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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."
They should make records like this for all MPs and their families pubically available, updated daily and hosted on the interweb.
After 6 months, they can decide if they *REALLY* want the intelligence services (and anyone who picks an MI5 laptop up on a train) to have the same.
Shanghai metro for one has an oyster type card that is anonymous. To top it up you pay cash at the ticket office.
There are logs, and you can check them yourself by inserting the card into a reader; same for your wife who took your card to see where you've been. It is anonymous in that your personal details are not tied to the card ID, so no fishing expeditions by the authorities.
It will be worse than E. Germany, so it must be stopped now. Amateur law enforcement through paranoid informants is a part of any police state but centralized tracking like this was beyond the means of E. Germany and other previous tyrannies. The other thing that makes it worse is that there's no large free state left for escape or rescue. Once the ability to identify and quash dissidents is established, the laws will be changed to make it easier to round them up.
If they have their way, there will be no way to travel in the UK that can't be tracked. Roads and air are already tracked, now they are going for rail. Dissidents will be locked to stone age techniques of walking/biking to meetings where no one can carry a cell phone.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
The downfall of all of this is that there is no physical link between the tag and any human being.
Shhhh don't give them any ideas! Next thing you know they are going to implant chips for you to travel, or go work, or get your chocolate ration for the week. I hear it's up to 20 grams!
People in power really don't have as much to hide? I know of a certain New York governor that is evidence to the contrary, and I don't really believe he's a one of a kind.
I mean, Orwell *showed* them in "1984" how bad it could be, but they keep moving towards it. It's very strange.
Not at all. The people in power are generally immune to any consequences, which is why they can do this and not care. The United States Congress was originally structured in such a way that the lawmakers would serve their term of office (a civic responsibility, much like jury duty) and then return to their previous lives to live under the very laws they instituted. That very powerful negative feedback loop was opened (to our detriment) when the idea of "career politician" was born. Now, I don't know enough about England's governmental structures to know if there were any similar controls that have also since lapsed into uselessness. If so, it would explain a lot.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
People in power really don't have as much to hide.
Wow, that is the most naive statement I've heard in well... as long as I can remember!
Really? You'll still be able to buy single (or multiple) trip tickets for cash, surely? Any "person of interest" will be sure to be doing that from today, if they weren't already. So as usual, the people the measures are supposed to catch will easily evade them, meanwhile millions of innocent commuters will lose another piece of their privacy.
Give them time.....I'm sure eventually they will do away with currency, probably sooner in the U.K. than in the U.S., but inevitably. The people in power (not to mention divorce lawyers and the like) would absolutely love to be able to know where every penny of your income goes (or comes from, in the case of the tax folks). Here the "Green Dot" and similar refillable debit cards are being hawked in ads everywhere, so eventually more and more poorer folk will be tempted into plastic, under the guise of "security" and "safety" ("Don't carry all that cash around.....") and "convenience." Not to mention those ubiquitous VISA ads that show traffic through some commercial establishment flowing like clockwork, with people waving their smart cards at that infernal little machine, until some nimnul pulls out cash and brings everything to a screeching halt.
Eventually, most Americans will be conditioned to see cash as "slow," "unsafe," and (the worst!) "old-fashioned" and the only citizens left clinging to their dead presidents will be the ignorant, the homeless, and those damned pointy-headed paranoia-spreading, conspiracy-theory nonconformists. It would be rather smooth at that point to phase out the use of currency altogether. Oh, it might be that some private transactions could still go on, perhaps in the form of barter/exchange, or some form of private scrip (which would be clamped down on pretty quickly), or for larger transactions hard metal such as gold (the private ownership of which will no doubt eventually be criminalized), but for the most part we are rushing towards a point at which any transaction involving any commercial enterprise will be logged, stored, and available for the data miners.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer