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UK Police Want An Automotive Tractor Beam
Barryke writes "According to The Observer, England is working on a remote control for cars to be used by the police. England's police force is lobbying to get a remote-control to stop other cars; this could also be used to limit speeds. Since needed technology is already available in modern cars, modification is very easy and cheap. But what if I just escape by hitting the clutch and use my speed to go downhill? Bet I'm in the hospital before they are!" Orwellian, or ... Californian?
Ok, ignoring all of the privacy issues that I know other people are going to address... It seems to me like giving any more control other than allowing the police to severely limit the speed of the target vehicle is just asking for all kinds of accidents from another person suddenly taking over control of the car. I think it would also possibly open the police up to civil suits were they to accidentally crash the car or harm any other people or property.
Don't they realise that this is THE THING to hack if you were a car-jacker! Anything that is supposed to be secure and in the public domain WILL be hacked. It will be the innocent public that have to suffer the newer types of criminality that will undoubtably occur with the introduction of this new technology.
Phil Agre from UCLA has an article about this at http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/car.html. As he puts it: 'Imagine the consequences as your car goes on the Internet. We're used to viruses in our desktop computers and we've heard about viruses in our palmtops. Next we'll have viruses in our cars, and then we'll have them in our pacemakers. Wireless communications is especially asking for it, and a public-spirited lawyer once mailed me a package of documents from a California Air Resources Board plan to equip all new cars with a device that would upload the car's identification number and emissions equipment status in plaintext whenever it was pinged by a roadside transponder. Wrong!'
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
Essentially, this is one of those things that recapitulates the (old and creaky) truism by the NRA:'...if guns are outlawed,' etc.
If the authorities set up an intrusive technology which gives them the ability to control an ordinary law-abiding citizen's property without any legal process, chances are it will only effect ordinary, law-abiding citizens.
Barring a technology so intimately interwoven into your cars ignition system that your car actually comes apart if you try to remove it, criminals and pranksters will hack the system making the authorities look a lot like keystone cops in situations where it really counts.
You've got to wonder about the people who come up with stuff like this: you imagine guys with sunken cheeks mumbling about power. All of them suffer from a dangerous cramp in their right hands...
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
What it will prevent, or at least reduce, are road blocks, spike strips and high speed chases. And yes, high speed pursuit is absolutely important as the any car involved is much more likely to kill participates or bystanders then a car at rest. But I guarantee, it will cause at situation where a desperate person who viewed their only option as evading, who is now sitting in an otherwise dead vehicle, to open fire and cause a deadly force situation from the police.
You sound like you're still in school; if you aren't then you really ought to know better. This is a political discussion, not a technological discussion. Frequently, the engineers will put together a disaster scenario, or something complicated like "It will work as long as we...", and the other political side will hire engineers with just as many credentials to say that "Live would be bliss if only we had this system!" Those engineers are generally wrong or even lying, but through the wonders of cognitive dissonance and human psychology will eventually convince themselves that their rosy view is correct.
Generally, both reports are then tossed out, the politicians do whatever the hell they feel like it, and, best of all, even after the system fails catestrophically, the either
Or some combination thereof. I'm not intrinsically as cynical as this is making me sound, but you have way too much faith in politicians. They don't understand second-order arguments, they tend to have an incredibly naive view of the world ("All policemen good", etc.), and in general it is difficult or impossible to reason with them because they generally believe in their very hearts that technology can be legislated, and second-order effects aren't "real" and can also be legislated away... despite abundent evidence to the contrary available to anybody willing to just open their eyes and really look around them. "Observation" is not a politician's strong suit.
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Oh, and
A lot of people have keyless entry remotes for their car, and I've never heard of one of those being "hacked" to unlock someone's door. It wouldn't be tough to make cars only respond to commands sent along with the proper key.
That's because the remotes were created by private companies who would subsequently be sued if the cars were stolen via that route. Companies with a long, rich engineering tradition, so when somebody told them the right way how to do those keyless entries, they actually listened to the engineers, because they were used to it.
Guess which part doesn't apply to the government? Hint: All of it.
For evidence, look at DeCSS, WEP, and any number of other standards. Strong things like the remote keyless entry are by far the exception, and they only arise when there is both the motivation and the necessary expertise to do it. (WEP probably had the expertise but not the motivation (network companies obviously wanted a bullet point, not a real feature, they didn't realize how important this was to us, now we're going to get "second generation" security that should have been here since day one). DeCSS has the motivation but not the expertise.)
If, and this is a big if, they hand the design of this system over to one of those car companies (with some level of experience in these things), it might be secure. If, as history shows is much more likely, the law hands over a design specification of what everything is supposed to do, it's going to be flawed.
And even if it's done competently, the keyless entry has some advantages that make it cryptographically feasible, like the ability to change the key on every entry. This sytem will probably have some small handful of "master keys", and no feasibl