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Posted on 10/07/2004 4:41:36 PM PDT by JOAT
Obscure agency working on technology to monitor all vehicles
A little-known federal agency is planning a new monitoring program by which the government would track every car on the road by using onboard transceivers.
The agency, the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, is part of the Department of Transportation. According to an extensive report in the Charlotte, N.C., Creative Loafing, the agency doesn't respond to public inquiries about its activity.
According to the report, cutting-edge tracking technology will be used by government transportation management centers to monitor every aspect of transportation. Under the plan, not only will movement be monitored but it also will be archived in massive databases for future use.
The paper reports a group of car manufacturers, technology companies and government interests have worked toward implementing the project for 13 years.
States the Creative Loafing report:
"The only way for people to evade the national transportation tracking system they're creating will be to travel on foot. Drive your car, and your every movement could be recorded and archived. The federal government will know the exact route you drove to work, how many times you braked along the way, the precise moment you arrived – and that every other Tuesday you opt to ride the bus.
"They'll know you're due for a transmission repair and that you've neglected to fix the ever-widening crack that resulted from a pebble dinging your windshield."
The agency's website says its purpose is to "use advanced technology to improve the efficiency and safety of our nation's surface transportation system."
Critics believe the program will be used to line the pockets of business interests that stand to gain from the sale of needed technology and that the government will use the data collected to tax drivers on their driving habits.
Though the program has ominous privacy implications, Creative Loafing reports none of the privacy-rights organizations it contacted were aware of the government's plans.
The report states that more than $4 billion in federal tax dollars has already been spent to lay the foundation for the system, which will use GPS technology and other methods to monitor Americans' movements.
The plan includes transceivers, or "onboard units," that will transmit data from each car to the system, the first models of which are expected to be unveiled next spring. By 2010, the paper reported, automakers hope to start installing them in cars. The goal is to equip 57 million vehicles by 2015.
Creative Loafing quotes Bill Jones, technical director of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, from a speech he gave in January.
"The concept," said Jones, "is that vehicle manufacturers will install a communications device on the vehicle starting at some future date, and equipment will be installed on the nation's transportation system to allow all vehicles to communicate with the infrastructure."
"The whole idea here is that we would capture data from a large number of vehicles," Jones said at another meeting of transportation officials in May. "That data could then be used by public jurisdictions for traffic management purposes and also by private industry, such as DaimlerChrysler, for the services that they wish to provide for their customers."
The plan sees the federal government working with auto manufacturers to place the transponders in vehicles at the factory, giving consumers little chance to drive a new car not tethered to transportation computers.
One of the program's visions is for transportation officials to share collected data with law enforcement, meaning a driver potentially could get a speeding ticket based on information stored in a government computer.
Proponents of the system say the safety benefits are enormous. One goal is to virtually eliminate auto accidents by having vehicles "communicate" with each other.
Neil Schuster is president and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, a group of government and business people that's the driving force behind the program.
"When I get on an airplane everyone in the system knows where I am," Schuster told Creative Loafing. "They know which tickets I bought. You could probably go back through United Airlines and find out everywhere I traveled in the last year. Do I worry about that? No. We've decided that airline safety is so important that we're going to put a transponder in every airplane and track it. We know the passenger list of every airplane and we're tracking these things so that planes don't crash into each other. Shouldn't we have that same sense of concern and urgency about road travel? The average number of fatalities each year from airplanes is less than 100. The average number of deaths on the highway is 42,000. I think we've got to enter the debate as to whether we're willing to change that in a substantial way and it may be that we have to allow something on our vehicles that makes our car safer. ... I wouldn't mind some of this information being available to make my roads safer so some idiot out there doesn't run into me."
At least one proponent of the plan is actually using the term "Orwellian" to describe it.
At a workshop for industry and government leaders last year, the Charlotte paper reports, John Worthington, president and CEO of TransCore – one of the companies currently under contract to develop the onboard units for cars – described the system as "kind of an Orwellian all-singing, all-dancing collector/aggregator/disseminator of transportation information."
At no other point in your life are you as controlled by the government than when you drive. I don't see why something like this adds fuel to the fire.
Tracking every vehicle: What's the difference in this, and On-Star?
It was a big disaster.....didn't work at all..................
Illegal Aliens
Billions of $$ in wasted taxpayer money
Nuclear secrets from Los Alamos
Who has the database (OnStar appears to be an early implementation of the technology).
On-Star is only in GM vehicles?
Commercial truckers already have their every movement tracked and scrutinized, so now that the bugs have been worked out, time to 'take it to the next level.'
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Alternative energy resource. |
no no no... you have to replace the antenna with a wire coat hanger.
