Australia Mulling a Nationwide Vehicle-Tracking System 176
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that as political support for Australia's version of the national ID card is waning, the powers that be have found a far more effective way to catalog the populace. CrimTrac, an Australian government agency responsible for designing technical solutions to aid policing, is due to hand in a $2.2 million scoping study for the introduction of a nationwide automatic number plate recognition system (ANPR). It seems that as well as ANPR, the system will also collect images of drivers and passengers with high enough resolution for identification purposes. All ANPR data collected would be made available to participating agencies in real time, and retained for five years for future investigations."
Re:No ... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, crime will stop when the second to last person dies.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
If only we had more data available, we could stop all crime!
but what would we do without politicians?!
oh, you mean, if only THEY had more data...
Re:ANPR already in UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeh but thats counting all of the private entity Cameras. There seems to be a widespread myth these days that every camera you see everywhere is linked together. So that perhaps a mean with a white beard and an over exuberant use of visa vis can watch us 24/7.
A fraction of the cameras are owned and controlled by the government and even then, from the limited information ive obtained from watching crime programs, getting detailed information accross even county borders isnt easy.
Take off the tinfoil hat please.
Re:I'm all for this system (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you were kind of joking, but I think that would be a great test for any new law like this. Something to go in the constitution. Any politician voting to approve any new monitoring law has to make all data collected about them (and their family?) publicly available in as near to real time as possible for the duration of their term of office, and a few years afterward, just to make sure.
If the law gets in, the monitoring is only put in on a trial basis for (say) 6 months, after which the politicians are given the opportunity to change their mind about their vote (eg the law is put to vote again).
If any politician doesn't want to vote for such a law on that basis, then that's probably a pretty good indicator that the law is too intrusive.
Re:Welcome to the Global Village (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, surveillance *can* be used by a police state, but it can be used against the state as well.
Not if the police state makes it unlawful for anyone but themselves to use surveillance. In the UK, you'll more than likely have your camera taken off you if the police spot you filming them.
Re:on-star service. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if Australians used American-made toilets (with swirling motion), they still wouldn't spin backwards. How water spins down a drain is related to the design of the unit, not the earth's rotation. (urban legend).
BACK TO ARTICLE:
"Only criminals need fear tracking of their cars," is the most common defense to this proposal. My response: "And what if the government makes travel a crime? Then we ALL become criminals." Why would government make travel a crime? Well besides the obvious case of dictatorship, there's also the possibility a government might outlaw travel for environmental reasons. Or because oil is scarce.
A person is not truly free unless he has the right to travel whereever he wishes without restraint or monitoring.
Re:ANPR already in UK (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand why people insist upon putting cameras everywhere. The terrorists that struck on 9/11 walked past several security cameras, and not one of them was flagged. They still boarded the plane & committed their crime.
Cameras are worthless, except for very simplistic uses like issuing automatic speeding tickets.
Re:ANPR already in UK (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ANPR already in UK (Score:3, Insightful)
Cameras aren't best used for realtime monitoring in some big room.
They're best used for retroactive analysis. Somebody becomes a person of interest, and now once you know where they were at any point in history you can find out everywhere they've ever been, everybody they've ever talked to, everywhere anybody they've ever talked to has been, and where they are right now.
I'm sure the first place we'll see these abused is in civil cases. Divorce cases come to mind very quickly.
Re:on-star service. (Score:4, Insightful)
History shows that all governments eventually become tyrannical in nature. (For example Rome started as a Republic, devolved into an Imperium, and finally ended as a dictatorship.) More recently, we have our own President spying on us with the US PATRIOT Act giving him power to tap all phone conversations everywhere.
Why give some future tyrant the tools to abuse his power & track all travel? We should limit government power every chance we get, to guard against that future tyrant *before* he arrives on the scene.
Australia Choices? (Score:3, Insightful)
Certainly a reasonable post. However note to a man not one has discussed to the other side of the issue. How far and by what means should law enforcement do it's job without constituents lambasting them for their failures (and they will most assuredly fail)? A weighty question, but then privacy is weighty and plenty have commentary on that.
Re:Countermeasures? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Jcr is a suspect for damaging government property, because the camera was working just fine as of 11:38:13 seconds and ceased to work at 11:38:15 after his vehicle passed."
Gang,
in its various incarnations including the rest of YRO, this is *the* signature theme of our century. It's gonna take something really culturally decisive to resolve this. Simple "low level" tricks will not quite work.
The reason why is that cumulatively, the ideas proposed so far have been logically inconsistent! Unfortunately, prosecuting attorneys seem to enjoy crushing people with logically inconsistent motivations.
I don't have the answers. All I know is that the macro problem is *really tough*.