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Starting Next Year, Brazil Wants To Track All Cars Electronically
New submitter juliohm writes "As of January, Brazil intends to put into action a new system that will track vehicles of all kinds via radio frequency chips. It will take a few years to accomplish, but authorities will eventually require all vehicles to have an electronic chip installed, which will match every car to its rightful owner. The chip will send the car's identification to antennas on highways and streets, soon to be spread all over the country. Eventually, it will be illegal to own a car without one. Besides real time monitoring of traffic conditions, authorities will be able to integrate all kinds of services, such as traffic tickets, licensing and annual taxes, automatic toll charge, and much more. Benefits also include more security, since the system will make it harder for thieves to run far away with stolen vehicles, much less leave the country with one."
Marches on steady. Unstoppable and with an insatiable appetite for new technology
I clone your MAC address, I decrypt your Wi-Fi, and I own your basic electronics already.
Apply these relative basic skills and what do you have? A high-tech integrated system which can actually be used to conceal the identity of a vehicle behind a false identity, and charge up all sorts of services to the legitimate owner besides.
The Ministry of Information Retrieval would like to speak with you sir...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Dupe - http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/08/11/0142205/in-brazil-all-vehicles-must-have-radio-ids-by-2014
authorities will be able to integrate all kinds of services, such as traffic tickets
Remember the bad old days, when police inconvenienced you with long stops while they wrote you a ticket just when you most urgently needed to get somewhere? Well, those days are gone! Now, a pile of tickets will arrive in your mail each day without you ever being held up by those pesky police. We hope you appreciate the convenience we've brought you while you're speeding off to your destination.
Sincerely,
Big Brother
The "must be tagged" law will not prevent theft, and will not prevent other criminal activities.
It does not prevent the criminals from disabling a tag, altering a tag, or replacing the tag.
What the tracking system ultimately tracks are the tags. Not the vehicles.
As such, removing the tags, and then transporting the vehicle under a different but "valid" tag would make an effective means of breaking this system.
The real benefit to law enforcement/government is *NOT* combating criminals, it is tracking law abidding citizens.
I would expect catch-22s like "we show your vehicle at the scene" in one case and "you can't prove that isn't a fake transponder being used to put you on the other side of the country" in another, with the difference being the desire of the prosecutor.
(Eg, "iron-clad, irrefutable!" When used to show guilt, and "suspect, clearly a technological fabrication!" When used to assert innocense.)
If anything, this masure will spawn a new form of criminal activity, buying, selling, and provisioning counterfiet/shady transponders.
It would fail outside the major cities at least. The cops over there can't even keep people from hacking into the water and power system. I went to one place where there was a literal "wrong side of the tracks". On one side, everyone paid for their utilities. On the other side, water was spraying out of pipes duck taped into each other in all directions and extension cords were running under the tracks. I am curious, are you Brazilian? You spelled Brazil with an "s" instead of a "z" like Brazilians.
Does everyone have to buy a new car equipped with all the integrated RFID/transponder gadgetry to participate in the mandated tracking system?
This type of thing, and the upcoming "black box" additions to new cars sold in the USA, are perfect examples of why you should not buy new cars frequently. Instead, repair whatever goes wrong with your current/old car and stop being so damn wasteful. Pick a good car that you like and keep it going.
I learned how to do almost all of my own car repair for this purpose. It's not nearly as hard as understanding C programming or being fluent with the Linux shell. You just have to man up and get your hands dirty. The rewards come as bountiful savings of money and inability to comply with new-vehicle tracking mandates.
Traffic tickets are not a "service". A service implies that you actually get something useful in return.
authorities will be able to integrate all kinds of services, such as traffic tickets, licensing and annual taxes, automatic toll charge, and much more.
Such as keeping track of who attends opposition political meetings and making sure that they do not get government contracts (and do get extra visits from the police).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The big brother society ... Marches on steady. Unstoppable and with an insatiable appetite for new technology
It also deploys very quietly these days. It's already up and running before people notice it's there.
We already HAVE four federally mandated car trackers on all passenger cars (along with most other vehicles) since 2007.
It's called a "Tire Pressure Monitoring System". It works by having (typically) a lithium-cell powered device in the valve stem on each wheel that transmits the tire pressure information along with a unique serial number (so your dashboard computer doesn't get confused by nearby cars). These can also be read by loops in the road.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Anything that can help to make it better is a good thing.
Anything? really? How about all traffic violations punished with the death penalty? No? Why not?
Yeah, privacy is a concern, i hope they make it in a way that it won't be abused.
