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Australia Mulling a Nationwide Vehicle-Tracking System
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that as political support for Australia's version of the national ID card is waning, the powers that be have found a far more effective way to catalog the populace. CrimTrac, an Australian government agency responsible for designing technical solutions to aid policing, is due to hand in a $2.2 million scoping study for the introduction of a nationwide automatic number plate recognition system (ANPR). It seems that as well as ANPR, the system will also collect images of drivers and passengers with high enough resolution for identification purposes. All ANPR data collected would be made available to participating agencies in real time, and retained for five years for future investigations."
Can you call the gov't up when you get lost and ask them for directions? "Help! I don't know where am I, but i see a kangaroo and the toilets are flushing backwords"
If only we had more data available, we could stop all crime!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
From the summary: "support for Australia's version of the national ID card is waning." Um, what national ID card?
So what exactly is the Hawke government going to do now?
load the band up onto the back of a flatbed truck, then hoon around while pretending to perform.
request the resulting footage under the freedom of information laws, then release as the video to your latest single.
You shall know him by his Sig
A long stick, a roll of duct tape, and a can of spray paint will trump even the most expensive traffic cameras.
but only if it's to tag known criminals.
That means the politicians have to get one first.
No, crime will stop when the second to last person dies.
Yeh but thats counting all of the private entity Cameras. There seems to be a widespread myth these days that every camera you see everywhere is linked together. So that perhaps a mean with a white beard and an over exuberant use of visa vis can watch us 24/7.
A fraction of the cameras are owned and controlled by the government and even then, from the limited information ive obtained from watching crime programs, getting detailed information accross even county borders isnt easy.
Take off the tinfoil hat please.
I don't know about that. When I am all alone some of things I do to myself are a crime too :)
People will start wearing masks.
Personally, I have always wanted an excuse to wear a burqa. Yes, I am serious too. When we get to the point that facial recognition is everywhere I am just going to start obscuring my face. If I have to do that then I want to be comfortable doing it. Naked underneath a burqa seems to be a good place to start. I am only half kidding.
That will be a pretty weird looking world when you have to protect yourself head to toe to obtain a little privacy.
You think it won't happen? You think I am overdoing it a little? They are going to keep that data for FIVE YEARS. You think they won't sell access to it, illegally or otherwise? Of course they will. You better not cheat on your wife or girlfriend. Go to happy finish massage parlors in the middle of day. Basically do anything you want to be private, since it will be a trivial matter to find out EVERYWHERE you have been for the last 5 years.
Ive spent the last few years working with IT departments at airports and other major networked UK sites providing cabling and telecom services. Ive been to many of the secret rooms and surveilance areas of these places.
Im not trying to disappoint the CCTV-Tinfoilhatters abroard in the US, but nobody sits in a room like Lex Luthor spying on individuals and following them about their business with camera. It is an extremely BORING pastime. The guys running these networks generally spend all their time releasing remote doors, monitoring queue lengths, opening car parking barriers and signing out keys for storerooms.
or reading The Sun.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Of course, surveillance *can* be used by a police state, but it can be used against the state as well.
Not if the police state makes it unlawful for anyone but themselves to use surveillance. In the UK, you'll more than likely have your camera taken off you if the police spot you filming them.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Ok, this is a technical problem begging for a technical solution. What's it take to detect cameras and hit them with a laser? A watt or so should do to fry the image sensor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You're an idiot, the ANPR scoping study was initiated LONG before the ALP won government.
What is...?
Even if Australians used American-made toilets (with swirling motion), they still wouldn't spin backwards. How water spins down a drain is related to the design of the unit, not the earth's rotation. (urban legend).
BACK TO ARTICLE:
"Only criminals need fear tracking of their cars," is the most common defense to this proposal. My response: "And what if the government makes travel a crime? Then we ALL become criminals." Why would government make travel a crime? Well besides the obvious case of dictatorship, there's also the possibility a government might outlaw travel for environmental reasons. Or because oil is scarce.
A person is not truly free unless he has the right to travel whereever he wishes without restraint or monitoring.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I don't understand why people insist upon putting cameras everywhere. The terrorists that struck on 9/11 walked past several security cameras, and not one of them was flagged. They still boarded the plane & committed their crime.
Cameras are worthless, except for very simplistic uses like issuing automatic speeding tickets.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I disagree. Anything you do to yourself, since nobody else is harmed, is not a crime.
