Spy Roads

Mileage Taxes, Automated Tolls and Civil Liberties:
The J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Parkway

"Now they've got the whole country sectioned off and you can't move without a form."
-- Harry Tuttle, from the film BRAZIL (1985)

on this page:

The Real ID Act hopes to require a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip in drivers license, creating a de facto National ID card.

However, competency tests are not required for renewing drivers licenses. Road safety would require driver testing for license renewal, particularly about pedestrian and bicycle safety issues, and issues related to "road rage" and excessive speed.


Civil Liberties and Transportation Surveillance

European Parliament – Luxembourg, 6 January 1998 – Directorate General for Research
Scientific and Technological Options Assessment – An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control
archived at http://www.cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm

Vehicle Recognition Systems


- George W. Bush, December 18, 2000


Maryland's highway surveillance systems


Cameras scan license plates for stolen cars
By Melissa Harris
Sun reporter
Originally published April 3, 2006


Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun


Britain's auto Panopticon


Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 22 December 2005

"Every time you make a car journey already, you'll be on CCTV somewhere. The difference is that, in future, the car's index plates will be read as well," said Frank Whiteley, Chief Constable of Hertfordshire and chairman of the Acpo steering committee on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR).
"What the data centre should be able to tell you is where a vehicle was in the past and where it is now, whether it was or wasn't at a particular location, and the routes taken to and from those crime scenes. Particularly important are associated vehicles," Mr Whiteley said.
The term "associated vehicles" means analysing convoys of cars, vans or trucks to see who is driving alongside a vehicle that is already known to be of interest to the police. Criminals, for instance, will drive somewhere in a lawful vehicle, steal a car and then drive back in convoy to commit further crimes "You're not necessarily interested in the stolen vehicle. You're interested in what's moving with the stolen vehicle," Mr Whiteley explained.
According to a strategy document drawn up by Acpo, the national data centre in Hendon will be at the heart of a surveillance operation that should deny criminals the use of the roads.
"The intention is to create a comprehensive ANPR camera and reader infrastructure across the country to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured," the Acpo strategy says.
"This development forms the basis of a 24/7 vehicle movement database that will revolutionise arrest, intelligence and crime investigation opportunities on a national basis," it says.
Mr Whiteley said MI5 will also use the database. "Clearly there are values for this in counter-terrorism," he said.
"The security services will use it for purposes that I frankly don't have access to. It's part of public protection. If the security services did not have access to this, we'd be negligent."


Hummers should pay more than hybrids: GPS to track all cars, all the time, under the guise of a “mileage tax”


DECLAN MCCULLAGH, CNET, December 5, 2005


Zero privacy protections

The PR offensive




JEFF GRAY, GLOVE AND MAIL, CA- It's the last thing many motorists would want -- a permanent, electronic back-seat driver, forcefully reminding them not to speed. But Transport Canada is road-testing cutting-edge devices that use global positioning satellite technology and a digital speed-limit map to know when a driver is speeding, and to try to make them stop. When a driver hits a certain percentage above the posted speed limit, the device kicks in and makes it difficult to press the accelerator. While the idea appeals to some road-safety experts, even the researcher in charge of the project admits many drivers -- some of whom have shown fierce resistance to photo-radar and red-light cameras -- may balk at the science-fiction scenario of a machine forcing them to apply the brakes. . . In Europe, proponents have said that the technology should be mandatory in all vehicles or that insurance companies might offer discounts to drivers who use it.

BOSTON HERALD - Over the coming year, the T will install automated fare collection equipment at every subway station and on every bus, allowing riders to pay easily with taps of special smart cards in their names. But each transaction with the plastic Charlie Cards will be recorded electronically, creating a record of where users were at a particular time on a particular day. Those records could be subpoenaed by cops, courts or even lawyers in civil cases. "The bottom line is that like other developments with consumer products and technology, the convenience does have a flip side. It’s convenience versus having the government be able to track you," said privacy expert Eric Gertler. . .
The new automated fare system will record where a passenger boards the system and at what time. The system won't capture any data on the rider’s destination. The information will be archived for a year and a half to two years before it’s erased. . .
The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority has for years recorded where and when users of the Fas tLane electronic transponders get on and off the toll highway. Unlike the MBTA, the Turnpike’s privacy protections barring outside release of the data without a subpoena are written into state law. "On a fairly regular basis we receive subpoena requests both civil and criminal," Pike spokesman Tom Farmer said.

