That's just the On-star operator in the control room you are hearing.
Be seeing you No. 911...
Posted on 05/15/2003 11:33:08 AM PDT by chance33_98
Data Recorders In Your Car
Shawn Boyd reporting Last Updated: May 14, 2003
Data recorders that work like those on commercial airliners are now standard equipment on most cars, they have been for several years. Two court cases are putting the information found on two black boxes to work for prosecutors in Florida and right here.
Edwin Mantos' trial began Wednesday in Broward County Florida. He's accused of running his Trans-Am into two teenage girls last August killing them. Data downloaded from his car's black box showed he was going 114 mph just before he hit them.
Diana Santi was killed in a car accident and the other driver, Manuel Martinez, survived and now faces a number of charges including murder. Metro did its usual crash investigation, but this time they took it further.
Plugging into what's often called a black box, the event data recorder is underneath the front passenger seat console or dash, as many as 40 million cars on the road have one. It's the brain that monitors and controls the car's airbag. But it also holds a wealth of information that can be used in accident reconstructions, engine speed, gas pedal pressure, brakes, and vehicle speed.
The SUV that Manuel Martinez was driving had a black box that revealed electronic secrets to investigating officer Mario Alfonsi. The SUV accelerated to 78 mph one second before impact according to the black box. Chief deputy DA Gary Booker is prosecuting Martinez.
The SUV's black box is giving him the backing evidence he feels will help him put Martinez away. Booker is looking to place blame and this will be the first time this kind of evidence is used in trial in Clark County.
Fortunately, your mother didn't.
That's just the On-star operator in the control room you are hearing.
Be seeing you No. 911...
Is this self-incrimination?
police require a monitoring system (example a small recording device) implanted in the homes of non-convicted citizens?
I could maybe see this in the case of repeat offender speeders. I also know that some companies (like the vinyl sticker advertising cars, cars that advertise one product) track the speeds of their drivers but that is a voluntary intrusion.
Some cars also have an internal governor to keep the car from going above a certain speed. If law enforcement wants to keep cars from speeding, why are cars permitted to reach speeds over 75MPH?
A simple matter of adding a line to the contracts when you buy a car indicating that you are licensing the use of the black box software, not purchasing said software and that any data obtained by said device is property of corporation xyz. Additionally, any tampering with the device is a violation of the property rights of corporation xyz...
24 pages of sign this and initial here, who would notice?
Skidmarks and other signs at an accident are forensic science gathered by officers at the scene. This device is Big Brother, monitoring your actions. Should car buyers be permitted to remove this device from their cars or should that be prohibited? Can this device be permitted to radio "home" someplace anytime your speedometer registers higher than 70mph?
Maybe it could even work with geocoordinate software to determine if you are in a slower speed zone. Would an officer need to apprehend you at that time or could they merely mail you a ticket like they do with the unmanned photography speed traps?
Can they put a tracking device on your person since you use public sidewalks too?
Cars go into parking lots (which are private property) quite often yet that beacon still identifies where they are.
And then there are pagers:
WIRED: Who Needs Crypto? Paging Bill Clinton ... (09:12 AM Sep. 22, 1997 PT)The Clinton administration, in the midst of a fight to limit the availability of strong encryption, has come face-to-face with an embarrassing example of what can happen when its own communications go unprotected.
Pam Finkel, a New York City computer consultant, earlier this month posted a transcript of what purports to be pager traffic among the presidential party when Clinton traveled to Philadelphia last 27 April
Finkel said the messages, transmitted in clear text using the dated Golay paging protocol and captured using a simple combination of scanner, PC, and Net freeware, were presented to her on 28 April when she attended a ham-radio festival in New York.
Finkel, who also works for the hackers' journal 2600, said "a white male, age 20 to 40" handed her a floppy disk he described as a submission to the print magazine. She said she checked out the contents that evening.
"My first reaction was to call the White House Communications Agency switchboard to see if it was really them. To me, it seemed like a real transcript. And then, on the news, I saw that this stuff (referred to in the transcript) was really happening."
