Brit Fascists To Track Motorists
Well, I see on the news that the British Government are installing cameras with OCR capabilities throughout London so that they can track all the cars which pass by. Of course this is only to track 'terrorists and car thieves', not ordinary law-abiding citizens, no, no, no, not at all, guvnor, so that's all right. And don't worry about all those reports that the British Police Force is full of corrupt officers who the superiors can't fire. I wonder why no-one in the media has pointed out that terrorists and car thieves, being, after all, criminals, will have no qualms about strapping on false plates. Oh, but I guess it will catch 'stupid' terrorists and criminals, so that's all right after all. Odd that this was announced the same day as other annoucements of the British Government joining an EU-wide system to track millions of European subversives (including, apparently, those who have been to rock concerts?). I bet it's just one of them coincidences... SpyMonger
At 08:15 PM 7/23/97 +0200, Name Withheld by Request wrote:
Well, I see on the news that the British Government are installing cameras with OCR capabilities throughout London so that they can track all the cars which pass by. Of course this is only to track 'terrorists and car thieves', not ordinary law-abiding citizens, no, no, no, not at all, guvnor,
I'm surprised the technology is reliable enough now, but if it's not, give Moore's Law another couple of years and the computers will get faster, while the algorithms will also get tuned better, so it will be soon. It's at least good enough today if you don't mind spending big bucks on computers that'll be more affordable in a couple of years. When San Francisco was going to close a major freeway for repairs, they videotaped traffic, had people type in the license plates from tape, looked them up in the DMV database, and sent them nice letters asking them to take a different highway for the next few months. Took a bit longer, but labor's cheap, and they didn't need instant results; a computerized system fast enough to track cars on-line opens up a lot more possibilities, both for practical applications and abuse. David Chaum's DigiCash was designed for applications such as tollbooths, which would permit uncrackable payment while preserving privacy; the technology's catching up enough to track everybody at a tollbooth cheaply enough to make it obsolete before it's widely deployed. You can already do it now with bar-code-like bumper stickers, but when you can just bill for road use by license plate, there's a lot less administration required. And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes... The rest of it's just implementation details.
Odd that this was announced the same day as other annoucements of the British Government joining an EU-wide system to track millions of European subversives (including, apparently, those who have been to rock concerts?). I bet it's just one of them coincidences...
Aren't those European Data Privacy laws great! # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)
On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: [...]
And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes... The rest of it's just implementation details.
Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and leave the license plate off. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html
On Thu, 24 Jul 1997, Kent Crispin wrote:
Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and leave the license plate off.
Of course you could start your own mailing list for NSA spooks and the like and only send email there. =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian | "If you wanna touch the sky, you must |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com| be prepared to die. And I hate cough |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ | syrup, don't you?" |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, | For with those which eternal lie, with |.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"| strange aeons, even death may die. |..... ======================== http://www.sundernet.com =========================
At 02:34 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: [...]
And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes... The rest of it's just implementation details.
Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and leave the license plate off.
If the government wants to take over all the public commons right-of-way and pave it for roads, I'm not saying I'm not willing to pay them for the use of all their nice concrete and asphalt*, though government-built roads have led to a whole lot of ecological and social problems that are far more severe than those a free-market road system would have given us; free-marketers without eminent domain would have built fewer roads in generally more efficient places because they'd need to make money on each one, though eminent domain may be enough of a cost-saver to make up for lower efficiency, and housing and business development would have organized more compactly around the roads and railroads that did get built, allowing less car use. But the government could have given us all license plates that say [StateName][Year] in big letters and the tax receipt in small letters instead of [CarIdentifier][StateColor] in big and [Year][Receipt#] in small like most states do today or [CarIdentifier] in big letters on the back and [InspectionMonth][YearColor] on the windshield like New Jersey does. Somehow cops manage to zing people for late car tax payment anyway, and somehow tax collectors manage to collect taxes on real estate (which doesn't move, but has owners that do) and wages (paid by often- mobile businesses to often-mobile workers) and sales well enough without requiring big taxpayer id# signs on houses, wallets, and merchandise. And somehow before the automobile we got by without license plates on horses and buggies and cows, though some people branded their horses or cows or painted their names on buggies without the law requiring it so they could demonstrate ownership if there was a dispute. The choice to require easy-to-use-rapidly unique identifiers or not affects the kinds of transactions that can be done with them. License plate numbers are primarily useful for social control, though they're occasionally useful for recovering stolen cars (if the thieves didn't use fake plates) or following slow white Broncos. As computers and radio communications increase the speed and flexibility of transactions, there are more ways to use them (cops can look up license plates any time they stop cars, allowing them to identify dangerous criminals who are too dumb to use fake plates) mostly for social control, but also to enforce tax collection. They also make it easier to charge for transactions such as bridge and freeway use - but they bias the economics towards an account-based system (since you've got an existing key) rather than a pay-as-you-go system (like subway tokens or turnpike tolls) or a pay-by-the-month system (like many transit systems offer, even for systems like BART and CalTrain that are well equipped for distance-based billing and some bridge tolls.) Changing the transaction costs changes the possible relationships between supplier and customer, and if the government wants to use them for social control, some of those relationships make it easier. [*There are people who refuse to get car license plates and driver's licenses and marriage licenses and pay taxes on principle, and they spend a lot of time arguing common law to judges and cops. I'm not one of them - as George Gordon says, if you're not having fun doing this kind of thing, you shouldn't be wasting your time doing it, and you also risk losing and setting bad precedents. Our buddy Jim Bell may or may not agree by this point in time....] # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 02:34 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: [...]
