UK's MI5 Wants Oyster Card Travel Data

Boiled Frog from a Nation of Suspects writes "The Oyster card, an RFID single-swipe card (which was recently cracked), was introduced to London's public transport users purportedly to make their lives easier. Now, British Intelligence services want some of the benefits by trawling through the travel data amassed by the card to spy on the 17 million Britons who use it. The article notes, "Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets — like the journeys an individual makes around the capital — could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual's movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects."

Comments

Re:Pervasive surveillance

[overshoot]

As we all know, the former Soviet Union and China are the closest we've come to paradise-on-earth.

I believe that the DDR (former East Germany) holds the record with something like 30% of the population keeping tabs on the rest. Their status as a workers' paradise is left to the reader to judge.

The TERROR!

[Richard W.M. Jones]

From TFA:

The fear of cyber-warfare has climbed Whitehall's agenda since last year's attack on the Baltic nation of Estonia, in which Russian hackers swamped state servers with millions of electronic messages until they collapsed. The Estonian defence and foreign ministries and major banks were paralysed,

Except that these were done by some Estonian script kiddies, so it wasn't "CYBERWARFARE!!!11@@!"

Rich.

Re:D Filter error: You can type more than that for

[TheRaven64]

There are two versions of the Oyster Card. The kind most commuters have is tied to a credit card. Whenever it becomes empty, it is automatically topped up. The other kind (which I have) can be bought for cash (technically I think it's a deposit and can be returned if you give the card back) and topped up for cash. When it is empty it stops working until you put more credit on it (by credit card or cash). If you ever top it up with a credit card then they can presumably tie your name to the card.

It's a silly thing to ask for, since any terrorist who isn't a complete idiot is likely to use the anonymous version. Of course, anyone willing to blow themselves up is probably some kind of idiot to start with...