Plenty of the transcript seems innocuous - lots of messages that calls are waiting for various members of the entourage, for instance, along with personal endearments, pleas for food, notes that staffers' hotel rooms had not been reserved, a query about whether an aide would be able to return to the capital aboard Air Force 1, the score of that day's NBA playoff game between the Washington Bullets and the Chicago Bulls, and a mention of the Republic of Texas hostage standoff.
In mid-evening, the transcript shows, an alert went out that Chelsea Clinton was on the phone for her parents. First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton took the call.
But other notes captured by Finkel's source ranged from annoying - many private phone numbers were exchanged - to potentially serious security breaches - announcements of Clinton's arrival at various venues and about planned movements.
Secret Service spokesman Jim Mackin said the protective agency had not yet determined whether the transcript was genuine, but added he doubted any critical information had been compromised.
"Nothing's been reported so far that indicates there's anything of a security nature in there," he said. Some of the minute details of the president's activities "may sound cute, but it's something the press knows every day."
As to whether the pager mode of communication is insecure, Mackin responded: "Our understanding is that it's illegal to intercept these messages. But we know when we use cell phones and pagers that they're insecure, so we're cautious when we use them."
The disclosure that its unscrambled internal messages were captured by an eavesdropper could come as a jolt to a White House that has taken an aggressive stand against strong encryption. The US software industry and electronic commercial interests have fought for advanced data-scrambling technology, both to maintain the American advantage in the field and to help build the foundation for secure buying and selling on the Internet. Privacy and civil-liberties advocates favor crypto as the principal tool in keeping personal data out of the hands of both deputized and undeputized snoops.
Encrypting pager messages, for instance, would almost certainly defeat eavesdroppers.
In the past two weeks, an effort led by FBI director Louis Freeh and the National Security Agency has resulted in the weakening of the Safety and Freedom Through Encryption Act, a bill that aimed to make strong encryption freely available in the United States and abroad by removing federal export controls and by banning imposition of a nationwide key-recovery system - a software feature that would allow law enforcement and spy agencies access to coded data.
The bill, co-sponsored by 252 members of the House, hit a brick wall in the House National Security and Intelligence committees. Both panels tacked on amendments that would reverse what the bill set out to do. Among new provisions of the bill: A key recovery system would be mandatory, and the president and the secretary of Defense would get the final say on what encryption-enabled software could be sold overseas. The House Commerce Committee, contemplating an amendment that would outlaw any crypto software that does not allow immediate deciphering of coded data, will consider the bill this week.
Finkel said she hopes that publishing the transcript will affect the outcome of the crypto debate.
"If this just makes congressmen sit up and listen, and think about what's at stake, then it's worth it," she said.
Onstar can be used to unlock your cardoors. Why not trigger electronic controls to kill the fuel line (car stalls out) or deploy the airbag?
Police could use it in car chase scenarios to end pursuit. If the doors can be unlocked from space, they could also be "child proof" locked to contain the suspects.
That wasn't my point. Here was my point (that if you want to worry about being tracked you better check for bugging devices):
The Nevada Supreme Court has said police may plant tracking devices on or underneath people's cars without a search warrant. The decision is here:
"...in order for an unreasonable search or seizure to exist, the complaining individual must have a reasonable expectation of privacy, which requires both a subjective and an objective expectation of privacy in the place searched or the item seized. Here, we conclude that Osburn had neither a subjective nor an objective expectation of privacy in the bumper of his vehicle."
This has been ruled on in several states. Cops basically walk up to your parked car and attached gps monitors and record every place you go. They do not need a warrant and can do it for any reason. I think PIs can do this too. As I said a little more scary.
There are officers using thermal sensing to look into homes from the street. There are bugging devices that read the vibrations off of windows using a laser (which can be purchased by private entities although they run into the 10s of thousands of dollars).
You are missing an important point: They are using the stored information to determine IF a crime has been committed. They are using it before they have a right to it. It is like using the information from an extensive interview of an un-mirandized suspect; or like busting down your door to search for dope because you stumbled out the door one morning.
Sure makes me want to disable the bags in all our cars. Ridiculous.
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