surveillance box to track drivers

[Eugen Leitl]

(ok, it's now official time to start shooting people)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/31/surveillance-transport-communication-box 

Big Brother is watching: surveillance box to track drivers is backed

Privacy row brewing over surveillance on the road

Box could reduce accidents, pollution and congestion

* Paul Lewis in Brussels

* The Guardian, Tuesday 31 March 2009

The government is backing a project to install a "communication box" in new
cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe, the Guardian can
reveal.

Under the proposals, vehicles will emit a constant "heartbeat" revealing
their location, speed and direction of travel. The EU officials behind the
plan believe it will significantly reduce road accidents, congestion and
carbon emissions. A consortium of manufacturers has indicated that the router
device could be installed in all new cars as early as 2013.

However, privacy campaigners warned last night that a European-wide car
tracking system would create a system of almost total road surveillance.
Follow that car: 'The British government are the main backers' Link to this
audio

Details of the Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) project, a
#36m EU initiative backed by car manufacturers and the telecoms industry,
will be unveiled this year.

But the Guardian has been given unpublished documents detailing the proposed
uses for the system. They confirm that it could have profound implications
for privacy, enabling cars to be tracked to within a metre - more accurate
than current satellite navigation technologies.

The European commission has asked governments to reserve radio frequency on
the 5.9 Gigahertz band, essentially setting aside a universal frequency on
which CVIS technology will work.

The Department for Transport said there were no current plans to make
installation of the technology mandatory. However, those involved in the
project describe the UK as one of the main "state backers". Transport for
London has also hosted trials of the technology.

The European Data Protection Supervisor will make a formal announcement on
the privacy implications of CVIS technology soon. But in a recent speech he
said the technology would have "great impact on rights to privacy and data".

Paul Kompfner, who manages CVIS, said governments would have to decide on
privacy safeguards. "It is time to start a debate ... so the right legal and
privacy framework can be put in place before the technology reaches the
market," he said.

The system allows cars to "talk" to one another and the road. A
"communication box" behind the dashboard ensures that cars send out
"heartbeat" messages every 500 milliseconds through mobile cellular and
wireless local area networks, short-range microwave or infrared.

The messages will be picked up by other cars in the vicinity, allowing
vehicles to warn each other if they are forced to break hard or swerve to
avoid a hazard.

The data is also picked up by detectors at the roadside and mobile phone
towers. That enables the road to communicate with cars, allowing for
"intelligent" traffic lights to turn green when cars are approaching or
gantries on the motorway to announce changes to speed limits.

Data will also be sent to "control centres" that manage traffic, enabling a
vastly improved system to monitor and even direct vehicles.

"A traffic controller will know where all vehicles are and even where they
are headed," said Kompfner. "That would result in a significant reduction in
congestion and replace the need for cameras."

Although the plan is to initially introduce the technology on a voluntary
basis, Kompfner conceded that for the system to work it would need widespread
uptake. He envisages governments making the technology mandatory for safety
reasons.Any system that tracks cars could also be used for speed enforcement
or national road tolling.

Roads in the UK are already subject to the closest surveillance of any in the
world. Police control a database that is fed information from automatic
number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, and are able to deduce the journeys
of as many as 10 million drivers a day. Details are stored for up to five
years.

However, the government has been told that ANPR speed camera technology is
"inherently limited" with "numerous shortcomings".

Advice to ministers obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information
Act advocates upgrading to a more effective car tracking-based system,
similar to CVIS technology, but warns such a system could be seen as a "spy
in the cab" and "may be regarded as draconian".

Introducing a more benign technology first, the report by transport
consultants argues, would "enable potential adverse public reaction to be
better managed".

Simon Davies, director of the watchdog Privacy International, said: "The
problem is not what the data tells the state, but what happens with
interlocking information it already has. If you correlate car tracking data
with mobile phone data, which can also track people, there is the potential
for an almost infallible surveillance system."