[Infowarrior] - EU wants to track all road vehicles?

[Richard Forno]

Big Brother is watching: surveillance box to track drivers is backed

• Privacy row brewing over surveillance on the road
• Box could reduce accidents, pollution and congestion

     * Paul Lewis in Brussels
     * The Guardian, Tuesday 31 March 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/31/surveillance-transport-communication-box

The government is backing a project to install a "communication box"  
in new cars to track the whereabouts of drivers anywhere in Europe,  
the Guardian can reveal.

Under the proposals, vehicles will emit a constant "heartbeat"  
revealing their location, speed and direction of travel. The EU  
officials behind the plan believe it will significantly reduce road  
accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. A consortium of  
manufacturers has indicated that the router device could be installed  
in all new cars as early as 2013.

However, privacy campaigners warned last night that a European-wide  
car tracking system would create a system of almost total road  
surveillance.
Follow that car: 'The British government are the main backers' Link to  
this audio

Details of the Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS)  
project, a £36m EU initiative backed by car manufacturers and the  
telecoms industry, will be unveiled this year.

But the Guardian has been given unpublished documents detailing the  
proposed uses for the system. They confirm that it could have profound  
implications for privacy, enabling cars to be tracked to within a  
metre - more accurate than current satellite navigation technologies.

The European commission has asked governments to reserve radio  
frequency on the 5.9 Gigahertz band, essentially setting aside a  
universal frequency on which CVIS technology will work.

The Department for Transport said there were no current plans to make  
installation of the technology mandatory. However, those involved in  
the project describe the UK as one of the main "state backers".  
Transport for London has also hosted trials of the technology.

The European Data Protection Supervisor will make a formal  
announcement on the privacy implications of CVIS technology soon. But  
in a recent speech he said the technology would have "great impact on  
rights to privacy and data".

Paul Kompfner, who manages CVIS, said governments would have to decide  
on privacy safeguards. "It is time to start a debate ... so the right  
legal and privacy framework can be put in place before the technology  
reaches the market," he said.

The system allows cars to "talk" to one another and the road. A  
"communication box" behind the dashboard ensures that cars send out  
"heartbeat" messages every 500 milliseconds through mobile cellular  
and wireless local area networks, short-range microwave or infrared.

The messages will be picked up by other cars in the vicinity, allowing  
vehicles to warn each other if they are forced to break hard or swerve  
to avoid a hazard.

The data is also picked up by detectors at the roadside and mobile  
phone towers. That enables the road to communicate with cars, allowing  
for "intelligent" traffic lights to turn green when cars are  
approaching or gantries on the motorway to announce changes to speed  
limits.

Data will also be sent to "control centres" that manage traffic,  
enabling a vastly improved system to monitor and even direct vehicles.

"A traffic controller will know where all vehicles are and even where  
they are headed," said Kompfner. "That would result in a significant  
reduction in congestion and replace the need for cameras."

Although the plan is to initially introduce the technology on a  
voluntary basis, Kompfner conceded that for the system to work it  
would need widespread uptake. He envisages governments making the  
technology mandatory for safety reasons.Any system that tracks cars  
could also be used for speed enforcement or national road tolling.

Roads in the UK are already subject to the closest surveillance of any  
in the world. Police control a database that is fed information from  
automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, and are able to  
deduce the journeys of as many as 10 million drivers a day. Details  
are stored for up to five years.

However, the government has been told that ANPR speed camera  
technology is "inherently limited" with "numerous shortcomings".

Advice to ministers obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of  
Information Act advocates upgrading to a more effective car tracking- 
based system, similar to CVIS technology, but warns such a system  
could be seen as a "spy in the cab" and "may be regarded as draconian".

Introducing a more benign technology first, the report by transport  
consultants argues, would "enable potential adverse public reaction to  
be better managed".

Simon Davies, director of the watchdog Privacy International, said:  
"The problem is not what the data tells the state, but what happens  
with interlocking information it already has. If you correlate car  
tracking data with mobile phone data, which can also track people,  
there is the potential for an almost infallible surveillance system."