Slashdot Mirror
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."
What the honest hope to unmask is criminals by considering everyone a suspect.
What they will do is discover and harass political opposition. Dark times for the UK.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
"That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects."
Translated: We want to be able to spy on you. We are not sure why yet.
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
Here is my pass, and an additional 100 pounds Sterling. Now, just travel around London for the next 7 days, sightseeing or whatever you like. When you are done, mail it back to me. Wow, now that is a really good tourism plan. What? Why am I being arrested at the airport? No, I did not rob a bank. No, I am not muslim. Oh, that's why? hmmmm
Or better, stick it inside someone else's bag and you look like you were traveling with them. The downfall of all of this is that there is no physical link between the tag and any human being. This is just stupid. Tracking people will not work, and will ONLY inconvenience the stupid criminals and honest people. When will governments learn?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Spying on everyone, and having everyone spy on *each other*, is a fabulous way to run a civilization. As we all know, the former Soviet Union and China are the closest we've come to paradise-on-earth.
What the fuck is wrong with England? I mean, Orwell *showed* them in "1984" how bad it could be, but they keep moving towards it. It's very strange.
First, apparently what they are asking for is not "anonymized" data. Second, as was very clearly demonstrated by the AOL data-release scandal, it is sometimes possible to get an awful lot of personal data on people by putting enough "anonymous" data together.
... and I have to say that stories like this are exactly the reason why I opted out of using the original Oyster where you have to register and hand over personal details. I use the anonymous pay as you go version. Though, thinking about it, I'm sure with a little effort they could associate the card id with the debit card payments used to top it up.
And this is why you should be wary of ANY data collection scheme...just like it used to be that any application would eventually evolve to a point where it incluided a webbrowser/IRC client/email reader, data collections like thses evolve until the government wants it.
And what happens when the database gets hacked (this is INEVITABLE) and your personal data is online, never to go away? Jack shit is what. The government won't reimburse you, the data will never dissappear (like they say, real men don't do backups, they archive to the internet!) and identity theives (including, you guessed it, terrorists) will have a field day with easily used personal data which can't be 'taken back'.
This is one of those cases where the certain (not potential, this shit is ionevitable) consequences are much worse than any 'problem' you are trying to solve.
Personal data will hit the net, identity thieves will have fun and you actually make tracing terrorists MORE DIFFICULT.
God, people are dumb sometimes.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
...because if you're going to be planning to commit some kind of 'terror' act, you're not going to be traceable by your oyster card. In fact, you're more likely just to pay cash at the ticket machines and be untraceable. I don't have anything to hide, but I won't use oyster - or own a customer loyalty card, or pay with debit/credit card when I can just pay cash. If it's not your own government spying on you, it's marketing companies working for corporations!
People in power really don't have as much to hide. Political dissidents, on the other hand, have to watch out for reprisals. Would you risk having anything to do with an opposition group if you knew your affiliation would be noted? Symmetry of information is not always the same as symmetry of power.
The best way to oppose this is to note that there's no real law enforcement benefit.
No calls now, I'm
Unless you are already tracking a suspect, data trawling is ineffective. The bigger the database, the less effective it is as more and more false positives occur and have to be investigated. This wastes huge amounts of time and resources and starves real investigations that could well turn up real suspects.
That's right. And I am going to do something about it, right now.
Oh, wait.... Not now, American Idols is on. And I'm hungry. I think I'll get a pizza.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
It's already anonymous if you want it to be. You can buy an Oyster card over the counter for cash without giving any personal details. You can optionally register the card, so you can top up the pre-pay online and so on, in which case it ceases to be anonymous, but the default is anonymous.
Of course, if you really have something to hide, you buy individual tickets, which would only be traceable with a lot of work correlating the CCTV images (no change from the present). Ok, it's £4 per Zone 1 journey instead of £1.50, but I bet the terrorists can afford it. In other word, this isn't a measure against the terrorists -- it's too easily circumvented: it's just more monitoring of the ordinary reasonably law-abiding citizen.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
My MP takes 48% of the vote with a majority of 10,000. But, yes, I'd certainly do what you suggest if I supported any of the other candidates, because what you say makes sense. That said, I'm not a supporter of democracy, so have resigned myself to not getting involved in any significant way (a bit like not going to church really) unless a party that'll transition us to technocracy arrives!
