Brit Fascists To Track Motorists

Well, I see on the news that the British Government are installing cameras
with OCR capabilities throughout London so that they can track all the
cars which pass by. Of course this is only to track 'terrorists and car
thieves', not ordinary law-abiding citizens, no, no, no, not at all, guvnor,
so that's all right. And don't worry about all those reports that the British
Police Force is full of corrupt officers who the superiors can't fire.
  I wonder why no-one in the media has pointed out that terrorists and car
thieves, being, after all, criminals, will have no qualms about strapping
on false plates. Oh, but I guess it will catch 'stupid' terrorists and
criminals, so that's all right after all.

  Odd that this was announced the same day as other annoucements of the 
British Government joining an EU-wide system to track millions of European
subversives (including, apparently, those who have been to rock concerts?). I 
bet it's just one of them coincidences...

SpyMonger

At 02:34 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>[...]
>> And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided
>> it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside
>> of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes...
>> The rest of it's just implementation details.
>
>Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and
>leave the license plate off. 

If the government wants to take over all the public commons right-of-way
and pave it for roads, I'm not saying I'm not willing to pay them
for the use of all their nice concrete and asphalt*, though 
government-built roads have led to a whole lot of ecological and social
problems that are far more severe than those a free-market road system
would have given us; free-marketers without eminent domain would have
built fewer roads in generally more efficient places because they'd need 
to make money on each one, though eminent domain may be enough of a 
cost-saver to make up for lower efficiency, and housing and business 
development would have organized more compactly around the roads and
railroads that did get built, allowing less car use.

But the government could have given us all license plates that say 
[StateName][Year] in big letters and the tax receipt in small letters
instead of [CarIdentifier][StateColor] in big and [Year][Receipt#] in small 
like most states do today or [CarIdentifier] in big letters on the back
and [InspectionMonth][YearColor] on the windshield like New Jersey does.
Somehow cops manage to zing people for late car tax payment anyway,
and somehow tax collectors manage to collect taxes on real estate
(which doesn't move, but has owners that do) and wages (paid by often-
mobile businesses to often-mobile workers) and sales well enough without
requiring big taxpayer id# signs on houses, wallets, and merchandise.
And somehow before the automobile we got by without license plates on
horses and buggies and cows, though some people branded their horses or 
cows or painted their names on buggies without the law requiring it
so they could demonstrate ownership if there was a dispute.

The choice to require easy-to-use-rapidly unique identifiers or not 
affects the kinds of transactions that can be done with them.
License plate numbers are primarily useful for social control,
though they're occasionally useful for recovering stolen cars
(if the thieves didn't use fake plates) or following slow white Broncos.
As computers and radio communications increase the speed and 
flexibility of transactions, there are more ways to use them
(cops can look up license plates any time they stop cars, allowing them
to identify dangerous criminals who are too dumb to use fake plates)
mostly for social control, but also to enforce tax collection.

They also make it easier to charge for transactions such as
bridge and freeway use - but they bias the economics towards an
account-based system (since you've got an existing key)
rather than a pay-as-you-go system (like subway tokens or turnpike tolls)
or a pay-by-the-month system (like many transit systems offer,
even for systems like BART and CalTrain that are well equipped for
distance-based billing and some bridge tolls.)  Changing the
transaction costs changes the possible relationships between
supplier and customer, and if the government wants to use them
for social control, some of those relationships make it easier.

[*There are people who refuse to get car license plates and
driver's licenses and marriage licenses and pay taxes on principle, and 
they spend a lot of time arguing common law to judges and cops.
I'm not one of them - as George Gordon says, if you're not having fun
doing this kind of thing, you shouldn't be wasting your time doing it,
and you also risk losing and setting bad precedents.  Our buddy Jim
Bell may or may not agree by this point in time....]

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

At 02:34 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
>On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
>[...]
>> And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided
>> it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside
>> of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes...
>> The rest of it's just implementation details.
>
>Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and
>leave the license plate off. 

Sabotaging your plates so they weren't machine readable or using a car 
registered in Slovenia or Wisconsin (both possible in the UK) would make more 
sense.

DCF
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On Fri, 25 Jul 1997 frissell@panix.com wrote:

> Sabotaging your plates so they weren't machine readable or using a car 
> registered in Slovenia or Wisconsin (both possible in the UK) would make more 
> sense.

Would a spy trying to infiltrate a building wear a dark hat, sunglasses,
a trench coat, and a briefcase handcuffed to her wrist, or would she dress
as the people entering and leaving the building?

Erm, just how many Wisconsin or Slovenian plates are you likely to see in
a given hour passing through a camera's view?  You'd stand out like a
haystack in the middle of NYC.   You want to trick the OCR by using a
plate where the 1's can get confused with the I's, O's with Q's, etc..

Or spraying your plates with mud or dust or something...  You certainly,
don't want to stand out and call attention to your car.

