I’ve already mentioned this book on the site, it was a great read if anyone is interested. For those of you who are interested, it’s about the way that one guy tracked some hackers down using any tricks he could.
But after my last post I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, how hard would it actually be to hide and not just on line. In our modern society it’s pretty much impossible to vanish, it’s not as if many people get paid in cash any more – so there is a whole financial system deal with. Almost every town has significant numbers of CCTV cameras, not just in the streets – but also garages (with Automatic Number Plate Recognition in many cases), shops, restaurants and other retail outlets. On some of the major overhead bridges on motorways there are facial recognition cameras, there are even cameras on buses and trains.
The use of a cash machine or a card any where for that matter is recorded, although it would seem that it’s possible to buy something in Nottingham in the Morning and Honk Kong in the after noon and it doesn’t raise any suspicions in financial circles. We all know that people can be accurately tracked using a mobile signal, well in the more populous areas any way. But this technology is going further, imagine you go to a store and the event goes like this. Pick up your trolley on the way in, wander round the store filling the trolley go to the checkout and pay. Nothing to sinister here you would think, well it’s not as simple as you’d expect. You can see the article here and it’s just the tip of the data collection iceberg, this technology has moved on a great deal.
There are many other possibilities to track people, it’s feasible that the NFC communications in you bank cards, telephone and even your car keys could be used to track you at a local level. Expand this into Wifi and other technologies and the methods of tracking you become even more diverse, they also become more effective. It must be pretty obvious that this is just a whole load of individual systems, each with it’s own disparate data set all just waiting to be joined up with the next technology to come along. So, what if the technology is already here? Do we risk ever more complex monitoring of peoples activity at a personal level, how will people react to it?
It is extremely unlikely that if the technology is implemented, it will ever be removed. Although knowledge of the information the government agencies would like to collect has been available for quite a while, see the Independent article here. One of the things that people also forget is the voluntary contribution that they make to being tracked, using social media, geo-tagging and the use of other mobile and fixed technologies. I would suggest as an example that the ANPR information that the police hold should be enough to worry people, consider the average motorist doing mixed driving over a period of time lets say two years. Of the more than 10 Billion records in the ANPR database, how many are his – it’s also worth noting that there seems to be no way of finding this information out.
Eventually there will be a major outcry, but it’s likely to be far to late to be able to make a significant impact on the personal freedoms that have been squandered away. You could run if you had to (although probably not for very long), but if you wanted to hide – it would have to be somewhere pretty remote and you’d probably have had to plan it for a while.