Are You Ready for the Congestion Tax ?

News With Views ^ | 06-14-05 | John Christian Ryter

[RFEngineer]

"What happened between Jan. 20, 1993 when Bill Clinton took office and March 29, 1996 when Clinton granted civilian access to 24 GPS satellites to the world? "

GPS has always been available for Civilian Use, what happened is that "Selective Availability" - an algorithm to degrade the accuracy of GPS to prevent an adversary from using our own satellites to navigate accurately was turned off.

I submit that this was a good thing.

Because even for civilian uses, it was possible to "back out" the selective availability algorithm through the use of Differential GPS techniques (measure the GPS reading of a known point over time and correct for differences)- which were becoming pretty sophisticated and indeed, real-time with many services.

The "tax-by-the-mile" proposals are real, but totally disconnected from this author's alternate reality.

[clearsight]

Seems that any of this afore mentioned information that is being gathered can be used for other purposes. It may seem unobtrusive now, but we have all seen how other information gathering techniques begin to creep forward gathering more and more information.
I have read about there being fiber optic type cameras and microphones being placed in all cable ready t.v. sets. I thought "no way", so I asked a recently retired air force intelligence friend of mine and mentioned that you never hear of this method of gathering information on someone presented in the court room.
His ans. to me was: Yes there are tiny tv cameras in all cable ready t.v. sets and microphones and that they in the intelligence agencies love to use that stuff, but they would never divulge in any court room that this method of snooping was used because they must never and willl never compromise to the public the methods they use and have to gather information lest everyone find out.After an answer like that, I will never have cable in my house. I don't care what any of you out there think about my reaction. For-warned is for-armed.