Re: Real-time surveillance of the police
At 2:04 PM 12/11/94 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
This was an idea explored in detail by David Brin in 1990 in his novel "Earth." Video cameras are ubiquitous and have a major effect on casual street crime.
Hard to forget Brin's description of little old ladies sitting on their front porches, "armed" will full-sensoria headgear, laying in wait for extremely uneducated juvenile miscreants... Humorous.
This scenario is a likely way that "position escrow" will evolve, from a voluntary escrowing (incl. timestamping, etc.). "Those with nothing to hide" will agree to escrow their movements...this will exculpate them in suspected crimes, etc. A slippery slope.
In "City of Angles", Kim Stanley Robinson(?) talks about just a virtuous all-surveilling governmental "privacy" authority which is supposed "protect" your privacy from the police, who had to subpoena the information to get it.
On the topic of how these localizers actually work, I'm not at liberty to talk about the technology. It's novel, and uses a *lot* if digital signal processing. It doesn't use GPS and it's not a variant of cellular telephones.
I wonder if they're using an active/transponder system. That's what O'Niell's Geostar system was designed with in the early '80's. It would have put up cheaper sattellites and smaller earth transponders. The way you saved on transponder size was with very small bursts at very high power. You could send a signal to a small net of satellites 30,000 miles up with a box initially no bigger than an HP12C, and which would shrink more with time. The feds never liked Geostar 'cause they already had the passive/receiver GPS in the works, and they wanted to "amortize" the social cost of an essentially military (hence the requirement for a passive system) system on the backs of commerce. The only thing which saved GPS for mere mortals like us was the MIC's usual severe understimate of Grove's Law and the exponential cost effectiveness of integrated circuits over time. If my hunch is correct, with lots more local antennas, the power requirements of the tranceiver, and as a result, the tranceiver size, gets pretty small. Small enough to be worn on one's ankle. Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923
Robert Hettinga wrote: (quoting me)
On the topic of how these localizers actually work, I'm not at liberty to talk about the technology. It's novel, and uses a *lot* if digital signal processing. It doesn't use GPS and it's not a variant of cellular telephones.
I wonder if they're using an active/transponder system. That's what O'Niell's Geostar system was designed with in the early '80's. It would have put up cheaper sattellites and smaller earth transponders. The way you saved on transponder size was with very small bursts at very high power. You could send a signal to a small net of satellites 30,000 miles up with a box initially no bigger than an HP12C, and which would shrink more with time.
I don't plan to say much more, and won't be playing the "Twenty Questions" game, but the system does _not_ use satellites or anything of that sort. Satellites up the ante considerably, and aren't even needed. Radio is enough to get 1% positional accuracy (or better) and radio can have better coverage in many places that GPS-like systems can't reach.
the backs of commerce. The only thing which saved GPS for mere mortals like us was the MIC's usual severe understimate of Grove's Law and the ^^^^^^^^^^^ exponential cost effectiveness of integrated circuits over time.
A minor nit, but that's "Moore's Law," an empirical observation made by Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel and current Chairman, that integrated circuit capacities (roughly, number of transistors, bits, gates) were quadrupling every two years or so. Gordon had this posted outside his cubicle (the guy was worth $300 million then, and he worked in a Westinghouse-walled cubicle....I thought that was carrying egalitarianism a bit far...he's now worth $1.5 billion) and we all wondered when the trend chart would be broken. So far, it's been pretty accurate. But of course his trend chart ("Moore's Law," so dubbed by pundits around 1970, when he first showed his chart) is a conflation of a huge number of interesting trends in lithography, capital spending, microprocessor consumption, etc.
If my hunch is correct, with lots more local antennas, the power requirements of the tranceiver, and as a result, the tranceiver size, gets pretty small. Small enough to be worn on one's ankle.
The transceivers get real small for other reasons, not because of satellites. Think about this: no reason to have satellites 100 miles overhead if there are thousands or tens of thousands of cooperating units nearby.... I won't say more for now about this, even though the patent filings may be accessible, and the work has been described at "Hackers" and a few other places (including Washington, at ARPA, who is also funding them--gulp). --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Cypherpunks list: majordomo@toad.com with body message of only: subscribe cypherpunks. FAQ available at ftp.netcom.com in pub/tc/tcmay
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