UK's MI5 Wants Oyster Card Travel Data 291
Boiled Frog from a Nation of Suspects writes "The Oyster card, an RFID single-swipe card (which was recently cracked), was introduced to London's public transport users purportedly to make their lives easier. Now, British Intelligence services want some of the benefits by trawling through the travel data amassed by the card to spy on the 17 million Britons who use it. The article notes, "Currently the security services can demand the Oyster records of specific individuals under investigation to establish where they have been, but cannot trawl the whole database. But supporters of calls for more sharing of data argue that apparently trivial snippets — like the journeys an individual makes around the capital — could become important pieces of the jigsaw when fitted into a pattern of other publicly held information on an individual's movements, habits, education and other personal details. That could lead, they argue, to the unmasking of otherwise undetected suspects."
Acid Test (Score:5, Interesting)
After 6 months, they can decide if they *REALLY* want the intelligence services (and anyone who picks an MI5 laptop up on a train) to have the same.
D Filter error: You can type more than that for yo (Score:3, Interesting)
Why link it to the individual at all? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are logs, and you can check them yourself by inserting the card into a reader; same for your wife who took your card to see where you've been. It is anonymous in that your personal details are not tied to the card ID, so no fishing expeditions by the authorities.
Re:Everyone is a suspect then. (Score:3, Interesting)
It will be worse than E. Germany, so it must be stopped now. Amateur law enforcement through paranoid informants [boingboing.net] is a part of any police state but centralized tracking like this was beyond the means of E. Germany and other previous tyrannies. The other thing that makes it worse is that there's no large free state left for escape or rescue. Once the ability to identify and quash dissidents is established, the laws will be changed to make it easier to round them up.
If they have their way, there will be no way to travel in the UK that can't be tracked. Roads and air are already tracked, now they are going for rail. Dissidents will be locked to stone age techniques of walking/biking to meetings where no one can carry a cell phone.
Re:I predict a new business coming (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I predict a new business coming (Score:4, Interesting)
Shhhh don't give them any ideas! Next thing you know they are going to implant chips for you to travel, or go work, or get your chocolate ration for the week. I hear it's up to 20 grams!
Sad but true. (Score:3, Interesting)
In the Netherlands there will be a travelcard that can be used in the whole country. Train, bus, tram, subway, everything.
They come in two flavours. One, *cough* anonymous, wihthout reduction and one, personalised, with 40% reduction. It appears anonymity comes at a price.
But who cares. They wouldn't do anything bad with it. They wouldn't use it to datamine your behaviour.
Recently I heared this story. I can't tell if it's true, but it sounds likely. They are still running trials with the cards and there are "some" flaws in the system. Somebody, with a registered card, described his traven from A to B and back again. After that trip, he found there was more money on his card than before and he wrote a story about is. Anonymously.
But surprisingly enough he got a call from the card company, so he asked how he got his phonenumber. The answer was "what do you think?".
I find this disturbing.
Re:That's not good enough. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pervasive surveillance (Score:4, Interesting)
Not at all. The people in power are generally immune to any consequences, which is why they can do this and not care. The United States Congress was originally structured in such a way that the lawmakers would serve their term of office (a civic responsibility, much like jury duty) and then return to their previous lives to live under the very laws they instituted. That very powerful negative feedback loop was opened (to our detriment) when the idea of "career politician" was born. Now, I don't know enough about England's governmental structures to know if there were any similar controls that have also since lapsed into uselessness. If so, it would explain a lot.
MPs can remain in charge indefinitely, no max term (Score:3, Interesting)
17 Million? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's not good enough. (Score:4, Interesting)
People in power really don't have as much to hide.
Wow, that is the most naive statement I've heard in well... as long as I can remember!
Re:Everyone is a suspect then. (Score:2, Interesting)
This gives the police/security service NO additional powers to detain/charge individuals. There's a big difference between having access to information and being given new ways of acting on the information. This doesn't give them access to any information which isn't already discoverable in the public domain. I could hire a PI to follow you around and accumulate a log of all your rail usage which would be identical to your Oyster log. It's not something you're doing in private, so why should it be protected?
Let's focus on privacy and the rights of individuals. But let's do it by restricting the powers of police/security services to intervene in our lives, and to discover what we do in our own home.
Besides, there's almost no chance that they'll discover anything useful in the mass of white noise of the Oyster network.
