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Using Cell Phones to Track Traffic
msh210 writes "The AP has reported (with additional information from KMOX-AM) that the Missouri Dept. of Transportation will be teaming up with a private company to track in-use cell phones on Missouri highways and state roads in an effort to monitor traffic flow. Individual information will not be stored, they say -- only the aggregate will be studied, using "sophisticated" math. (See also findlaw.com's commentary on privacy concerns. "
For instance, a simple search would have uncovered This Page.
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Video cameras can't count cars. A device which detects cell phones can.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Automated toll collection tags used in the Northeast ("EZ-Pass") are already being used to monitor traffic flow. Not only are these tags traceable to you, they are connected to your credit card, which is auto-debited for tolls. Currently they are not being used to auto-ticket speeders (you wouldn't even need to use 'sophisticated' math to figure that one out), but they do warn that the EZ-Pass info will be used for traffic monitoring and monitoring 'violations of your agreement.'
t erms.asp
Here it is in the service agreement (search onpage for 'monitoring'):
https://www.ezpass.csc.paturnpike.com/paturnpike/
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
This has been going on for the past 6 months in Maryland.
i nessnews/172883-1.html
http://www.mddailyrecord.com/pub/5_398_friday/bus
MMTIS uses the movement between towers, without collecting personal information, and uses that data to determine speed and movement in specific areas.
From Lectric Law Library:
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE - Circumstantial evidence is best explained by saying what it is not - it is not direct evidence from a witness who saw or heard something. Circumstantial evidence is a fact that can be used to infer another fact..
Circumstantial evidence is generally admissible in court unless the connection between the fact and the inference is too weak to be of help in deciding the case.
You need a lot more than a single circumstantial fact to "prove" that someone committed a crime. Rather, you need a large number of such facts that close in on the case and provide a single, inescapable conclusion. Even if you have done that, be prepared for the defense to argue each point under a "hypothetical" context, thus convincing the jury that the "evidence" is nothing more than a set of coincidences presented in such a way as to make the defendent look guilty.
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All of the cell phones that I have seen turn off the receiver and transmitter when they are turned off. The only things that stay on are the clock, keyboard scanning, battery charger controller and backup power for volatile memory.
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Not hypocritical at all.
A cell phone is trackable even when its owner is not talking on it.
This article provides a good outline on what happens. Basically, there's a control channel, through which your phone communicates whenever it's got a battery in it. Your phone listens for an SID (System Identification Code) on this channel, and tells the appropriate MTSO (Mobile Telephone Switching Office) "Hi, I'm here". The MTSO has to know where you are, so that it can route incoming calls to the device.
All that's happening here is that the traffic monitoring folks are listening in on the back-channel communications between a large number of cell phones and base stations, and using the changes in location (as averaged over a large number of devices) to guesstimate the average speed of traffic. Individualized cell phone tracking is useless for a traffic flow application, so it's actually highly likely that the traffic folks are telling you the truth when they say that individual data isn't being logged, and that only aggregate data is being recorded.
The technology's nothing new - a system like this is necessarily a part of any wireless phone system, otherwise your phone couldn't ring when someone called you. No such agency is now permitted to do such a thing domestically (a sentence that can be parsed in at least eight ways, all of which are true), but they probably don't, because everyone else who's also interested in individualized tracking, is already doing this, has been doing this for years, and is using other tricks in software to locate their targets to within a few meters, all in real-time. They aren't using the traffic-control folks' data, because they don't need it.