It can't happen here?

[alexpgp]

On the heels of an announcment of comprehensive tracking of automobile movements in England (for law-enforcement purposes, naturally) comes this article that gives a high-level overview of some of the schemes being hatched on this side of The Pond.

However, author Declan McCullagh is simply not paranoid enough in his thinking, in my view.

Primo, any auto-tracking system that interacts with GPS wouldn't be of much use if it couldn't actually verify who is driving the car, wouldn't you agree? Tie a car to a driver to a GPS system, and not only can one scratch any petty itch that might occur to a bureaucrat intent on building an empire (crime prevention, enforcement of motor vehicle laws, sale of marketing data to the private sector), you pretty much also close a hole that currently exists in the nation's public transportation system, i.e., the ability of people to move from place to place in an automobile in a largely anonymous fashion.

Close this hole, and you would win big brownie points by giving the public the impression that terrorists can no longer move with impunity among the population, despite the unfortunate side effect of further marginalizing those people who have found themselves on "no fly" lists simply because they share a common name with a Bad Person™ somewhere in the world. Those who today cannot fly without loads of hassle would, in a brave new GPS-ed world of the future, no longer be able to move about by car too well, either.

(But I am probably being unfair with that last observation. Something will eventually be done about the false positives in the government's database, else it might occur to scum like al-Zarqawi to order their henchmen to simply change their names to "John Armstrong," "Mike Smith," or something equally innocuous just to get such names added to the "no fly" list and really gum up the works.)

One item of particluar interest in the CNET story:

A report prepared by a Transportation Department-funded program in Washington state says the GPS bugs must be made "tamper proof" and the vehicle should be disabled if the bugs are disconnected.

"This can be achieved by building in connections to the vehicle ignition circuit so that failure to receive a moving GPS signal after some default period of vehicle operation indicates attempts to defeat the GPS antenna," the report says.

It doesn't mention the worrisome scenario of someone driving a vehicle with a broken GPS bug--and an engine that suddenly quits half an hour later.

Yeah, just the thing you want to have happen during a medical emergency, or something equally life-threatening. But the major threat, in my opinion, would not be a busted GPS bug. It would sooner be some kind of attack designed to take out GPS satellites, either physically or virtually.

The physical scenario is probably something the military is prepared for, kinda. I think it'd be devilishly hard to covertly position kinetic energy weapons next to all the satellites in the GPS constellation, but what about a deliberate coordinated attack? We gonna respond with nukes if, say, the Koreans manage to muster enough missiles to take out our GPS and turn any area that adopts this "tamper proof" nonsense into a parking lot?

Or how about simply jamming the heck out of the broadcast GPS signal? I suppose you could make the GPS receivers in cars resistant to jamming, but that'd only make them more expensive, no?

In the end, I am probably spouting technical gibberish, but it just seems to me that making the operability of all motor vehicles in an area rely upon a single point of failure (the GPS system) is a marvelously dumn idea with exactly the kind of appeal that makes it so attractive to non-technical bureaucrats.

Cheers...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

Based on what Stanford has done in the DARPA robot car contest, and what the team leader plans to do next - a self-guided trip from SF to LA - it won't be long before GPS tracking won't be an issue - it'll be part of the car's automatic self-navigation function, and cars won't even be allowed on major routes unless they're connected to the larger computer-controlled system. Privacy? What privacy? And if not in my lifetime, certainly in that of the next generation.

Although in all fairness, I remember only too well the coloring books we kids got after WWII that showed the giant flying wing passenger planes and the twin-rotor helicopters in everyone's driveways ;)