Satellite toll plan to make drivers pay by the mile
Darling orders nationwide road pricing. Charge of £1.34 a mile on busiest roads
By Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor
05 June 2005

British motorists face paying a new charge for every mile they drive in a revolutionary scheme to be introduced within two years.
Drivers will pay according to when and how far they travel throughout the country's road network under proposals being developed by the Government.
Alistair Darling, the Secretary of State for Transport, revealed that pilot areas will be selected in just 24 months' time as he made clear his determination to press ahead with a national road pricing scheme.
Each of Britain's 24 million vehicles would be tracked by satellite if a variable "pay-as-you-drive" charge replaces the current road tax.
In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, Mr Darling warned that unless action is taken now, the country "could face gridlock" within two decades.
Official research suggests national road pricing could increase the capacity of Britain's network by as much as 40 per cent at a stroke, he said.
The rapid uptake of satellite navigational technology in cars is helping to usher in the new "pay-as-you-drive" charge much sooner than had been expected. Figures contained in a government feasibility study have suggested motorists could pay up to £1.34 for each mile they travel during peak hours on the most congested roads.
Although a fully operational national scheme is still considered to be a decade away, Mr Darling said local schemes could be up and running within five years. Manchester is considered a front-runner, with local authorities in the Midlands and London also pressing to be considered for a £2.5bn central fund to introduce the change.
Most of the necessary technology already exists. Lorries will be tracked by satellite and charged accordingly from 2007. The main obstacle to constructing a scheme to track Britain's 24 million private vehicles is public opinion, and Mr Darling is determined to start making the case now.
"You could dance around this for years but every year the problem is getting worse," he said.
"We have got to do everything we can during the course of this Parliament to decide whether or not we go with road pricing. Something of this magnitude will span several parliaments and you need 'buy-in' not just from political parties but also from the general public.
"Drivers have got to see that they benefit," he said, adding that one of the "weaknesses" of the congestion charging scheme introduced in the capital by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was that it delivered a "general benefit not a particular benefit". Motorists could feel they are paying a penalty to support buses they do not use.
The national road-pricing scheme, by contrast, has got to work so there's "something in it for me", said Mr Darling in advance of a keynote speech on the issue this Thursday.
Despite his insistence that the scheme would lead to no overall increase in the level of taxation as road taxes and fuel duties are reduced or abolished, it is bound to prompt fresh claims that Labour is waging a "war on motorists".
Some campaigners, meanwhile, are pressing Mr Darling to introduce new levies on individual roads immediately, using existing microwave technology or tolls. But that would force traffic on to quieter roads while entrenching opposition to a national scheme, ministers believe.
However, new and expanded roads are likely to see innovations such as car-sharing lanes, available to single drivers only if they pay a premium.


Geoslavery: GPS and technological tyranny

March 5, 2003
KU researcher warns against potential threat of 'geoslavery'




NEWS COVER 09.29.04 
Big Brother In Your Car

Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com


Data Mining and Surveillance
They're Watching You (about data mining corporations versus personal privacy)

... We appear to be on the brink of a post-September 11 surveillance society. In one optimistic scenario, the U.S. is employing its full range of technical ingenuity to ferret out terrorists, using all the resources of the Digital Age and its quirky software geniuses. Meanwhile, dazzling new biometric identifiers -- iris scans, voiceprints, DNA registries, and facial recognition software -- are about to reduce identity theft to a quaint memory even while they shorten airport security lines and speed up credit approvals.
But in a less appealing second scenario, we could be on the verge of surrendering every detail about our private lives to an all-knowing Big Brother alliance of cops and mysterious private security corporations. They'll promise to protect us from terrorists. But along with that safety, we'll face arbitrary and unappealable decisions on who can fly in a commercial airliner, rent a truck, borrow money, or even stay out of jail.
That's the conundrum at the center of No Place to Hide, a finely balanced look at the see-saw struggle between security and privacy. Author Robert O'Harrow Jr., a Washington Post reporter, deftly shows how the government and its contractors have been lurching between these two goals ever since the September 11 terrorist attacks raised homeland security to the public's top priority.
The biggest threat and the biggest promise seem to lie not with official government databases but with the private companies that sell their information to all levels of government and to banks, airlines, credit-card companies, mortgage holders, car-rental agencies, and the like. ...
After September 11, it was only natural that these companies would volunteer their services in tracking terrorists. They had a head start in a critical technology: data mining. In practical terms, that involves cross-indexing every conceivable source of information -- unlisted telephone numbers, credit-card records, appliance warranty cards, insurance claims, arrest warrants, Social Security numbers, child custody orders, book purchases, E-ZPass records -- to compile a list of suspects or even possible terrorists that need to be placed on the Homeland Security Dept.'s "no fly" list.....


