From: BillK (bill@wkidston.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Thu Oct 17 2002 - 07:20:58 MDT
On Thu Oct 17, 2002 Eugen Leitl wrote:
>>On Wed, 16 Oct 2002, BillK wrote:
>> My understanding of the present system is that the output is only
>> blips on a screen. Bigger, faster blips would be vehicles, smaller
> We're not discussing the properties of a specific system, but
> reasonable expectations of what is physically possible, and evaluation
> of trends.
> I am not at all worried about current capabilities.
Glad to hear it. There is a big difference between what is theoretically
possible now and what has actually been deployed out in the field.
The UK Government would not be handing out big development contracts if
it was already deploying this stuff.
> The hard part is gathering the information with an array of sensors.
> Lots of smart sensors needs to be installed, serviced, and gathered
> info from.
> Several trends (integration density, integrated software radios,
> ultrawideband, cheap DSP, etc.) would seem to make blanket
> surveillance affordable, especially if implemented as an
> incremental-cost rider on a bona fide infrastructure.
You are now talking years in the future for deploying this.
But I do agree with the trends you mention.
>> 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.
> If we're talking about more or less blanket coverage of large parts of
> the city including all movements of vehicles and people this
> completely nukes privacy.
>> Now if they can add cell phone identification within two years, then
>> recording the movements of every unique cell phone becomes possible.
> You're describing capabilities of several years (a decade, if not
> more) ago. There's a directional ID catcher gadget issued to
> individual LEOs.
> The base stations know your position to within ~100 feet. Where do you
> think mobile positional services obtain the info? It's not GPS yet.
Yes, that's correct. I know that. And as of at least a year ago the
~100 feet location of all calls to cell phones are recorded and can be
checked. (Billing enquiries, police enquiries, etc.).
But the point is that at present you have to actually make or receive a
call on your cell phone in order for it to be identified. To the Celldar
system under development, blips on the screen are just blips.
What they want to introduce in the next two years is a passive
identification so that the blips can be identified and they know
instantly who they are tracking.
And it would be really 'useful' to link this future cell phone id with
all the video surveillance cameras as well.
> EU is pushing forwards to store all connection info for each person
> for a year. This is different, but another data point showing the
> intent. Yes, ve really are dat kurious.
>> As Samantha said there would be far too much data for everyone's
>> individual movements to be examined.
> That's nonsense. 10^6 objects at a 1 Hz position refresh rate generate
> few MBytes/s raw data flux. A current desktop is easily capable of
> processing that stream in realtime. Same PC could easily hold TBytes
> of cheap RAID.
> Stored naively, as a raw dump (of course, one wouldn't do that),
> that's a FIFO almost two weeks deep. Then it's flushed out tiered
> archive storage.
> Off-shelf clustering allows me to scale up that capacity by four
> orders of magnitude. This means I can track all objects on Earth
> surface today with a completely inconspicuous few 10 M$ facility.
> Allow for a decade or two of technical advances, and continuation
> of current basic right erosion.
Again, I agree with all of that. But 'examine' doesn't mean the same as
'recorded'. I agree that years in the future you will be able to keep a
database of the movements of everyone in the world (or at least everyone
carrying a cell phone). But humans won't have time to look at it all.
You have to use computer analysis to pick out the highlights.
>> 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.
> You're getting it.
>> Somehow I don't think I'll be carrying a cell phone in the future.
> One could do traffic remixing in ad hoc meshes. Or make a habit of
> swapping cellphones with friends (it's a good idea to do it with the
> consumer cards you get at Albertsons and elswhere).
Depends on the friends you have. ;-)
One-time use cell phones are probably the best bet - if you really must
carry a cell phone.
BillK
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