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30-03-2006, 02:08pm
Speed cameras, red-light cameras, e-tags. Innocuous technology to make the roads safer and our journey simpler yer right... or a series of "Big Brothers" keeping track of our every move?
Eight years ago, on the night that a Saudi diplomat was brutally murdered in his Canberra apartment, a car was filmed travelling south along the Hume Highway towards the national capital. Then, a few hours later, it was filmed heading north back towards Sydney.
The car wasn't being tailed by the Australian authorities, the Saudis or anyone else. The "spy" was a humble traffic camera, although this emerged only after four people were arrested and brought to trial over the diplomat's violent death. The fact that the camera had been set up to monitor speeding and unregistered trucks didn't cause a ripple. The candid Safe-T-Cam had, in fact, filmed every vehicle travelling along that stretch of the Hume. So when the diplomat's ex-lover insisted to police that she and her new boyfriend had been in Sydney at the time of the crime, the authorities had only to look at an image of her car fleeing back up the highway to know that she was lying.
Few people would be troubled by the use of traffic cameras to locate criminal suspects. But the Canberra incident highlights how the mass surveillance of motorists, far from being an Orwellian conspiracy theory, is now routinely practised and growing more pervasive by the year. In Australia and other major Western countries, traffic is increasingly monitored with the sort of sophisticated technology that makes the image of a shadowy figure watching through binoculars seem impossibly quaint. Whether we're appearing in "real time" on one of the hundreds of traffic cameras operated by central command centres in Melbourne and Sydney, being "flashed" on a speed or red-light camera operated by the police, or clocked on a toll road with our seemingly innocent e-tags, it's almost impossible to drive anywhere without being monitored and/or leaving an electronic data trail.
It's even getting harder to disappear on obscure back roads thanks to GPS - the US military-developed global positioning system whose satellite tracking can pinpoint a car's location to within a few metres. A group of Stanford University academics in the US are reportedly working on satellite navigation systems so accurate they will be able to tell authorities whether you're in your car or standing next to it. This is revolutionary technology, and great if you get lost or have an accident or your car is stolen. But there's a chilling aspect to it all as well - namely, the loss of individual privacy.
Edited by: LARDASS at: 30/3/06 4:53 pm
Eight years ago, on the night that a Saudi diplomat was brutally murdered in his Canberra apartment, a car was filmed travelling south along the Hume Highway towards the national capital. Then, a few hours later, it was filmed heading north back towards Sydney.
The car wasn't being tailed by the Australian authorities, the Saudis or anyone else. The "spy" was a humble traffic camera, although this emerged only after four people were arrested and brought to trial over the diplomat's violent death. The fact that the camera had been set up to monitor speeding and unregistered trucks didn't cause a ripple. The candid Safe-T-Cam had, in fact, filmed every vehicle travelling along that stretch of the Hume. So when the diplomat's ex-lover insisted to police that she and her new boyfriend had been in Sydney at the time of the crime, the authorities had only to look at an image of her car fleeing back up the highway to know that she was lying.
Few people would be troubled by the use of traffic cameras to locate criminal suspects. But the Canberra incident highlights how the mass surveillance of motorists, far from being an Orwellian conspiracy theory, is now routinely practised and growing more pervasive by the year. In Australia and other major Western countries, traffic is increasingly monitored with the sort of sophisticated technology that makes the image of a shadowy figure watching through binoculars seem impossibly quaint. Whether we're appearing in "real time" on one of the hundreds of traffic cameras operated by central command centres in Melbourne and Sydney, being "flashed" on a speed or red-light camera operated by the police, or clocked on a toll road with our seemingly innocent e-tags, it's almost impossible to drive anywhere without being monitored and/or leaving an electronic data trail.
It's even getting harder to disappear on obscure back roads thanks to GPS - the US military-developed global positioning system whose satellite tracking can pinpoint a car's location to within a few metres. A group of Stanford University academics in the US are reportedly working on satellite navigation systems so accurate they will be able to tell authorities whether you're in your car or standing next to it. This is revolutionary technology, and great if you get lost or have an accident or your car is stolen. But there's a chilling aspect to it all as well - namely, the loss of individual privacy.
Edited by: LARDASS at: 30/3/06 4:53 pm