PROMIS Connections to Cheney Control of 9/11 Attacks Confirmed, by Jamey Hecht,
With research assistance by Michael Kane and editorial comment by Michael C. Ruppert





Eyes on the road
February 3, 2006 - 11:19AM

Speed cameras, red-light cameras, e-tags. Innocuous technology to make the roads safer and our journey simpler ... or a series of "Little Brothers" keeping track of our every move? Nikki Barrowclough looks behind the boom in traffic monitoring.
Eight years ago, on the night that a Saudi diplomat was brutally murdered in his Canberra apartment, a car was filmed travelling south along the Hume Highway towards the national capital. Then, a few hours later, it was filmed heading north back towards Sydney.
The car wasn't being tailed by the Australian authorities, the Saudis or anyone else. The "spy" was a humble traffic camera, although this emerged only after four people were arrested and brought to trial over the diplomat's violent death. The fact that the camera had been set up to monitor speeding and unregistered trucks didn't cause a ripple. The candid Safe-T-Cam had, in fact, filmed every vehicle travelling along that stretch of the Hume. So when the diplomat's ex-lover insisted to police that she and her new boyfriend had been in Sydney at the time of the crime, the authorities had only to look at an image of her car fleeing back up the highway to know that she was lying.
Few people would be troubled by the use of traffic cameras to locate criminal suspects. But the Canberra incident highlights how the mass surveillance of motorists, far from being an Orwellian conspiracy theory, is now routinely practised and growing more pervasive by the year. In Australia and other major Western countries, traffic is increasingly monitored with the sort of sophisticated technology that makes the image of a shadowy figure watching through binoculars seem impossibly quaint. Whether we're appearing in "real time" on one of the hundreds of traffic cameras operated by central command centres in Melbourne and Sydney, being "flashed" on a speed or red-light camera operated by the police, or clocked on a toll road with our seemingly innocent e-tags, it's almost impossible to drive anywhere without being monitored and/or leaving an electronic data trail.
It's even getting harder to disappear on obscure back roads thanks to GPS - the US military-developed global positioning system whose satellite tracking can pinpoint a car's location to within a few metres. A group of Stanford University academics in the US are reportedly working on satellite navigation systems so accurate they will be able to tell authorities whether you're in your car or standing next to it. This is revolutionary technology, and great if you get lost or have an accident or your car is stolen. But there's a chilling aspect to it all as well - namely, the loss of individual privacy.
Two years ago, the Office of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner devoted an entire edition of its newsletter, Privacy Aware, to just one subject: "Privacy and the Car". It included a brief section on telematics, the term used to describe the combining of satellite GPS, in-car computers and mobile phone technologies. "Telematics raises concerns because, while GPS receivers cannot send data back to a central location, mobile phones can. Used together, they turn the vehicles they're embedded in into very powerful tracking and monitoring devices," the report declared.
How much covert monitoring goes on in tandem with open surveillance, such as speed cameras, is anyone's guess, because that's not the sort of information governments readily disclose. Professor Roger Clarke, a Canberra consultant in data surveillance and information privacy, regards the Hume Highway incident as an example of "function creep" - when technology, set up for one purpose, secretly ends up serving another purpose as well. And function creep, he says, is a way in which the "surveillance society" has sneaked under the public's guard.
"The social and political commentators have missed it, but what's more worrying is that young people have grown up with surveillance and have a different attitude to it," Clarke says. "They think life's like that."
Governments and transport authorities insist that such surveillance systems are totally benign. They are about road safety, keeping people alive, and managing increasing volumes of traffic more efficiently, they say. This isn't just soothing rhetoric - with around 1600 deaths on Australian roads last year alone, road safety is a huge issue - but at the same time we seem to have ceded our civil rights as motorists.
Cameron Murphy, president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, does not doubt that surveillance technology is about much more than simple traffic management.
"Most people are aware that speed cameras and red-light cameras are obviously there for infringement purposes," Murphy says. "But we are also aware that there's an extensive network of cameras that can track people from one end of the city to the other, along freeways and on main arterial roads.
"You should be able to go from A to B without the government monitoring you. If the prime motive is traffic management alone, then you don't have to survey one end of the freeway to the other - it doesn't add up. That's when it becomes an invasion of privacy ... Recording where people go, what time of day they travel. If there aren't appropriate controls, the data could be used for commercial purposes or by any other government agency."
Given the fear of terrorism and the heightened national security alert, the potential of some of the new "smart road" technologies is obvious. For instance, British firm Hills Numberplates has already devised so-called e-Plates, numberplates embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. These tags act as tracking devices that transmit a unique, encrypted ID code via silicon chips that cannot be seen or removed. Known as a silent technology, RFID is sometimes described as a sophisticated barcode because it can identify and track goods from a distance.
