Fw: Hi, I'm from the government and I'm here to screw you

[Sean Lynch]

On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 10:04 AM, brian carroll
<electromagnetize at gmail.com>wrote:

> > Any questions?
>
> about the V2V cars- what is the likelihood that automobiles are _not
> tagged in some way, just like computers, given that location or other
> data is critically important and perhaps more easily accessible or
> tracked outside of a particular environment, say run-ups to meetings
> or whatever, the timeliness of data as it approaches a meeting point,
> thus ramps up in criticality, say if a cellphone conversation decides
> actions minutes before an encounter. or, to scan a city for someone
> via satellites, pinging the missing submarine from satellite. given
> highest priority to own every computer, how likely is it that vehicles
> are not already being tracked, regardless of 'known technology' that
> then brings this tracking into the open. even if via passive means,
> giant RFID in the sky/net, say serial #s that reflect back with
> vehicle title databases, mapping geographies this way, 100,000
> vehicles return signals, as if looking at asphalt and concrete heavens
> using astronomy software to parse star/car-names. either installed in
> new vehicles by default, or when serviced if a focused customer.
> perhaps not advanced beyond passive ping, though are vehicles really
> driving around autonomously besides redlight cameras and speed traps?
> doubt it.
>

Given that a V2V system can only warn of an impending collision with
another V2V-equipped vehicle, this seems ludicrous to me. Passive systems
like radar and lidar will be cheap enough to be in nearly every new car
soon enough.

However, even if V2V ends up being mandated, whether it's abusable is very
implementation-dependent, and there are already plenty of ways to track
vehicles: license plate scanners, toll transponder readers, even just plain
old image processing on existing surveillance cameras to track vehicles
probabilistically. Oh, and then there's that cellphone you're probably
carrying with you.

Some of these are easier to avoid than others, and a V2V system could
probably be disabled easily. But we're already being tracked, and I doubt
there's much incentive for a politician to go out on a limb to make it even
easier. If we really want to avoid tracking, it's the efforts to network
and database security cameras and ALPRs that we need to go after. Those are
much harder to avoid, even if you don't own a cellphone and ride a bicycle
or walk everywhere.
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