RFID and Big Brother

RFID: Put it on your car like a Government LoJack?

After reading the article:An RFID solution to rush hour headaches? by Amanda Termen, I just had to make comment on it. I did a post to her article but felt it needed a full blog post to properly address this article and it's overall impacts.

Big Brother Will Invade... Unfortunately, Big Brother will always invade any system that has a good intention to it. That's why he's called Big Brother. If he didn't, he'd be called little wuss in the corner. The RFID is a great technology and I can certainly see it being placed inside our yearly tag stickers on our car before we even know it. However, maybe it will change the way taxes are collected and those that cause the most pollution pay the most andthey'll have stats to back it up. HA HA... I crack myself up! What I see is that everyone will still pay their yearly ad-velorum taxes, tag taxes, and now this NEW tax for actually using the roads. Here in Atlanta, mass transit is a joke. Built and run by an independant corporation which is the business of making money, not running as a non-profit organization, as it should. Not that they shouldn't make additional funding to make the system better. I'm talking about CEOs that have a $400K income with a $2Million dollar bonus schedule for being more than normal profitable. Gov't Hidden Agenda: track all vehicles and collect that information into a main gov't database to collect information on how to increase their revenue per year with the following revenue streams: hidden agenda 1 - by charging the people actually use the roads with a 'pollution mileage rate' on top of your ad-velorum and tag tax. hidden agenda 2 - catch red-light runners for tickets/revenue. hidden agenda 3 - add "RFID readers" to cop cars to identify the person they just 'zapped' with their speed detection device, which uploads the ticket with relavent info to their "speeders" server and automatically e-mails or mails you a ticket and the cop doesn't even have to chase you anymore, or even be a cop, just an attachement under bridges or the side of the road. They could actually use your own transponder signal to determine speed! hidden agenda 4 - use 'classified/secret' warrants against the collected information to track your driving habits and "follow you" virtually to help in "tailing" folks without the man-power needs. hidden agenda 5 - I'm not even evil enough to think of them all =) Big Brother spinsters - the way they'll sell it to us constituents. spin 1 - Find stolen cars faster, because they can be identified by cop cars just driving through "suspected areas" spin 2 - catch violating probationers, like sexual predators driving too close to children's parks. (Hey, I'd almost buy into that to protect my son!). spin 3 - make those that are the "significant polluters" to pay their fair share. (companies won't like it, but voters may). And to look at removing the initial tag tax (but they won't) to be replaced by this system. spin 4 - I don't work for the whitehouse, so I'm not the best spinster and I'm sure there are more that can be thought up. =) Conclusion: Anyway you look at it, the benefits have to outweigh the hidden agendas in order to even contemplate putting this kind of policy into place. Which, in my opinion isn't going to happen any time soon.