For the ultimate protetion, get rid of the secret tranceiver they put in the gas cap, and stuff an old rag in there. (Malatov Buick style)
One thing that's been overlooked here. If they can monitor all of the functions the on-board computer handles, they can also TURN IT OFF REMOTELY AT ANY TIME! Speeding? No problem, we'll just turn off your ignition, lock the doors and windows, and the nice officer will come and let you out on your way to jail.
Just in time for Kerry and the Communists to take over politically and employ all these cool new gadgets to make our lives so much better. Damn, that makes me want to do extremely terrible things to liberals everywhere.
Yeah, nobody wants to pay out of pocket needlessly. When I went to LA and planned to register my car, I had to go get a smog check that was $55. I wasn't too happy about that, and Florida never made me do it. Thankfully I left that liberal cesspool and came back.
The reason there are so many laws on the road is because automobiles are dangerous weapons in the wrong situation. Privacy should be for the home in my opinion. When you drive, you are at risk and putting people at risk. I think that everyone in this case has a right to know about where you are and what you're doing.
I can't seem to think of how such a device would impact me in a negative way. Eventually people will have to come to terms with the fact that we will never be completely safe in automobiles until they become guided. Be it rails or hover with autopilot it's the logical evolution of automobiles. However, I'm not fond of that. I own a 2002 Trans Am and I adore driving it around. I wouldn't appreciate having that luxury taken away, so we make a sacrifice. Danger for leisure.
I know this isn't about car safety. It's about the government tracking my car. I don't really care personally what they track, so long as I live in safety. There is only one thing I expect from the government and that is their protection. I can take it from there. I enjoy my personal responsibility.
GEICO knows every little detail about my car because it has a VIN. GOod for them. It saved me the trouble of having to prove that my car had ABS, airbags and an anti-theft device built in..
I'll be damned if they're gonna shove a GPS tracking gizmo up my tailpipe.
For one thing, you could solve a great number of crimes simply by knowing who was where and when.
And I'm not bothered too much by the fact that when I fly my airplane, the feds track me with radar almost continuously. I leave my transponder on all the time so they can, because if I loose my engine, it's a quick thing to punch in 7700 [ident] and they know I've got a serious problem and where I am.
On the other hand. I think it was Franklin who said that citizens seeking to trade liberty for security will get neither. This technology certianly has the ability to limit liberty, and I will resist it because I don't trust governments of any kind. They ALL must be watched.
Illegal Aliens
The government is encouraging the invasion. Do you seriously believe we could NOT stop hordes of illegals entering this country? If it was a priority, it could be accomplished in one month. What is lacking is the will. (Shooting invaders, patrolling in Abrams tanks, overflying with surveillance blimps...yeah it could be done.
Billions of $$ in wasted taxpayer money
Ever heard of 'black' programs? Do you really think a hammer 'costs' $400? Funding for covert ops has to come from somewhere and be untraceable.
Nuclear secrets from Los Alamos
Hey, the Chinese needed some 'help' to gain parity with the US. All it took was some investing in re-election campaigns....
It'll never work.
There are too many geeks out there who would figure out how to ratf--k it, probably with very little effort.
"its purpose is to "use advanced technology to improve the efficiency and safety of our nation's surface transportation system." "
Riiight, [wink], always stealing liberty under the guise of helping the people.
in Japan, they have an annoying bell that rings when you exceed the max freeway speed limit. I guess you can disable it, but I think they have those "safety checks" (read another damn tax) that states like VA have
While it might sound nifty to know that a traffic accident just happened 5 miles ahead (airbag deploy detector transmits to nearest roadside traffic sensor, which notifies State Patrol and alerts on-comming traffic via the same roadside sensor/transmitters), the likelyhood of this technology CAUSING as many problems as it solves seems to escape everyone's attention.
So what happens when 5000 cars decide to exit a freeway just because one lane is blocked ahead? What does that do to the local surface streets? How many additional accidents are caused?
What happens when joe hacker breaks into the system and decides to shut down each engine that passes a certain transmitter, or alerts police to accidents that don't exist while banks are robbed elsewhere?
How many private citizend will have to be jailed for disconnecting these privacy invading devices the minute they drive off the dealers lot?
The benifits are oversold, new risks are overlooked (did anyone predict airbags would kill kids, or allow death-wish driving?).
The promise will be that this is the first step toward self driving cars - hop in, key in your destination and watch a movie while the car drives you there. The reality will be something totally different.
To error is human. To really F**K things up, you need a computer.
Of course if the penalty for tampering with it is ten years in a "Federal pound-me-in-the-*** prison," the instances of tampering would probably be fairly low.
It's a bit expensive, but I can get you the equipment to do just that. It's a local "GPS simulator" and it can fool your GPS into thinking it's anyplace on earth. They use it for testing receivers.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the gov't had sensors around the city that pick up the same signal and keep a record of the vehicles that have Easy Pass so they can construct data about people traveling and where? For statistical purposes only of course (inset me whistling dixie here).
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