Didn't someone mention using IR lasers to knock out cameras in a similar
topic?  Would perhaps a broadband IR transmission do the same without
harming humans? (So they won't rear end you of course.) :)

=====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos==============
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<--*-->| ------------------ | syrup, don't you?"                     |\/|\/
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.+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"| strange aeons, even death may die.     |.....
======================== http://www.sundernet.com =========================

On Thu, Jul 24, 1997 at 06:54:29PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> At 02:34 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
> >On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> >[...]
> >> And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided
> >> it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside
> >> of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes...
> >> The rest of it's just implementation details.
> >
> >Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and
> >leave the license plate off. 
> 
> If the government wants to take over all the public commons right-of-way
> and pave it for roads, I'm not saying I'm not willing to pay them
> for the use of all their nice concrete and asphalt*, though 
> government-built roads have led to a whole lot of ecological and social
> problems

Can't deny that.

> that are far more severe than those a free-market road system
> would have given us;

I see no evidence for this.  Do you know of any national level 
free-market road system that would demonstrate this?  I don't think 
there are any.

> free-marketers without eminent domain would have
> built fewer roads in generally more efficient places because they'd need 
> to make money on each one, though eminent domain may be enough of a 
> cost-saver to make up for lower efficiency, and housing and business 
> development would have organized more compactly around the roads and
> railroads that did get built, allowing less car use.

I don't know.  Maybe, maybe not.  This is all hypothetical.

However, I think that strong identification systems for people and
cars would develop on private road systems, as well.  The reason is
that traffic rules would have to be enforced on private roads just as
much as they do on public roads.  Roadway operators would still want
drivers licenses to identify drivers who were competent, and would
still want to be able to identify cars as an aid to identifying
people.

More generally, while much of the argument on cpunks has been about
the government invading privacy, in fact, of course, "private
enterprise" has no motivation to respect privacy rights -- knowledge
about people is just another commodity.

In fact, there was a recent thread about how there was no such thing 
as "privacy rights"...

[...]
								
> And somehow before the automobile we got by without license plates on
> horses and buggies and cows, though some people branded their horses or 
> cows or painted their names on buggies without the law requiring it
> so they could demonstrate ownership if there was a dispute.

My dad had his own brand, many years ago ("WC on a Bench" -- I used 
to have a wooden plaque with it burned in...).  There was and still is 
a great deal more government involvement in brands than you may 
realize.  Brands are registered, there are "brand inspectors", etc.  

But in any case, *many* things were different 150 years ago. 
Arguably, you didn't need things like license plates, because
*everything* was much less anonymous -- the web of personal knowledge
of other people's doings was much more complete.  You didn't need to
put your name on your buggy, because everybody locally knew it was
yours.

[...]

> Changing the
> transaction costs changes the possible relationships between
> supplier and customer, and if the government wants to use them
> for social control, some of those relationships make it easier.

That's the leitmotif of this discussion, isn't it -- government use of
technology for social control.  In my view, however, it is a mistake
to focus on the government.  Society exerts social control, not just
the government.  We have jobs, families, friends, habits, training,
education -- a whole web of relationships that channel our activities 
and our thinking.

If you consider what "freedom" means in the context of this larger 
definition of "social control" things become rather subtle.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

At 08:15 PM 7/23/97 +0200, Name Withheld by Request wrote:
>  Well, I see on the news that the British Government are installing cameras
>with OCR capabilities throughout London so that they can track all the
>cars which pass by. Of course this is only to track 'terrorists and car
>thieves', not ordinary law-abiding citizens, no, no, no, not at all, guvnor,

I'm surprised the technology is reliable enough now, but if it's not, 
give Moore's Law another couple of years and the computers will get faster,
while the algorithms will also get tuned better, so it will be soon.
It's at least good enough today if you don't mind spending big bucks on
computers that'll be more affordable in a couple of years.

When San Francisco was going to close a major freeway for repairs,
they videotaped traffic, had people type in the license plates from tape,
looked them up in the DMV database, and sent them nice letters asking
them to take a different highway for the next few months.
Took a bit longer, but labor's cheap, and they didn't need instant results;
a computerized system fast enough to track cars on-line opens up 
a lot more possibilities, both for practical applications and abuse.

David Chaum's DigiCash was designed for applications such as tollbooths,
which would permit uncrackable payment while preserving privacy;
the technology's catching up enough to track everybody at a tollbooth
cheaply enough to make it obsolete before it's widely deployed.
You can already do it now with bar-code-like bumper stickers,
but when you can just bill for road use by license plate, there's
a lot less administration required.

And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided
it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside
of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes...
The rest of it's just implementation details.


>  Odd that this was announced the same day as other annoucements of the 
>British Government joining an EU-wide system to track millions of European
>subversives (including, apparently, those who have been to rock
concerts?). I 
>bet it's just one of them coincidences...

Aren't those European Data Privacy laws great!


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp
#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)

On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
[...]
> And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided
> it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside
> of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes...
> The rest of it's just implementation details.

Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and
leave the license plate off. 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

On Thu, 24 Jul 1997, Kent Crispin wrote:

> Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and
> leave the license plate off. 

Of course you could start your own mailing list for NSA spooks and the
like and only send email there.

=====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos==============
.+.^.+.|  Ray Arachelian    | "If you wanna touch the sky, you must  |./|\.
..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com| be prepared to die.  And I hate cough  |/\|/\
<--*-->| ------------------ | syrup, don't you?"                     |\/|\/
../|\..| "A toast to Odin,  | For with those which eternal lie, with |.\|/.
.+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"| strange aeons, even death may die.     |.....
======================== http://www.sundernet.com =========================