May 23rd, 2007
YouTube rubbernecking has NJ officials seeing red
You can see just about any type of video on YouTube—even highway surveillance videos, if that’s your thing. Apparently, there are enough armchair rubber-neckers out there in Internet-land to generate a sizable audience - and that has some New Jersey authorities concerned.
The Star-Ledger reportsthat after an employee of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority (NJTA) uploaded a video of a horrific fiery crash at the Great Egg Harbor Toll Plaza on the Garden State Parkway, the NJTA adopted a new policy limiting the number of employees allowed to make copies of videos captured by highway surveillance cameras.
The posting, which quickly spread to other sites, angered investigators who have been trying determine who was responsible.
“These kinds of tapes are for operational and law enforcement purposes, not for entertainment purposes,” said state Transportation Commissioner Kris Kolluri, who also heads the Turnpike Authority Board. “I’m not happy with the fact that these were released. We’re going to take every action we can to figure out who is responsible and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The new policy states that copies of surveillance videos must be approved by the executive director, the internal audit director or the electronic toll collection director. Soon after the accident occurred, workers were speculating when it would be posted on the Net.
“The first thing we thought was, ‘How long before this gets out on the Internet?’” said Turnpike Authority spokesman Joe Orlando. “Just because of the state of the world, there was concern from the first minute we saw it.”