Re:Everyone is a suspect then. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Everyone is a suspect then. (Score:4, Interesting)
Really? You'll still be able to buy single (or multiple) trip tickets for cash, surely? Any "person of interest" will be sure to be doing that from today, if they weren't already. So as usual, the people the measures are supposed to catch will easily evade them, meanwhile millions of innocent commuters will lose another piece of their privacy.
Give them time.....I'm sure eventually they will do away with currency, probably sooner in the U.K. than in the U.S., but inevitably. The people in power (not to mention divorce lawyers and the like) would absolutely love to be able to know where every penny of your income goes (or comes from, in the case of the tax folks). Here the "Green Dot" and similar refillable debit cards are being hawked in ads everywhere, so eventually more and more poorer folk will be tempted into plastic, under the guise of "security" and "safety" ("Don't carry all that cash around.....") and "convenience." Not to mention those ubiquitous VISA ads that show traffic through some commercial establishment flowing like clockwork, with people waving their smart cards at that infernal little machine, until some nimnul pulls out cash and brings everything to a screeching halt.
Eventually, most Americans will be conditioned to see cash as "slow," "unsafe," and (the worst!) "old-fashioned" and the only citizens left clinging to their dead presidents will be the ignorant, the homeless, and those damned pointy-headed paranoia-spreading, conspiracy-theory nonconformists. It would be rather smooth at that point to phase out the use of currency altogether. Oh, it might be that some private transactions could still go on, perhaps in the form of barter/exchange, or some form of private scrip (which would be clamped down on pretty quickly), or for larger transactions hard metal such as gold (the private ownership of which will no doubt eventually be criminalized), but for the most part we are rushing towards a point at which any transaction involving any commercial enterprise will be logged, stored, and available for the data miners.
Re:D Filter error: You can type more than that for (Score:1, Interesting)
The Wikipedia article on the Oyster card [wikipedia.org] mentions the New York MetroCard, the Washington DC SmarTrip, and the Boston OMG-It-Involves-LEDs-So-It's-A-Bomb.
OK, maybe not that last one.
In any case, the US ones work basically the same way: totally anonymous if you use only cash, but once you use a credit card or if you get a monthly pass, permanently IDed to you.
I'm pretty sure that just like the UK, the US metro areas claim they don't track people, but you can bet they do. Partially because I can't imagine a city planner not using the data in aggregate to help plan route schedules, and partially because it's been shown time and time again that if the data is collected, the police will be given access.
Re:D Filter error: You can type more than that for (Score:3, Interesting)
Any terrorist who isn't a complete idiot will be using ye olde magnetic strip cards paid for with cash. So these changes will serve to catch catch complete idiots, while letting the masterminds get through.
Actually, even smarter terrorists would use an anonymous card that's been topped up with stolen credit card data (one or more cards) which would send the spys looking in the wrong places, and possibly highlight the dangers of relying too much on data.
Re:I predict a new business coming (Score:3, Interesting)
Or speeding on a freeway, or drunk driving. Neither activity actually causes harm, it's just that both lead to increased risk of harm. But both are really "pre-crimes".
For the record, I think they're crap laws -- what should take place is harsh punishment for damages caused if an accident results, not for some imagined possibility. The world is substantially safer from a professional driver going 100MPH on the freeway rather than my 80-year-old uncle driving a single mile to the store. Even stone sober, my uncle's driving poses a far greater risk to life and property than your average drunk driver.
Re:Everyone is a suspect then. (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't get me started.
I've got to make a trip to Liverpool next Saturday to pick up my 9-year old stepdaughter for the Easter holidays - even with a fairly economical car, that's a 400 mile round trip, and is going to set me back 60 quid, of which at least 50 goes to those leeches in Whitehall.
When they start to invest all that tax in efficient public transport, wake me up and I'll agree that it's reasonable.
Until then, it's just gouging by the parasites who are allowed to spend 22 grand feathering their second home knocking shops.
When I see proper fuel duty on airline fuel, then I'll believe that there's a green agenda - at the moment it's just institutionalised theft.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I predict a new business coming (Score:3, Interesting)
You do not drive as well as you think you do. Driving is not just about you getting where you want to get as quickly as you can. It is about doing the best on the road for everybody, not charging around like a fool, but driving with respect to other drivers.
Allow me to gloat ... (Score:1, Interesting)
It was plainly obvious that such a juicy database full of travel data would sooner of later be in the hands of a shady organization with secret objectives and little accountability to the public in general.
Expect some "leaks" about some not-in-the-government politician's visits to their mistresses or something such in the near future.