The only reason certain "self" activities like masturbation, smoking dope, or committing suicide are outlawed is because we got a bunch of petit-dictators (aka control freaks) who want to control everybody else. There's no justifiable reason to outlaw these activities as long as the only person I am harming.... is myself.
"No person has a right to harm another. And that's all the government should restrain him." - Thomas Jefferson
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
An IR laser diode that is left unfocused will do the trick.
It won't zap the sensor, but unless they have used a decent IR filter it will saturate the chip to the point of not registering anything else.
Reasons why you may want to avoid doing this:
- no idea if there will be retinal damage if someone else looks at it
- ANY camera will get upset, so an traffic monitoring will show up your car as worthy of close inspection
- AFAIK, anything that hinders reading your license plate by whatever means is illegal (it is in most of the countries I've been in, no idea about AU).
This is NOT a tech problem, it is a political one. As long as the population doesn't make it VERY clear they disagree with what is going on, their government will continue to seek ways to waste a lot of taxpayer money. I'm willing to bet money on the UK ID Card scheme getting nuked if there is a change of government (AFAIK that is an election pledge), that's why they're so pushy about implementing it in at least some form (hence the contract announcements etc etc) - the intention is to make it hard to roll back.
You know, I can recall times when being in politics was something respectful. I'm obviously old..
Insert
Cameras might change the behavior of rational criminals, but not crazy criminals. I expect that the crazy criminals will stay crazy (and get caught), while the rational criminals will invest in false plates or stolen cars, and balaclavas. Or maybe Ned-Kelly masks.
Please cite the law that allows them to do this
Simple: it's behaviour likely to cause a breach of the peace. IANAL, but this covers everything the police don't want you to do. They don't have to obtain a conviction - they merely arrest you, take you for questioning, confiscate your camera then let you go without charge some hours later.
You will then have been summarily imprisoned for a period of time - although you were never found guilty of any crime.
This is purely deterrence (and very effective it is, too) to stop anyone from doing anything they don't like. You won't get beaten up and officially nothing happened - except that you have been grossly inconvenienced and maybe lost your camera, too. As with any bullying regime, this type of action is executed with impunity as the police involved will not have to answer to anyone, or justify their actions.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Cameras aren't best used for realtime monitoring in some big room.
They're best used for retroactive analysis. Somebody becomes a person of interest, and now once you know where they were at any point in history you can find out everywhere they've ever been, everybody they've ever talked to, everywhere anybody they've ever talked to has been, and where they are right now.
I'm sure the first place we'll see these abused is in civil cases. Divorce cases come to mind very quickly.
The police in the UK already have the power to detain people arbitrarily. So that piece of the fascist puzzle is already in place for a gulag. All you need is some leader to take advantage of said legislation, but hey, by then its too late..
By the way, did you know that before the first world war, you could travel and live ANYWHERE in the world freely and without restriction? Passports were put in place to control the flow of people during the war. Guess what? The legislation was never revoked after the war. We just live with it, and it has got progressively More suppressing over the years. Do you really think governments have your interests at heart when it comes to personal freedoms?
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
I'm in Canada and every time I try to take pictures of the police, I am either told to stop, or am questioned, or in some cases have been told to delete the pictures! This just happened to a friend who was taking pictures of police practicing riot control. I get the message. Try it some time. It may not be illegal but it is not a good idea. Do a search on this, police harassment of people taking their pictures is absolutely common in various Western countries.
History shows that all governments eventually become tyrannical in nature. (For example Rome started as a Republic, devolved into an Imperium, and finally ended as a dictatorship.) More recently, we have our own President spying on us with the US PATRIOT Act giving him power to tap all phone conversations everywhere.
Why give some future tyrant the tools to abuse his power & track all travel? We should limit government power every chance we get, to guard against that future tyrant *before* he arrives on the scene.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Agreed. The whole idea is incredibly stupid. "CrimTrak"? If they know someone is a criminal, go to his house, his parent's house or his girlfriend's house. 95% of the time he'll be there. For the other 5%, we need panopticon video surveillance of the general population! It's obvious! How ever did we make it to 2008? The criminals should have killed us all by now without this technology!
Please, somebody, somewhere cut me a f*cking break and stop this stupidity.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Certainly a reasonable post. However note to a man not one has discussed to the other side of the issue. How far and by what means should law enforcement do it's job without constituents lambasting them for their failures (and they will most assuredly fail)? A weighty question, but then privacy is weighty and plenty have commentary on that.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"