I always thought George Bush Sr. gave the States a horribly nasty poison pill by choosing Dan Quayle as his running mate. One can only guess he feared impeachment over the Iran/Contra scandal.

Security Cameras:

There's an idea circulating in the science fiction crowd (first saw Dave Brin use it) that with the advent of broadband wireless communications, everyone may start carrying video cameras, especially elderly people who want a bit of personal security. We already have camera phones. Imagine continuously transmitting video back to your home computer. A somewhat horrible thought, that wherever you went in public, people may be filming you, but also, a comforting thought that you will be physically safer because of that filming. I'm not sure what would bother me most. (I think I'd want to enact laws prohibiting video devices that could focus on a face at over 300 feet.) This sort of thing would also give people limited protection from individual bad police officers.

There's another idea for public video cameras: put 'em up with public funds, but encrypt the data so that three or four keys are required to access the information: for instance, decryption keys held by the city, the province, the local branch of Amnesty International, and the Concerned Folksingers of MyTown. When a crime has been committed in an area, all four groups would have to supply the appropriate keys to give investigators access to the video. This technology is already feasible. Of course, judging from the huge expense governments tend to spend per unit on red-light cameras and photo-radar vans, perhaps it isn't affordable quite yet.