Miceal O’Ronain spotted a new item in the Times of London yesterday. He has also looked between the lines and seen where this will eventually go
The issue is, at least for now, congestion on the roads:
“…Satellite equipment to monitor every car journey will be ready only in a decade or more.”
[…]
“Satellite tracking and charging will be tried out on the lorries that use Britain’s roads under a scheme that will begin in 2006. If the experiment is successful, the system could be extended to cars as well.”
Here are the technical specifications for the system:
- EU network is preferred system
- A nationwide system would be likely to use the EU’s Galileo global-positioning network, an array of 30 satellites scheduled for launch in 2006 and 2007.
- The alternative, the US military GPS network, used by the current generation of satellite navigation and tracking devices, does not guarantee access to civilian clients. Galileo is designed for civil use and guarantees an uninterrupted service.
- Galileo will be accurate to 1 metre, GPS to only 30m. The lower accuracy of the US model could cause disputes on whether vehicles had actually entered charging zones.
But why stop with cars? Just surgically implant a transponder into each citizen of the UK. If you can do it for cars and wild life, you can do it to people.
Miceal O’Ronain
As if the terrifying implications for our civil liberties weren’t enough, there’s another side to this plot.
The statist apparatchik Alistair Darling was quoted as having “promised” this would result in no increase in taxation for motorists. Aside from the fact that all governments lie about this, neither his government nor any other is allowed to tie the hands of future administrations – so he would be introducing an electronic hand in your pocket, the depth of whose immersion would depend entirely on the whim of whichever chancellor we were lumbered with at a given moment.
This is a proposal which needs to be resisted with absolute opposition – it’s no exaggeration to say that it could entirely change the way we live our lives and our relationship with those who have usurped governance of us.
How do these apparatchik talk like this and not make their own skin crawl? What’s crazy is that usually they are cheerful and quite satisfied with their work; whistling as we all head to the death camps. (sorry about the hyperbole).
I tend to disagree with most of what I read on this site, but I’m totally with you on this matter.
I have heard that in theory anyone with a mobile phone switched on and in signal can already have their location pinpointed.
If road pricing is to be implemented fair enough, but there is no jutification for satellite tracking. A simple system of toll barriers where you hand over your coins and go would be quite sufficient.
I generally agree with most of what I read on this site, but I totally disagree with you on this matter.
The biggest social problem in Western societies is crime, not government abuse of private data (I view this as a fairly minor problem). Essentially crime results from anonymity. Anonomous people steal anonomous property (including vehicles). Lack of anonymity will eliminate 95% of crime and a much higher proportion of property crimes.
Not-with-standing what the government does people will choose to exchange their anonymity and that of their property in exchange for increased security. Twas always thus and it will happen irrespective of what governments does or doesnt do.
Otherwise this looks like an attempt to justify the Galileo boondogle. The so called guarantee is a legal guarantee (not an engineering guarantee) and is worth about as much your guarantee of a right to fair trial.
“Essentially crime results from anonymity.”
No, crime results from people committing criminal acts. Anonymity may or may not be involved. I would guess that in many crimes, there is no anonymity at all. The victim may even know the perp, but if the victim is sufficiently terrorized or dead, what diff?
The kinds of “crime” this universal tracking system will be used to focus on aren’t the violent ones, anyway. Violent criminals will jimmy this system, just as they steal license plates and IDs now.
Sorry, just another state intrusion, touted as having crime-fighting benefits, that will deliver no such thing.
This is a technical detail but a WAAS enabled GPS receiver is accurate down to a meter or two. All GPS receivers made in the last couple of years are WAAS. I have one on my boat and it is amazing.
I really hate to break this to you but the technology to do everything stated is already at the consumer level. No developments are required, only implementation.
Here, in the US, a number of companies are installing GPS receivers in company owned vehicles and receiving printouts of all details of the vehicle’s travels. This includes stops, speeds, locations and times. It is said to increase production.
There is no logical stopping point.
“No, crime results from people committing criminal acts.”
This is tautological rubbish! You might as well say crime results from laws. Without laws there would be no crime!
“Anonymity may or may not be involved. I would guess that in many crimes, there is no anonymity at all. The victim may even know the perp, but if the victim is sufficiently terrorized or dead, what diff?”
I didn’t say all crimes! There will some crimes from domestic disputes to suicide bombers that will be relatively unaffected by lack of anonymity (although lack of anonymity will significant impede preparations for suicide attacks as the Israelis have demonstrated). Also many of the domestic and person-to-person crimes have only recently been criminalised – domestic and pub brawls used to be viewed as non-criminal personal matters unless someone got seriously injured or killed.
As for most crimes, especially property crimes, the removal of anonymity will somewhere between dramatically reduce and completely eliminate them. One example of this effect is that when I was young in the UK, most people were paid in cash, and payroll robbery was common. The change to cheques eliminated this form of crime. Cos cheques are not anonomous (except to a very limited extent when cheques are negotiable instruments).
Read TomD! What he says is correct. This will happen cos people will choose it and the main impediment will be government aided and abetted by the Left who are always afraid of people making their own choices. I view this as a straight down the line Libertarian issue.
Look at the bright side: when, as will probably happen, the US finds it necessary to negate the Galileo satellites, all these intrusive schemes will come to a crashing end. Could be fairly entertaining.
As TomD pointed out, the technology to do these things already exists, and is in use elsewhere.
The vast majority of the property crime than I and most other people suffer would be made vastly worse by the complete destruction of privacy. I lose 50% of my income due to being robbed under threat of violence year in and year out by the state. Ending privacy just makes that even easier.
If individuals insist on doing business with identities clearly established, no capitalist libertarian could possibly object to that. But if you trust the STATE to have THAT degree of power over civil society by completely abolishing privacy, do not kid yourself you are a libertarian. You are in fact some sort of nightmarish Orwell-style totalitarian.
Phil Bradley wrote:
“Not-with-standing what the government does people will choose to exchange their anonymity and that of their property in exchange for increased security”
Well if people CHOSE to do that, nobody would have a problem with it. What on earth makes you think anyone will have any choice in the matter? When did we ever?
A couple of other points.
(1) GSP is accurate down to 1m or even less now; the “selective availability” that reduced its accuracy was turned off a few years ago.
(2) If they are relying on their own launch technology here, we can probably relax for a while. Can anyone say “Ariane”??
(3) Has nobody else realised that this is at least in part just a way of taking money off people who exceed the speed limit? I know it would be easy enough to put speed limiters on cars, but hey, that wouldn’t raise any revenue for the feds, would it?
One major problem with the associated proposals to use satellite tracking to enforce speed limits is that an internal or external agency that wants to freeze a country in the face of invasion only has to change the speed limits everywhere to zero.
Then only vehicles without the speed controls can move.
Ron:
You’re quite right. And I’d submit that the government will use such a scheme to prevent road congestion by preventing some cars from operating on some days of the week.
I heard about a similar scheme on Radio Vlaanderen Internationaal a few years back about getting cars to observe speed limits in the towns by having electronic transponder-activated governors that would make the cars unable to go faster than the speed limit. (The scheme was mooted especially with the idea of stopping cars from going too fast in neighborhoods with children. Any politician who claims to be doing things “for the children” has about as much concern for your children as Marc Dutroux or Jeffrey Dahmer.) So, I responded saying that somebody’s going to be able to hack into this system, and that if I were the hacker, I’d hack it so that all cars going to the Belgian seacost would be stopped, while any car in a school zone would be forced to go 120km/h or faster.
Anyone with any sense can see this is going to make all of our lives worse but what can we do to stop this ever going into effect?
And how will they enforce satellite systems being fitted to cars?