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."
You'll be blackmailed into it or the auto mfgrs will be.
And they'd know if you tampered with it by having police vehicles scan your system while driving in traffic much like the IFF transponders used in military aircraft.
Yes, I prefer having my plane squawk my location too - it keeps me on the ATCs screens and out of the windscreen of something much larger and faster. But on the road, where I go and how I get there is MY business, not the gov'ts.
To hell with trying to tamper with a system like this - that's treating a symptom. I'd rather treat the disease at that point: Vote from the rooftops and get rid of a government that was that heavily involved in my daily life.
"Red Barchetta" an old song by 'Rush' is a song that deals with breaking the 'motor law' by driving a vehicle that is not controlled, that is piloted by an individual.
Maybe driving my musclecar will be against the 'law' in my lifetime, since it will not have a tracking feature...
A couple of years ago a murder was solved because of the tracking system in the truck the perp drove.
Wouldn't the cops just love to have known where Scott Peterson drove the day his wife disapeared? Although that jerk is so damn smart, he probably would have spoofed it.
That's where we're heading my friend.
I'd go with a '55 convertible, but point taken and appreciated!
They already are, just because of nostalgia; but if this stuff is true, they'll be higher in price.
Fr'instance, I'm now looking for a reasonable deal on a mid-fifties era Chevy or GMC panel truck, big six with a three-speed manual trans. I'll restore it and add an air conditioner, and that'll be my vehicle 'til I no longer need one.
" A couple of years ago a murder was solved because of the tracking system in the truck the perp drove.
Wouldn't the cops just love to have known where Scott Peterson drove the day his wife disapeared?"
Oh, come on! You can't believe catching the odd murder (who sits in jail even without this technology I might add) justifies putting everyone under the magnifying glass of government survelence?
How much safer do you really think it will make you? Realistically, what risks will you NOT face once this system is fully inplemented that you face now?
You know what "supposed to" means, right?
By Mark Baard
Some federal and state government officials want to make state driver's licenses harder to counterfeit or steal, by adding computer chips that emit a radio signal bearing a license holder's unique, personal information.
In Virginia, where several of the 9/11 hijackers obtained driver's licenses, state legislators Wednesday will hear testimony about how radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags may prevent identity fraud and help thwart terrorists using falsified documents to move about the country.
Privacy advocates will argue that the radio tags will also make it easy for the government to spy on its citizens and exacerbate identity theft, one of the problems the technology is meant to relieve.
Virginia is among the first states to explore the idea of creating a smart driver's license, which may eventually use any combination of RFID tags and biometric data, such as fingerprints or retinal scans.
"Nine of the 19 9/11 terrorists obtained their licenses illegally in Virginia, and that was quite an embarrassment," said Virginia General Assembly delegate Kathy Byron, chairwoman of a subcommittee looking into the use of so-called smart driver's licenses, which may include RFID technology.
The biometric data would make it harder for an individual to use a stolen or forged driver's license for identification. The RFID tags would make the licenses a "contact-less" technology, verifying IDs more efficiently, and making lines at security checkpoints move quicker.
Because information on RFID tags can be picked up from many feet away, licenses would not have to be put directly into a reader device. If there was any suspicion that a person was not who he claimed to be, ID checkers could take him aside for fingerprinting or a retinal scan.
States need to adopt technologies that can ensure a driver's license holder is who he says he is, said Byron.
Federal legislators may also require states to comply with uniform "smart card" standards, making state driver's licenses into national identification cards that could be read at any location throughout the country. The RFID chips on driver's licenses would at a minimum transmit all of the information on the front of a driver's license. They may also eventually transmit fingerprint and other uniquely identifiable information to reader devices.
But federal mandates for adding RFID chips to driver's licenses would create an impossible burden for states, which will have to shoulder the costs of generating new licenses, and installing reader devices in their motor vehicle offices, said a states' rights advocate.
"It could easily become yet another unfunded federal mandate, of which we already have $60 billion worth," said Cheye Calvo, director of the transportation committee at the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Drivers with E-ZPass tags on their windshields can already cruise through many highway toll booths without stopping, thanks to RFID technology.
RFID tags, which respond to signals sent out by special reader devices, have in some tests demonstrated broadcast ranges up to 30 feet. Reader devices have proven to possess similar "sensing" ranges. This is what has some privacy advocaters worried, including one testifying tomorrow before the Virginia legislators.
"The biggest problem is that these tags are remotely readable," said Christopher Calabrese, council for the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Program.
RFID tags inside driver's licenses will make it easy for government agents with readers to sweep large areas and identify protestors participating in a march, for example. Privacy advocates also fear that crooks sitting on street corners could remotely gather personal information from individual's wallets, such as their birth dates and home addresses -- the same information many bank employees use to verify account holders' identities.
Information from card readers could also be coupled with global positioning system data and relayed to satellites, helping the government form a comprehensive picture of the comings and goings of its citizens.
Driver's licenses with RFID tags may also become a tool that stalkers use to follow their victims, said Calabrese. "We're talking about a potential security nightmare."
But opponents of the use of RFID and other technologies in driver's licenses and state issued ID cards are conflating RFID's technological potential with its potential for abuse by government authorities, said Robert D. Atkinson, vice president at the Progressive Policy Institute.
"Putting a chip or biometric data on a driver's license doesn't change one iota the rules under which that information can be used," said Atkinson.
The Virginia legislators may balk at the use of RFID in driver's licenses, however, unless they can be proven to be immune from use by spies and identity thieves.
"I can't see us using RFID until we're comfortable we can without encroaching on individual privacy, and ensure it won't be used as a Big Brother technology by the government," said Joe May, chairman of the Virginia General Assembly's House Science and Technology Committee.
Guess I won't be buying any new cars after 2010.
There's no agency can unilaterally do this. Perhaps Congress can pass a law to this effect, which will then be subject to judicial review if it is enacted.
Until then, wetting pants is silly.
. . . too late.
LOL, if his thighs were pretty cold beforehand, perhaps it wasn't all bad.
Every day WND descends further into irrelevancy. This was picked up from a paranoid, left-wing weekly.
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