:)
Back to democracy though, I dare say that getting Proportional Representation implemented would drive up those turnouts since every vote would count, but what party with a chance at winning First Past The Post is going to support that?
Honestly, my main worry is not that criminals or other external parties will misuse the information a government gathers, but that the government itself will misuse that information. It should not be forgotten that an individuals liberty and a government's authority are always in conflict with each other, which is the whole reason modern, so-called free societies have systems to limit the powers of government. Many people seem to have lost sight of the importance of those limits, and would be willing to grant almost unlimited powers to the state, since they do not believe the state would ever misuse those powers.
It's a lovely display of trust, of course, but a woefully misguided one. If in any governmental system there is potential for abuse, then sooner or later there will be abuse. Simple probability. The more power a government has over it's citizens, the more potential for damage there is in cases of abuse. And any government will take all the power they are given, that is why they must actively be kept in check.
It was only today I read someone seriously wondering why people would complain about the police keeping a register of DNA samples and fingerprints of all citizens - their express point of view was that if it helps catch criminals, anything goes. At times like that, I tend to feel like I'm an atheist debating the existence of God with a deeply religious person. It's as if there were no common ground at all, no common logic to be found. Hopefully it isn't so.
I don't disagree with this. In fact, there's a continuum between the two, especially as lobbyists control governments and it becomes harder to tell the line between the government and private citizens with an agenda, between people with "authorized" use of force and people abusing force. It's not a crisp line. And the founding fathers certainly knew this, which is why they built a distributed government and refused to centralize power from the start--which makes me not understand why the modern Republican party can favor "original intent", and yet do these kinds of things, which dismantle what I see as the core of the original intent. "Original intent" must just be a marketing buzz word to them, used as after-the-fact justification for something they wanted to do, because their rhetoric doesn't match their actions, and I can't believe they don't know that the founders meant to limit the power of government, and to reserve to the people the right to defend themselves.
If those same people had written the Bill of Rights today, I'm quite sure the second amendment would have been extended to contain a personal right to some sort of defense against cyber intrusion, the little used third amendment would have contained protections against the government commandeering ISPs, the fourth and fifth amendment rights against cyber surveillance, and so on. The intent of the so-intensely-defended second amendment was not to preserve deer hunting for all time, it was to allow the citizenry a way to protect themselves against the encroachment of a too-powerful federal government.
Also, what's especially odd, and it goes again to what you're saying above, is that in the US, there are any number of talk show hosts (most of whom, in my area, are unabashed Republicans) who outright refer to the Democrats as traitors in the style of the book by that name. It is a travesty that one can think of mere political opposition that way, and somewhat scary because bad things tend to begin with a dehumanization of the supposed enemy, preparatory to doing something bad to them as a mass. But you'd think the silver lining would be that they would dare not put a bunch of power in the hands of the government, lest it get in the hands of what they think are traitors as part of the natural process of the next election. Instead, though, they seem to just blindly do it, and then somehow hope that they can use the fact of having created so precarious a situation as leverage to say "and therefore you must not elect a Democrat, for they are criminals and thieves." I just don't get it.
Of course, the article is about the UK, and their history with this is much different. So some of what I'm saying doesn't really apply to them from a literal historical point of view... except that the whole point of studying history, anyone's history, is to not have to live it oneself.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
I cannot see, why the British police & government do not get it over with once and for all: Give everybody an RFID implant, make sure you cannot go anywhere in public without being traced, keep the records forever, make them available to any (semi-)governmental institution including the police and MI5 -- remembering that they will keep your data safe.
...
No need for beating around the bush and small steps in the direction of total surveillance.
It is just like removing a plaster, do it swiftly and the pain will soon be forgotten!
Honestly
PS: It will, of course, due to fact that crimes could be committed by foreigners, be mandatory for people visiting England to have an implant too, maybe just a temporary one that is removed at the border. Naturally, nobody in their right mind would object to that.