Slashdot Mirror
Tracking People Via Cell Phone
An anonymous reader writes "According to the articleat the Guardian the UK Government have been working on a project to use the widely available mobile phone masts as a form of localised radar to track both people and vehicles without their knowledge.
Supposedly there is even work on the way to give this project the ability to see through walls!
Maybe Philip K. Dick was right to be paranoid about governments."
Yeah, or even Thomas Jefferson. Or the ancient Greeks.
-Peter
Apparently, the Soviet Union in Stalin's time was populated with excessive numbers of important people. Fortunately, that anomaly was fixed.
Simple example: Let's say you're gay and living in an area where being gay is cause for persecution (even if it's not illegal). You may not be doing anything WRONG, but knowing everything you do sure makes it easier to persecute you.
And what if your lifestyle or religion or whatever you now lawfully do is declared illegal? Now all that observation of your formerly-innocent activities can be used as evidence against you.
And THAT is the problem with the philosophy of "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
In the past, all or most of technology-related privacy concerns have differed from this one in a single simple aspect: you basically had to be an active user of whatever technology was exploiting your privacy to be vulnerable to it. Therefore in order for your credit card to be stolen online, it needed to, at some point be transmitted via an online purchase or transaction. More to the point, you actually had to OWN a credit card. A person with all his wealth in gold buried in his back yard had nothing to fear from hackers and the Y2K bug.
Similarly, spam, web tracking, email monitoring, phone tapping, phone-based GPS geo-location; all of these invasions could, by eschewing the technologies involved and choosing to live a simpler, less connected life, be avoided. The sacrifice involved was significant, but not unmanagable.
If technologies like these become acceptable forms of populace control, this axiom of "it only affects you if you use it" will no longer apply. A technophobe with no phone line and no electricity living in a cold-water flat in London will still be vulnerable to electronic espionage. The current range of this technology is anywhere cellular service is available. Considering I was able to make a call this summer from the peak of a 5000 meter isolated mountain top in the remote Italian alps, I find this idea truly terrifying.
The UK has, in recent years, been a bellweather for survaillance practices worldwide. As an American citizen beginning to see the sort of widespread video survaillance now common to those living in England, I make a simple plea to any UK citizens reading: Do anything within your power to stop this. Write letters, mail threatening powders, strip in front of parliment. (Note: don't mail powder. thats a bad idea) Anything to keep this idea from gaining a foothold. I ask this of you so that you aren't subjected to it, but also so that it doesn't eventually bleed into my country.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
I don't have anything to hide ... so I don't mind this.
Now thats an interesting attitude. Perhaps you have nothing illegal to hide (that you know of) but maybe you don't want [insert anyone] to know every step you take? You might not want your employer to know that you have been going to interviews at a compediting company? Or your wife to know that you spend more time at your local bar than you should?
A bit extreme perhaps, but i still don't like it.
Oh, did i mention that turning off your phone isn't going to help? Batteries out is the key....
If an invasion of your privacy isn't a big deal to you then I don't even know where to start the argument..
True ravers don't need drugs
the point is that innocence has never been an assurance that someone will not abuse power against you. many post sept-11 muslims in the US were perfectly innocent (95% of those arrested as a matter of fact) and yet thousands were rounded up and held for 6-9 months or more on end. the japanese-americans during WWII were innocent, but were rounded up into camps. the jews in germany were innocent. and in our current times (within the last year) the government has interrogated a large number of citizens for 'unamerican activities'. the gov has also recieved thousands of complaints about 'suspicious' (dark-skinned) people who the government went on to detain, arrest, or degrade. So yes, there IS a precedent for those who have 'nothing to hide' needing protection from government power.