Re: Real-time surveillance of the police

At  2:04 PM 12/11/94 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>This was an idea explored in detail by David Brin in 1990 in his novel
>"Earth." Video cameras are ubiquitous and have a major effect on
>casual street crime.

Hard to forget Brin's description of little old ladies sitting on their
front porches, "armed" will full-sensoria headgear, laying in wait for
extremely uneducated juvenile miscreants... Humorous.

>This scenario is a likely way that "position escrow" will evolve, from
>a voluntary escrowing (incl. timestamping, etc.). "Those with nothing
>to hide" will agree to escrow their movements...this will exculpate
>them in suspected crimes, etc. A slippery slope.

In "City of Angles", Kim Stanley Robinson(?) talks about just a virtuous
all-surveilling governmental "privacy" authority which is supposed
"protect" your privacy from the police, who had to subpoena the information
to get it.

>
>On the topic of how these localizers actually work, I'm not at liberty
>to talk about the technology. It's novel, and uses a *lot* if digital
>signal processing. It doesn't use GPS and it's not a variant of
>cellular telephones.

I wonder if they're using an active/transponder system. That's what
O'Niell's Geostar system was designed with in the early '80's. It would
have put up cheaper sattellites and smaller earth transponders.  The way
you saved on transponder size was with very small bursts at very high
power. You could send a signal to a small net of satellites 30,000 miles up
with a box initially no bigger than an HP12C, and which would shrink more
with time.

The feds never liked Geostar 'cause they already had the passive/receiver
GPS in the works, and they wanted to "amortize" the social cost of an
essentially military (hence the requirement for a passive system) system on
the backs of commerce. The only thing which saved GPS for mere mortals like
us was the MIC's usual severe understimate of Grove's Law and the
exponential cost effectiveness of integrated circuits over time.

If my hunch is correct, with lots more local antennas, the power
requirements of the tranceiver, and as a result, the tranceiver size, gets
pretty small. Small enough to be worn on one's ankle.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
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Shipwright Development Corporation     who eats too little and sees Heaven and
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(617) 323-7923

Robert Hettinga wrote:

(quoting me)

> >On the topic of how these localizers actually work, I'm not at liberty
> >to talk about the technology. It's novel, and uses a *lot* if digital
> >signal processing. It doesn't use GPS and it's not a variant of
> >cellular telephones.
> 
> I wonder if they're using an active/transponder system. That's what
> O'Niell's Geostar system was designed with in the early '80's. It would
> have put up cheaper sattellites and smaller earth transponders.  The way
> you saved on transponder size was with very small bursts at very high
> power. You could send a signal to a small net of satellites 30,000 miles up
> with a box initially no bigger than an HP12C, and which would shrink more
> with time.

I don't plan to say much more, and won't be playing the "Twenty
Questions" game, but the system does _not_ use satellites or anything
of that sort. Satellites up the ante considerably, and aren't even
needed.

Radio is enough to get 1% positional accuracy (or better) and radio
can have better coverage in many places that GPS-like systems can't reach.

> the backs of commerce. The only thing which saved GPS for mere mortals like
> us was the MIC's usual severe understimate of Grove's Law and the
                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^
> exponential cost effectiveness of integrated circuits over time.

A minor nit, but that's "Moore's Law," an empirical observation made
by Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel and current Chairman, that
integrated circuit capacities (roughly, number of transistors, bits,
gates) were quadrupling every two years or so.

Gordon had this posted outside his cubicle (the guy was worth $300
million then, and he worked in a Westinghouse-walled cubicle....I
thought that was carrying egalitarianism a bit far...he's now worth
$1.5 billion) and we all wondered when the trend chart would be
broken. So far, it's been pretty accurate.

But of course his trend chart ("Moore's Law," so dubbed by pundits
around 1970, when he first showed his chart) is a conflation of a huge
number of interesting trends in lithography, capital spending,
microprocessor consumption, etc.

> If my hunch is correct, with lots more local antennas, the power
> requirements of the tranceiver, and as a result, the tranceiver size, gets
> pretty small. Small enough to be worn on one's ankle.

The transceivers get real small for other reasons, not because of
satellites. Think about this: no reason to have satellites 100 miles
overhead if there are thousands or tens of thousands of cooperating
units nearby....

I won't say more for now about this, even though the patent filings
may be accessible, and the work has been described at "Hackers" and a
few other places (including Washington, at ARPA, who is also funding
them--gulp). 

--Tim May


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