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Big Brother Gets a Brain
Gregus writes "The Village Voice delves into the DARPA's latest plan to track people and vehicle movement in cities, ostensibly for urban warfare, though this would be really handy watching 'suspicious' people in any city. "The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to 'track everything that moves.' " The actual DARPA RFP and briefings. I just feel more safe all the time."
How orwellian our world is becoming. He must have had a time machine or something. Seriously if you havn't read 1984 you really should. Everything is coming true!!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
I'm not too bothered if someone is tracking where I go and where my car goes within a city. I still have the privacy of my own home, which is the only place I really had privacy in the first place, and I have the added benefit of knowing that if my car gets stolen, then someone is tracking it for me. My only worry about this is what happens if the data collected by the government falls into the wrong hands? If someone had enough information about you to know what places you went to on a regular basis, they'd have enough information to know when you're not at home (and therefore the best time to break in and steal things from your house).
I feel the same about the government or my ISP tracking what I do online. If someone know what sites I visit and who I chat to, I'm not really that bothered. If I want to talk PRIVATELY, I'll use an encrypted connection. I don't do anything illegal online (warez, stealing music, etc) so I've nothing to worry about.
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The USGovt can't even manage the information they receive now. There are reams of information they had about the 9/11 plans that just didn't get invetigated, interrogations that are untranslated years after they happened, untold bytes that are simply stored and unexamined, we should abandon the notion that the government wants these capabilities to protect anyone.
The government wants this information because of a desire for power. Will this be used to scan for threats to the general public or to curtail and monitor the activites of those who threaten governmental power, like dissenting political activists? Look at the history of the abuse of the FBI by almost every executive administration for those answers.
This won't stop until the people pull the plug.
The best way to do is to be.
Ashcroft really scares me. Libertarians were all supported Bush in 2000. I wonder what they will do in 04. My guess is they are more unhappy with Bush then Clinton at this point thanks mostly to CHeney and Ashcroft.
http://saveie6.com/
I pretty much guessed as much when the DMV in our state issued everyone new license plates. The primary difference was that the new kind are many times more reflective than the old ones, making them ideal for tracking via camera at lengthy distances.
It couldn't be that a more reflective license plate makes your vehicle more visible, and thus less likely to be hit, could it?
That's why I voluntarily chose a highly reflective plate, when it became available.
Jesus Tapdancing Christ. Don't you feel that there are people way too close to the levers of power who would be happy if every citizen reported to their local Patriotic Office every day to prove that they were not a terrorist (powder residue tests, full cavity search, lie-detectopr test)?
I'm praying for a rip in the fabric of spacetime that lets the Founding Fathers through. They would be bitch slapping these bastards so hard....
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
While you may not be in college or high school, its views like yours that let democracy fall. So Bin Laden trained a few hundred terrorists (because of our egotistical superiority over the middle east, but thats a whole 'nother topic)... does that give the United States any right to "suspect everybody"??? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!
The reason that people live in this great country is because people have the freedom to do what they feel is necessary to protect their rights. If someone wants to "steal gas trucks and ram them into office buildings," certainly the government should take steps to stop them from doing so, but not at the expense of giving up our personal freedoms such as the right to privacy.
Sure, its a scary world, and the possibilities are definitely endless for terrorists who want to blow shit up. But being so gripped by fear to give up your freedom to live your life is the most idiotic way to live I've ever heard. There are millions of people around the world living under that kinda of facist/militaristic rule, and I'd be willing to bet that any one of them would LOVE to trade places with you, with the ability to use the internet to look up information they never knew existed before, to drive around in a car wherever they want, and if they desire, to rise up against an evil government and overthrow them!
Britain has shown that this system gets alot of bad people off the streets and prevents crime.
All this PARANOIA makes no sense. We want security. Big Brother sounds good to me. I don't want to be robbed and killed by some inner city negroes and don't want to die from from some extremist groups.
That means DARPA employees, NSA, CIA, FBI, police, Congressmen, Senators, the Executive, Fortunate Sons of Blue Chip dynasties, [RI|MP]AA execs, Enron/Worldcomm/Haliburton CEOs, high class hookers, roofied teenage pop star wannabes, assorted Princes and diplomats from oppressive oil rich dictatorships, coke dealers, transexual Thai ladyboy dominatrices and all, right?
I ask this because it'll be very interesting to see if Freedom of Information extends to letting We, the People find out the locations of those people, and specifically, interesting intersections of them in space-time.
I'm betting not in practice ("National Security" == "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"), but it'd be nice to assert it in principle about now to hopefully give Them a chance to pause for thought.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
On one hand, our government wants to track all movement.
.
On the other, they're terrified of a dissertation that uses simple data mining to reveal infrastructure weakness.
So . . . they're going to build a massive system, rely on it, and thus give people a nice jucy target to screw up. Knowing the government, it won't work anyway, or if it somehow works it'll be misused, making it only more laughable.
Besides, imagine what happens when someone Bluescreens national security . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
This stuff all already exists in various components. It is just being pieced together a little differently. It is another tool developed from existing components. Like most tools it can be used for good or evil. Even a hammer can be used for evil but nobody would consider outlawing hammers.
Like most people, I value my privacy. Matter of fact, I place a high value on my privacy. But when I am in public, I behave like I am in public. By doing so, when I am out and about I attract very little attention and I remain more private than if I were to draw attention to myself.
I can see this tool being used for good, to catch criminals, to determine where stashes of drugs are hidden and so on. But just as importantly, I can see how it can invade privacy of innocent people.
Hopefully it will never be used for anything outside of the battlefield. If it is hopefully the courts will see it as an invasion of privacy and require law enforcement to have a warrant to employ it and place significant restrictions on the data it gathers! By that I mean the courts should require all data gathered that does not lead to criminal prosicution to be destroyed.
I can see how this tool can be used for good but I can also see it's evil nature. Let's make sure it is very tame before we let ot out of the coral. If we don't we as a society will be living under the thumb of as society no better than the Nazis
We are always quick to point out that just because something CAN be used to do something illegal, it should not be illegal itslef. DeCSS, modchips, software cracks, file sharing, you know what I mean.
Well.. are we not then two faced if we sit here and complain that the government is developing something that could be used to track people in cities? We all know what happens when you block technology, right? It goes underground.
If your government wants to spy on you, you need to make sure that spying is clearly illegal, so those involved can be prosecuted... not try to keep technology out of their hands.
(Apparently, some ancient technology known as the "media" used to work, and another called "the Constitution" was also formerly useful. But we didn't replace the dilithium crystals or something.)
Tracking terrorists? While dozens of police cars head for the "last known" location of a target, the real terrorist can have a wonderful time planting bombs somewhere the hell else.
We're probably about 5 years away to improving any such system to the 1% level.
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