Hills Numberplates claims a single "reader" positioned at the roadside can identify dozens of vehicles fitted with an e-Plate, moving at any speed, at a distance of up to 100 metres. But will they catch on here? VicRoads has no plans to bring in e-Plates. However, the NSW Roads & Traffic Authority says they have certainly been up for discussion - though as yet there's no decision to introduce them.
"But as with everything of this nature, it's a case of watch this space," a spokesman says.
Transport authorities are also keeping an open mind about an electronic version of
the vehicle identification number (VIN) that comes with every car. A Department of Transport and Regional Services spokesperson in Canberra says that while there are no plans "at this point in time" for an electronic VIN, that doesn't mean it won't happen.
Melbourne-based academic Professor Marcus Wigan, an adviser to the US Department of Transport, is also the Australian Privacy Foundation's spokesman on intelligent transport systems. He says e-VINs (which would transmit to a central location as cars pass specific points) are simply a more efficient way of managing the many regulatory aspects of the identity of vehicles. An e-VIN would certainly decimate the stolen car trade, but it would also obviously increase the ability of authorities to track cars and monitor daily travel routines.
The expression "intelligent transport systems" (ITS) is a catch-all phrase for
the in-car electronics, smarter roads, satellite navigation technology, tolling systems and remote road monitoring being employed increasingly throughout the world - sometimes without limit.
Last September, as Hurricane Rita bore down on Texas, and hundreds of thousands
of motorists fleeing the Houston area became trapped in a 200-kilometre traffic jam in which cars were abandoned and people collapsed from heat exhaustion, officers from the state's highway system were reportedly scanning e-tags to make sure evacuees had paid their tolls.
Meanwhile, London's Independent newspaper reported late last month that the United Kingdom was about to become the first country in the world where all motorists would be monitored by a vast network of cameras that would read the licence plates of every passing car. Neither the Home Office nor the British police denied the story, or the paper's claim that the ultimate plan was to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that police and security services could analyse the journeys of individual drivers.
And in the US, the Washington-based Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office - a powerful, 500-strong group of car manufacturers, technology companies and government interests - has reportedly spent more than $4 billion and almost 15 years developing a system of tracking and sensor technology that would collect data on the movements of every driver and public transport user. The stated aim of this system, known as the Integrated Network of Transportation Information, is to reduce the 40,000 or so annual road deaths in America
by allowing government agencies to intervene directly between drivers, their cars and the road. And authorities want to have it in place within the next decade.
Whether or not they were designed for such purposes, what intelligent transport systems do is identify specific vehicles - and, therefore, their drivers.
The term first cropped up in Australia about 15 years ago. In 1992, an organisation called Intelligent Transport Systems Australia was set up in Melbourne, and today its membership base includes government, scientific, academic and car manufacturing groups. The group's executive director, Brent Stafford, says he expects that all new vehicles will be equipped with satellite navigation and telematics by 2010. And while he says he understands people's unease about such technologies, he can't see why such systems would be used to track Australians en masse, as seems to be the intent in Britain.
"It's quite easy to track the movements of every vehicle, but you'd have to ask, 'What for?'" says Stafford. "You'd also have to consider how much it would cost. ITS is the application of technology to transport. It's not the application of technology to security. The fact is, there'll be lots of Little Brothers looking after you, but no Big Brother spying on you."
Lachlan McIntosh, chief executive of the Australian Automobile Association, shares Stafford's view. "Why would you want to track everybody? And what would you do with all that data?" he asks.
When Good Weekend suggests to him that, given the uncertain times we live in, such surveillance options could be very attractive to government departments, he replies: "In France during World War II, everyone was tracked and monitored without these technologies.
I think surveillance comes and goes in society ... If there's a political will to monitor what everybody does, then it's likely to happen.
"In the end, there are a lot of benefits in monitoring where you are: the emergency response if you are to have an accident, for instance ... If, as you say, this will happen, and everyone had a monitoring device in their car that said they just had an accident, we may well save 100 or 200 lives a year. Okay, you may well have been going to Cronulla when you shouldn't have been, or maybe you had an unfortunate crash and nearly died, but you were saved because of the device. There are trade-offs in those discussions, and we often forget the benefits when we talk about the downside."