Yes because even without the electronics, governments have historically respected liberty, freedom, and due process when using the information gathered from monitoring policies.. What kind of crack are you smoking?
The range of the signal is just 5 meters,
Radio doesn't work like that.
If the rang was big i would love to have it on my bike also, i would put it glue inside the frame, no way to remove it into the street.
so, the abuse of your fellow citizens by your government is a-ok as long as the government protects your bike for you? You selfish twat. I hope you're not like most brazillians..
That movie is very aptly named.
Rethinking email
I lived in Brazil for 3 years, and while it's a lot easier to find the black market in Brazil than in the US, it's no where near 90% illegal. Even where Redock and Abbedias type knock-off options are available Brazilians recognize and would rather have the real deal.
For the most part the people who have illegal utilities are shack dwellers (even poorer than those in brick-built favelas). Even most of the brick buildings in the favelas have an electric and water meter attached and in use.
The combi vans are popular and cheaper than the bus, but police busts make them risky, and they're hard to get in and out of. As a result it's mostly poorer working men who need to save the R$0.25 per ride who take them.
My experience was mainly in Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo (the city itself and several suburbs), so maybe Rio is a different story.
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Brasil is a communal society; we could care less for individual rights. Heck, if the entire country goes out on the streets naked every February, there is no need for individualism.
That being said, it's really hard to enforce a law in Brasil, mostly because it is a matter of national pride to find a way around the rules. They can put as many transponders as they want, but if all the population gets are tickets, then even the dealerships will have an "unofficial" - official - system to remove the tags.
The same thing happened with DVD players way back. Companies tried to force consumers to only get players for region 7. Except that, when you bought a DVD player, the salesman himself would write a code in a piece of paper that you could use to unlock all the regions.
Of course, if the system is used properly, then people won't bother. They could care less if some random guy knows if they are going to churches or brothels.
OK,
It is VERY FUNNY how foreigners or first world people think about that.
The REAL reason is:
TAXES, FEES and revenues.
The Brazilian gov. only cares about revenues and taxes to keep it's dysfunctional dept. and employees.
Brazil was one of the first countries to have its IRS system on internet, paying taxes on INTERNET.
In one of my country roads, there is a camera that read the tags and check if the license is ok.
If not it sends a alert to the next police station with details.
The police see: White car, tag xx xxx
He stop and tow the car.
But if you go at night that does not work.
So the brazilian govt is going deeper.
In sao Paolo you have SOME days you can use your car, if you use on 'not allowed' days and you get caught you get a fine.
So this is the reason for the tags.
'hmmmmm..you moved your car 1 mile in your not allowed day, please pay'
Now I will wait for my fellows brazilians say that 'it is not like that.' and how our govt 'really ' cares about us..
A lot depends on what one views as an effective long term crime prevention strategy.
First there's the top down approach. Assuming that the majority of the worst criminal activity is perpetrated by experieced life long criminals (think ring leaders, organised crime, career criminals etc) then it stands to reason you want to target those individuals for arrest and incarceration. Yes, there are outliers; nutjobs going on shooting sprees, crimes of passion, serial killers, and the odd person who comes up with a scam that works, etc. The problem is, removing the head does't always help. Someone else might step up, or removing the head might cause more chaos, criminal organisation to split into competing units, etc.
Then there's the bottom up apporach, which is focusing on 'small' crimes according to the theory this increases the preception of the risk of being caught, thus ultimately preventing crimes from being commited, as opposed to catching criminals after the act. Of course there are always going to be those people who are going to ignore the preceived risk, or even see past the charade. And this approach doesn't address organised crime and/or career criminals very well.
As far as mandatory tagging of vehicles is concerned, this very much fits in with the bottom up approach. It's not intended to make it harder for (semi-)professional car thieves to work. But it will increase the barrier of entry into the car thief profession, assuming it takes some skill and practice to get around the tagging system. And of course assuming that dumb-user devices that do the job for you don't become readily available, a la backdoor software packages for script kiddies. In general the bottom up approach also has the long term effect of reducing the size of the criminal labour pool, over a period of decades.
That said, bottom up approaches tend to affect law abiding citizens disproportionately when tecnology comes into play. Having a police force focus on jay-walking, drunk and disorderly, and disturbing the peace charges is different from implementing a system monitors widely and throughly. The first still works on the presumption of innocence; you have to commit the offence before the cop targets you. The second means information is collected prior the any crime being commited, the exact opposite: "We're collecting eveidence against you in case you commit a crime"
Benjamin Franklin said it best: Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.