My way , highway and spy way

Ian Kerr feels like he is "standing in the middle of yesterday"

"ten years ago, information studies guru phil agre wrote a series of interesting articles about intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in an online journal called the network observer. the focus of these articles was on privacy. agre wanted to avoid utopian and dystopian extremes, steering readers instead towards what he called "medium-sized concepts that let us make theories about the interaction between technologies and institutions..."

agre warned of transponder disks that would be placed inside vehicles as part of automated toll collection systems on highways. agre worried that these transponders could be used not just to collect tolls but also to track who was traveling where and when. he predicted that automated tolls would commence on a voluntary basis but would become involuntary as toll roads multiply in number alongside public-private sector cost-recovery partnerships. the central aim would be to find an efficient and convenient way to collect tolls automatically, without asking drivers to slow down or pay cash at a gated highway entrance or exit.

ITS, agre noted, threatened the possibility of driving anonymously. in collaboration with world leading privacy expert marc rotenberg, agre raised a number of policy issues essential to ensuring adequate privacy protection on tomorrow's semi-public highways. agre also commended a company called amtech systems for developing a vehicle identification process system that would allow people to pay tolls automatically but with complete privacy, based on the digital cash methods developed by internationally renowned cryptographer david chaum.

the brilliance of chaum's system was its ability to authenticate the driver for the purposes of tracking payments without the need to reveal, collect or disclose personal identifiers that would indicate who was traveling where and when, etc. using crypto to render untraceable the link between drivers' identities and their means of payment, such technologies offered (and indeed continue to offer) the promise of a middle ground in cases where there is a clash between privacy and the public interest.

flash forward ten years.

it turns out that agre was dead right. automation and ITS have indeed come to rule the road on many of the better roadways in north america and europe."