There are also advantages in being able to keep an eye on hazardous cargo or large sums of money, he adds. "We all want to know that if a cargo of ammonium nitrate goes missing, it can be tracked and found. Is that an intrusive activity on the driver of the truck? Well, maybe it is, but it's a security mechanism as well. Now, should you want to put surveillance on a particular car for some criminal activity, I imagine you would need a warrant and you would have to go to a magistrate to obtain it. So I would think Australians would want to ensure that they are protected through our court system against the undue use of surveillance."
People have to be informed about the benefits of the new technology, what the implications are and what the risks are, he adds. "As long as we have that sort of reasonably informed debate in Australia, I think we're likely to want to adopt the latest technology."
But is there debate? Dr Peter Chen, a political scientist who lectures in communications at the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University, says Australians tend to be relatively passive when it comes to such matters.
"While we like to tell ourselves that we have a healthy disregard for government, it's total fiction. We're very accepting of increased state security and surveillance for whatever reason," Chen believes. And when governments talk up safety as a way of getting more surveillance systems under the wire without causing public alarm, we generally accept official reasoning.
"That's the argument that's always used," says Chen. "No government ever says we're introducing wide-scale surveillance for anything but notions of public safety, and while the paranoid concerns of some people are somewhat overstated, systematic surveillance technologies are very compelling tools for governments of all persuasions, and tend to inevitably lead to the expansion of their use into other areas of public policy."
Remote surveillance, like static cameras and portable speed cameras, is cheap, too; much cheaper than human surveillance. "This was a key argument in the government's support for electronic tagging of terrorist suspects late last year: surveillance technologies are cheaper than policing," he says.
Police in NSW recently began using high-tech scanning units that employ automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) technology to "read" the registration of passing vehicles and check them against an RTA database, as a way of detecting stolen and unregistered vehicles. Victoria Police trialled the technology, too, but has opted instead for mobile data terminals linked to the main police computer system, from which police can also access the VicRoads registration database. Seven hundred of these terminals are now being fitted to police cars, motorbikes, boats and helicopters by the Victorian Department of Justice.
Paul Chadwick, the Victorian Privacy Commissioner, wrote about ANPR technology during the trial. The systems, he pointed out, can be linked to existing surveillance camera systems, "so multiplying the 'eyes' of the State, and can be linked to a variety of databases, so expanding the State's 'memory'".
Meanwhile, the ordinary motorist, blithely driving across town or to a lunch in the country, should think twice about e-tags - those small, wireless electronic transponders attached to the windscreen that collect information about a car's movements and charge the owner a toll.
The e-tag revolution kicked off in Melbourne in 2000 with the opening of the privately operated, 22-kilometre CityLink, one of the world's first automated, fully electronic toll roads. In Sydney, both the controversial Cross City Tunnel and the recently opened Westlink M7 are also fully automated. This means that toll-road operators, whether they're government or private companies, can collect personal information such as your vehicle registration, driver's licence number, credit card details, name and address and your pattern of travel.
And that's a concern to lawyer Anna Johnston, a former NSW deputy privacy commissioner who's now the chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation. As she notes, drivers on these toll roads now have no choice but to identify themselves every time they use them. "I don't want to indulge in conspiracy theories, or say that we have reached that 'Big Brother' point," she says, "but there is a danger we are sleepwalking into a situation where more and more of our information can be logged, tracked, profiled and matched in ways that haven't really been contemplated in the past. That may not be the intention at the time a new technology is introduced - but of course with each new technology, with each new chipping-away at our privacy, it makes the next step so much easier."
Johnston's foundation campaigned against a law passed in NSW last May, which allows the RTA to issue photo identity cards to non-drivers over 16 years of age (VicRoads has no plans to introduce the voluntary scheme).
"We weren't against the concept of a photo ID card for non-drivers - there's a need for it, clearly - but we suggested an alternative way to develop it, so that it didn't result in one database being held by one agency covering the entire population, whose details get printed on a card which is both unique and universal. All that, of course, is like a national ID card, which Australians rejected in 1987."
The bill didn't limit the type of information that could be collected and stored, Johnston says, and the legislation specifically allowed the RTA to put the two databases (driver and non-driver) together. She's concerned the latter will eventually happen.
However, both the RTA and a spokesman for the NSW Roads Minister, Joe Tripodi, assured Good Weekend that the photocard database would be kept separate from other databases within the authority, and that there would be separate databases for drivers and non-drivers. In a statement, the RTA also said that databases kept on NSW motorists are not integrated, for privacy reasons, and that access to one database doesn't automatically mean access to another.
