ‘We need this to keep our people under control’, and once those things are in place, they are very hard to turn off.” Who installed 1800 new sets of traffic lights to London streets? Ken Livingstone. Who introduced the punitive, premature congestion charge (premature because it was imposed before natural flow/Equality Streets had been tried) with its rampant surveillance system? Livingstone. Who keeps it in operation and does nothing to remove the yoke of control over our freedom of movement? Boris Johnson