Follow the tail-lights out of the city

[venta]

One of these days I am going to get round to rigging up some LEDs in my rear windscreen so I can spell "BACK OFF" to the person driving way too close behind me.

I hate tailgaters :(

(Today's finally passed me when I was in the middle lane, pulling onto a roundabout to go straight on. He turned right, from the left hand lane, straight across my bows without a signal.)

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I prefer the idea of the averaging speed cameras to the current ones. They're all connected and check the elapsed time between one camera and the next.

Mutter mutter privacy mutter paranoia mutter governments how we hate them.

The application here being that an ordinary speed camera could in theory photograph everyone, but actually doesn't. An averaging speed camera system is required, in order to work, to track the movements of every motorist on the road. I give it 5 years before records of these movements are kept indefinitely and made available to the police in order to identify those whose movements mark them as suspicious, and about as long before they are misappropriated by tabloid journalists.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

Have a point for spotting the secret agenda.

Not only could they be used to monitor motorist's movements (handy for when those darned getaway drivers getaway), but for massive generation of extra revenue.

Any road that has those cameras on them can instantly become a toll road with no need for any extra hardware. They can even be toll roads at certain times of the day and not others.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".
I must not reply "Why would that be a bad thing?".

(...and I even didn't use copy-and-paste the first three times.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

I think most of us can work that out.

Well, the first 3 times anyway.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I was quite interested to learn recently that a guy called David Chaum had a system 15 or so years ago that enables tolls to be automatically and electronically and anonymously collected.

The basic deal is that you pay some money to put credits on your gadget, you hang the gadget in the window of the car, and the gadget pays the toll in such a way that (for cryptographic reasons) its impossible to figure out who it was that paid that particular toll unless they tamper with their gadget in such a way that it tries to use the same credit twice. Doing that leaks enough information that you can backtrack to the point where the credit was bought and nail the perp.

Buggered if I know how it all works, but I'll try to find out next time I have a spare day or two.

The point is that the tech exists for you to have your clever tolls and me to have my privacy. The main reason it isn't in use is that governments enjoy monitoring their subjects citizens.

I don't know whether it could be used to prevent speeding. Maybe you could give cars an anonymous token on their way into the monitored zone, then demand it back when they leave and photograph them only if they either can't give you a valid token or else they're giving it to you too soon. But you'd have to deal with attackers who just always fail to give you a token and always claim that their gadget must have been on the blink, and I don't know how to do that.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The main reason it isn't in use is that governments enjoy monitoring their citizens.

I'm not sure that's entirely fair, but certainly it's not in their interests to spend time and money developing ways of tracking speeding etc anonymously when the technology already exists to do it with some bonus infringement of privacy.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

It's tolls that I'm referring to with the tracking thing.

I suppose the fairness of my comment depends on the difference in cost of the systems - the technology for both is researched, the question is deploying it.

Perhaps it would be more reasonable for me to say that governments do not enjoy paying to not monitor their citizens.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

So you've potentially got an anonymous system, and a non-anonymous system.

What's to stop "people" (ie. the government) installing the non-anonymous system, and telling everybody that it's the anonymous one?

They'd end up with something that they couldn't admit to owning, but that's in the same category as inadmissible evidence: it gives them a big clue as to where to start looking for admissible evidence.

Plus, of course, such a gadget would cost money. I believe the going rate to charge for such things is 35 quid...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

What's to stop "people" (ie. the government) installing the non-anonymous system, and telling everybody that it's the anonymous one?

1) Someone would notice. In the same way, speed cameras could take a picture of every passing car and add it to a national tracking database, but we'd find out eventually. The police (or BT) can tap phones without warrants, but if it were automated on a large scale we'd find out eventually, because big secrets are quite hard to keep.

2) There's nothing in the anonymous system to prevent the gadget being implemented by a third party (or the individual user). According to the description I've seen of Chaum's work in digital cash, it doesn't compromise your anonymity for the government to control the shop where you buy credits and the tollbooth where you turn them over. So long as you trust the gadget, you're OK, and all the government knows is how many credits you're buying each week.

So, suppose that I could build the gadget myself out of off-the-shelf components, or buy one from a third party manufacturer. Likewise I could review the software and the crypto alogrithms involved. Then even though I'm not actually going to do all that, I can be fairly confident that a system so visible to the public will actually be the system claimed and not some other, incompatible system.

Obviously, this still assumes that "they" don't photograph me as I pass the tollbooth, but as I say, we'd know they were doing it and they'd have to admit that they were engaging in illegal mass surveillance of innocent people etc. etc.

Plus, of course, such a gadget would cost money

That is a nuisance, or course. But the usual use for similar non-anonymous gadgets at the moment is for toll roads, where you pay for the convenience of not having to stop at a booth and pay cash to raise a barrier. If you go through the "gadget" lane without a gadget, some machine notices and takes a picture.

Since the expense is acceptable to the public in the existing conditions, I don't see this as a major barrier to the adoption of an anonymous payment scheme. Toll roads are set to become more common regardless of the means used to actually collect the tolls. This system introduces a level of privacy impossible in a London-congestion-style "we'll photograph everyone and send them a fine in the post if they haven't phoned to pay us by the end of the day" effort.

No, the barrier to use is that no government is inclined to even explore such a means of ensuring privacy by technology as opposed to merely stipulating it by legislation.