New Technology May Be Keeping An Eye On You
Law enforcement groups in Canada are increasingly sorting through the vast data banks that citizens constantly contribute personal information to–such as credit-card use and phones–with high-tech data-mining programs, searching for relationships between people and what interests them.
One piece of technology law officials recently employed is the “black box” incorporated in late-model cars. During a recent trial, a motorist was imprisoned in the fatality of a Montreal college student. Black box data–in this case technology meant to determine air bag efficiency by obtaining and recording the vehicle’s speed five seconds before the air bag is deployed–revealed that the driver was excessively over the speed limit when he struck and killed the student.
Other new technologies include the e-Plate project taking place in Britain, in which a miniscule device incorporated in a license plate sends a unique ID number. Vehicles can be followed in real time or as they pass over or through fixed points. The plan employs radio frequency identification technology (RFID). RFID tags, which are microchips as tiny as a grain of sand, have a 96-bit code full of data that can be read and stored by RFID readers.
The goal of RFID’s creators is to formulate “an Internet of things” where every item has an individual number and can be linked to a computer. The tags have been employed in all types of situations, placed into the ID tags of executives at prominent conferences and utilized to track prisoners.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Calgary Herald (09/20/04) P. C3; Moore, Lynn .