STERLING, VA -- Do we want to submit to constant monitoring by the government -- or do we value our right to some degree of privacy in public spaces more than catching scofflaws?

This is what the use of cameras and automated radar traps to deal with the problem of red light running and "speeding" ultimately comes down to.

To get a bad case of the creepies, simply drive a few miles over the posted speed limit on Northern Virginia's scenic George Washington Parkway.

A week or so later, a present will arrive for you in the mail: a machine-generated ticket for speeding, issued courtesy of photo radar traps set up by the National Park Service, a federal agency which has jurisdiction over the parkway.

The photo radar was set up last year, very quietly, as part of a "demonstration project" run jointly by the NPS and Lockheed-Martin, a private defense contractor which supplies the gear and processes the film -- in return for a percentage of the fees generated by the fleecing of hapless motorists.

Lockheed Martin also provides the cameras already in widespread use at intersections around the country to catch "red light runners."

The logical next step is the widespread adoption of automated speed enforcement. If not strangled in its crib, the use of technology to constantly monitor us will develop to the point where we are always under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

This isn't about "safety" -- anymore than beating a suspect with rubber hoses to extract a confession is about "reducing violent crime rates."

The argument that "only scofflaws" need be concerned about the unblinking eye of watchful government observing us at every street corner -- teamed, let's remember, in a for-profit endeavor with a private company -- is dangerous precisely because it implicitly confers carte blanche authority upon government to look us over anytime, for any reason.

The same equipment that can be used to catch red light runners can also easily be used to keep track of your movements, identify and catalog who you happen to be traveling with, and so on. This, by the way, is precisely what camera technology is being used for in Great Britain.

It's not much farther to a society in which "Your papers, please!" becomes as accepted as it was in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. Free governments do not randomly monitor the doings of the citizenry. Unfree countries don't have Fourth Amendment protections -- or the notion of presumptive innocence under the law. We do -- but some want us to chuck all that in return for their chimera of "safety."

It is, however, hard to see how a less free society can be "safer" in any meaningful sense. With photo radar and red light cameras, there is no due process, no right to confront your accuser -- a ticket is simply mailed to you via an automated process.

Catching "speeders" and "red light runners" is the straw man set up by advocates of this kind of over-the-top use of government power. But just as we could "catch more criminals" by randomly frisking people -- or searching homes without warrants -- the benefit is not worth the cost. Advocates of photo radar/camera enforcement are either naive or don't care about the threat posed by these technologies to our civil liberties.

Keeping the forces of government in check and off our backs is every bit as important -- ultimately more so -- than keeping tabs on "speeders" and red-light runners.

Eric Peters is a nationally syndicated automotive columnist whose works has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Digest magazine and other leading publications. Readers may write him at 11 Wicker Court, Sterling, Va. 20164.