Don’t look now, but
someone is joining your travels: Big
Brother.
You assume you’re
alone, traveling in your car to and from work?
No, you are being watched. All along
I-95 TV cameras are looking for accidents and slow downs. Though there are specific state laws
prohibiting the use of those cameras to write speeding tickets, they can follow
your car by model, color and license plate number.
Many local cops’ cruisers
have license plate readers, scanning every plate and sending its information to
a national database that can alert the officer to outstanding warrants, lack of
insurance and other stoppable offences. Some departments
store their scan data for weeks, others for years.
Now, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agency (ICE) is contracting with a private company to have access to a billion
license plate records,
allowing the agency to know where you were and when.
If you have an
EZ-Pass, it’s being “pinged” for more than just paying tolls. The NYC Dept of Transportation uses hundreds
of E-ZPass readers in Manhattan, it says, to monitor the flow of traffic. But the NY Civil Liberties Union calls that
an invasion of privacy.
And, of course, our cell-phones are
constantly transmitting our location and speed to services like Google and
Waze, though you can turn that
off. It’s even alleged that hackers can use Waze
to track you. And have you checked your Google Location
History
lately to see everywhere you’ve been and when?
Even outside of your car, you’re still being
followed. Metro-North just added security cameras to its trains,
watching both the engineer and the passengers.
There are cameras, as well, at stations and on NYC buses. MTA (and NYPD) can easily track every swipe of your
MetroCard
(tied to your credit card). Of course,
they’re only looking for bad guys, not you.
Right?
Traveling by air? Well, in addition to a full luggage search
and body pat-down by the TSA, now the airlines and US Customs agency are using
facial recognition to allow you to board your flight and leave the country.
If you’re bound for Aruba on JetBlue out of
Boston you won’t even need a boarding pass as your face will identify you to
the airline… and who knows who
else. The whole process take two or three seconds
and is billed as a “convenience”.
US Customs hopes to use facial recognition
for arrivals into this country starting this summer. Meantime your RFID chip-enabled passport will
be necessary. But do you know what information
about you is encoded
in that chip? US Customs says there is
no personal data on the chip, just a reference number corresponding to your
personal information stored on their computers.
Like all RFID chips, your passport’s can be
“pinged” from up to 30 feet away, so some travelers are now shielding their
passports with expensive wallets
lined with metal.
Don’t want Big Brother to join you on your
journeys? Wear a disguise, strip
yourself of all technology, and try walking or riding a bike. Or just stay home, curled up in a
paranoid-induced ball, worrying.
Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media
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