The inevitability of more privately run, cashless toll roads, and a more widespread user-pays road system means there'll be more databases and more information stored on motorists. Privacy laws protect access to all databases, although privacy advocates tend to be lukewarm about their effectiveness.
"You get principles that sound great in theory, like, 'This information should only
be used for the purpose for which it's collected, or with your consent', and people say, 'Oh good'," says Nigel Waters of the Australian Privacy Foundation. "Then you look at the fine print where it says, 'Except in emergencies, for law enforcement and a whole raft of other exemptions.'"
But the acting Privacy Commissioner for NSW, John Dickie, argues the Privacy Act is not without teeth. "Government departments and agencies are subject to it. People can't just wander off and get around things - [though] if there is a serious crime, all bets are off," he says.
Four years ago, a former employee of Transurban, the company that operates CityLink, admitted in court that he had passed on the credit-card details of more than 8000 CityLink customers to cyber thieves, who then used them for an internet spending spree. A subsequent review of Transurban's information handling practices by the Office of the Federal Privacy Commissioner found Transurban needed to take steps to reduce the risk of further privacy breaches. The FPC won't detail what those measures involved.
A spokesman says there were no fundamental problems and that Transurban merely
needed to "enhance" existing systems.
Meanwhile, Transurban has told Good Weekend that it takes the protection of personal information seriously, and that the manner in which it manages the use and disclosure of personal information goes beyond obligations imposed by state and federal privacy legislation. The information it collects on its database is used only for collecting tolls and enforcing toll collection, isn't available to other organisations, and is only made available to police or to an authorised government body once there's a properly authorised written request.
It's not just toll-road operators who are amassing huge amounts of data on private citizens. In what could almost be called privatised intelligence gathering, the outsourcing of traffic management systems to private-sector organisations means more databases still. One such organisation is Tenix, the contractor employed by Victoria Police to operate its speed cameras - and which wrongly fined more than 100 motorists last July after the wrong speed limit was entered into the machine by an operator.
"I guess if there's a concern about the private-sector organisations holding increasing amounts of data, it's, 'Where are they holding it, how secure is it, and what purpose are they putting it to?'" says Monash's Peter Chen, who believes we will soon be talking about "data laundering" the way we now talk about money laundering. "I think it's safe to say that governments around the world, not just in Australia, have been lousy at regulating the movement of data about members of the public held by private-sector organisations.
"We have privacy laws which are relatively tight, but ... if you put a large chunk of the general surveillance system data into private hands, the company that picks up that contract will undertake that work in the most effective and efficient way for their profitability. And that might mean warehousing and processing data offshore, outside the legal jurisdiction of Australian governments. If I were a car company, I'd be very interested in finding out about the sort of people who drive a lot, who they are, what are their characteristics. If that information was held in a country with
poor data security legal provisions, then data could be sold, resold or 'stolen'. That's not a conspiracy theory view. It happens all the time. Large amounts of data get 'lost' in transit every year around the world."
Marcus Wigan points out that no one "owns" the information stored about them - so there's very little redress for consumers if their data is misused. "There's no such thing as intellectual property when it comes to information about you," he says. Nevertheless, he cautions against paranoia over intelligent transport systems, even though he has his own concerns about the data building up as a result of new technologies.
"The rules we have to manage that information are reasonably good, but not so good as to handle a situation of future cross-linkages between all those databases," he says. "So if we have [someone's] entire historical records on a range of individual databases, and at some point, for administrative convenience, a link is drawn between them, then the result is a complete history of locations, times, events of many different kinds that suddenly becomes available as a single resource. That's a quantum leap.
"Your vehicle will have had its numberplate [photographed] various times, your e-tag will have been caught - you only have to have one identification token transferred between two or more agencies for an amazing degree of record linkage with other sources of information about you and your activities over a considerable period.
"The ability to manage this is improving incredibly quickly. Once this is achieved -
and it's a few years away yet - we suddenly get a retrospective loss of privacy of an enormous order [and] ITS systems become surveillance systems.
"I'm not saying they'll be used in that way," Wigan adds. "I'm saying the potential for that to occur ... would then become a low-cost, low-effort issue. We need to use the time until all this is in place to educate and earn the trust of the community to secure the very real benefits of intelligent transport systems."
Published in the Good Weekend on January 28, 2006