And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes... The rest of it's just implementation details.
Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and leave the license plate off.
Sabotaging your plates so they weren't machine readable or using a car registered in Slovenia or Wisconsin (both possible in the UK) would make more sense. DCF -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQCVAwUBM9iMyYVO4r4sgSPhAQFGPwP8Dn6f8HkS4YYQcCAdojTsHPtluYun6xKT 4Rg2jVD0AH4wvk+aPLHuMkImdLvIoRUEtethudiRqPyW04ulj3GZFRDdIH8ck8wN 0ULTz128WcePyLKKVAhZnSVqmlF120lltFh2u0URsSoS8s5DMZBpAH6UfBNsBqIb 1XMsLgYCn2s= =6dIy -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Fri, 25 Jul 1997 frissell@panix.com wrote:
Sabotaging your plates so they weren't machine readable or using a car registered in Slovenia or Wisconsin (both possible in the UK) would make more sense.
Would a spy trying to infiltrate a building wear a dark hat, sunglasses, a trench coat, and a briefcase handcuffed to her wrist, or would she dress as the people entering and leaving the building? Erm, just how many Wisconsin or Slovenian plates are you likely to see in a given hour passing through a camera's view? You'd stand out like a haystack in the middle of NYC. You want to trick the OCR by using a plate where the 1's can get confused with the I's, O's with Q's, etc.. Or spraying your plates with mud or dust or something... You certainly, don't want to stand out and call attention to your car. Didn't someone mention using IR lasers to knock out cameras in a similar topic? Would perhaps a broadband IR transmission do the same without harming humans? (So they won't rear end you of course.) :) =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian | "If you wanna touch the sky, you must |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com| be prepared to die. And I hate cough |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ | syrup, don't you?" |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, | For with those which eternal lie, with |.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"| strange aeons, even death may die. |..... ======================== http://www.sundernet.com =========================
On Thu, Jul 24, 1997 at 06:54:29PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 02:34 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: [...]
And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes... The rest of it's just implementation details.
Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and leave the license plate off.
If the government wants to take over all the public commons right-of-way and pave it for roads, I'm not saying I'm not willing to pay them for the use of all their nice concrete and asphalt*, though government-built roads have led to a whole lot of ecological and social problems
Can't deny that.
that are far more severe than those a free-market road system would have given us;
I see no evidence for this. Do you know of any national level free-market road system that would demonstrate this? I don't think there are any.
free-marketers without eminent domain would have built fewer roads in generally more efficient places because they'd need to make money on each one, though eminent domain may be enough of a cost-saver to make up for lower efficiency, and housing and business development would have organized more compactly around the roads and railroads that did get built, allowing less car use.
I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. This is all hypothetical. However, I think that strong identification systems for people and cars would develop on private road systems, as well. The reason is that traffic rules would have to be enforced on private roads just as much as they do on public roads. Roadway operators would still want drivers licenses to identify drivers who were competent, and would still want to be able to identify cars as an aid to identifying people. More generally, while much of the argument on cpunks has been about the government invading privacy, in fact, of course, "private enterprise" has no motivation to respect privacy rights -- knowledge about people is just another commodity. In fact, there was a recent thread about how there was no such thing as "privacy rights"... [...]
And somehow before the automobile we got by without license plates on horses and buggies and cows, though some people branded their horses or cows or painted their names on buggies without the law requiring it so they could demonstrate ownership if there was a dispute.
My dad had his own brand, many years ago ("WC on a Bench" -- I used to have a wooden plaque with it burned in...). There was and still is a great deal more government involvement in brands than you may realize. Brands are registered, there are "brand inspectors", etc. But in any case, *many* things were different 150 years ago. Arguably, you didn't need things like license plates, because *everything* was much less anonymous -- the web of personal knowledge of other people's doings was much more complete. You didn't need to put your name on your buggy, because everybody locally knew it was yours. [...]
Changing the transaction costs changes the possible relationships between supplier and customer, and if the government wants to use them for social control, some of those relationships make it easier.
That's the leitmotif of this discussion, isn't it -- government use of technology for social control. In my view, however, it is a mistake to focus on the government. Society exerts social control, not just the government. We have jobs, families, friends, habits, training, education -- a whole web of relationships that channel our activities and our thinking. If you consider what "freedom" means in the context of this larger definition of "social control" things become rather subtle. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html
participants (5)
-
Bill Stewart -
frissell＠panix.com -
Kent Crispin -
nobody＠replay.com -
Ray Arachelian