From: BillK (bill@wkidston.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 15:11:36 MDT
>>> On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I wonder when this system will come to Virginia. If we had it now,
>>> the Virginia sniper would hardly even make it into national news -
>>> he would have been caught after the first shooting.
>>
>> Eugen Leitl wrote:
>> Am I the only one who thinks that a system allowing you to obtain
>> complete trajectories and fingerprints of all moving objects on a
>> 24/7/365 manner in realtime something that is bound to be abused,
>> and abused horribly?
>> Think of all the pattern matching and crosscorellation analysis you
>> could do with that data. <SHUDDER>
>>
> Samantha wrote:
> The data density would be ridiculous. Non-starter.
My understanding of the present system is that the output is only blips
on a screen. Bigger, faster blips would be vehicles, smaller blips -
pedestrians. (Remember the radar screens from the Gulf War showing
hordes of dots streaming back to Iraq?)
This is fine for isolated areas, say around power stations, defence
establishments, etc. Any blips that appear could have a camera zoomed in
on them. And mobile military want to use a similar system to spot enemy
troops hiding in the countryside.
If a Virginia shopping mall was being monitored when an incident
occurred, then possibly a blip moving away at high speed would stand out
as unusual. If it did then it could be tracked and followed from mast to
mast until it stopped, or the tracking could be passed over to a police
helicopter.
Similarly if a suspect was being monitored then a visual sighting of him
leaving home could switch over to use the system to track his movements.
But the overall recording of dots moving around a city is not a privacy
problem at present.
Now if they can add cell phone identification within two years, then
recording the movements of every unique cell phone becomes possible.
This data could indeed be stored for years. In theory, it would only
be examined by human eyes if a crime was being investigated.
As Samantha said there would be far too much data for everyone's
individual movements to be examined.
But once the data existed, then it could be analysed by computer and
lots of 'interesting' items might be highlighted. What would be
considered 'interesting' would, of course, depend on which
agency/department/team/bureaucrat was doing the analysis.
And I think there is no chance that the public would be given access to
the data files so that they could check on the movements of politicians
/ spouses / business competitors / etc.
Somehow I don't think I'll be carrying a cell phone in the future.
BillK
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