Word comes from Brian J. that the state of Missouri may begin spying on drivers through their cell phones. Now being a Missourian this scares me I mean the Department of Transportation that doesn’t even do a good job fixing the roads wants to spy on me.
The Missouri Department of Transportation will spend $3 million annually on a program to monitor the movements of individuals on highways via their cell phones — without their knowledge or consent.
Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up another potential ticketing technology.
Sounds like it’s time to blame Canada.
“The traffic community has been really excited for quite some time about the possibility of being able to use cell phones to track vehicles,” Valerie Briggs, program manager for transportation operations at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials told the Associated Press. “Almost everyone has a cell phone, so you have a lot of potential data points, and you can track data almost anywhere on the whole (road) system.”
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Spy on people through their phones, hell why were at it why don’t we just put a camera in everyone’s bedroom. A start of a police state? If it looks like one, acts like one umm maybe it is one.
Update by Rick Rajter: Not to mention a recently granted patent to the NSA (number 6947978 ) that allows for geographically locating a webuser by analyzing his or her traffic and essentially triangulating the position much like one finds the epicenter of an earthquake. Kinda scary. Here’s an article for more information.