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6/21/2003
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- San Mateo

Traffic tracking plan spurs fear of 'Big Brother'
MTC says privacy will be maintained when monitoring begins in Sept.
By Sean Holstege, STAFF WRITER
Little Brother will be watching you, unless you carry a Mylar bag.

Little Brother, in this case the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, sent out a letter last week to 200,000 Bay Area residents advising that in September, it will use FasTrak transponders to monitor traffic.

The MTC has taken extraordinary steps to avoid acting more like George Orwell's classically malevolent "1984" dictator, Big Brother, who watched the every movement of his fictional subjects.

Chief among the transportation agency's efforts to protect the privacy of motorists, MTC mailed with each notice a couple of Mylar bags. These prevent a FasTrak transponder from chatting with any of hundreds of receiver antennas now cropping up on Bay Area freeways. MTC also promised that all data will be dumped at the end of every day and that it will encrypt and scramble data that could be used to identify each car.

The purpose of the $6 million program, which starts on Interstate 80 and will spread to all Bay Area freeways by the end of next year, is to let people know how long it will take to drive from point A to point B.

It works like this: Between San Francisco and Davis there are 10 sets of receivers, which look like small TV antennas. Every time a FasTrak transponder passes one of these, it sends an electronic ping to a computer, which sorts the pings, measures the travel times between two points and then calculates the average speed and travel time for a particular stretch of highway. Individual cars will not be tracked, only the aggregate speeds and volumes, say MTC officials.

When travelers call the automated, voice-activated 511 travel hot line or log-on to 511.org they will get up-to-the-second freeway forecasts.

Some Bay Area residents are suspicious, particularly privacy watchdogs such as Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "People should be concerned if they are concerned about the privacy of their location," Tien said.

"Imagine what J. Edgar Hoover would have done with this to track the movements of Martin Luther King or what the Nixon Administration would have done to follow its enemies," he said.

When Caltrans launched FasTrak in 2000, Bay Area users were told that it only would be used to collect tolls on the area's bridges. The MTC has been getting 25 calls a day this week from skittish drivers.

Some, says MTC Spokesman Randy Rentschler, are just plain confused about what to do with the shiny plastic bag that's labeled "Static Shield Bag" and warns that "handling precautions are required." His advise: If you don't care about being tracked, toss it.

The rest of the callers seem to care about being tracked. For them, the Mylar bag blocks the signal, and can be removed when the more paranoid drivers get near a toll plaza.

"They are the people interested in privacy and most are comfortable after they are informed of the measures we are taking. But some are not, and there isn't any assurance we can give them that will make them feel better," Rentschler said.

Some people don't know how to get the Mylar bag around the transponder if it is glued to their car's windshield. He advises people to keep the FasTrak device in a convenient cubby-hole, such as a coffee-cup holder.

For those who don't use the bag, what guarantees that their data will be kept private, or that scrambled data can't be unscrambled? What if U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft subpoenas MTC for its data?

"We will tell him there's nothing to give," Rentschler said.

Contact Sean Holstege at mailto:href= ">sholstege@angnewspapers.com .

That gives Tien some, but not enough, comfort.

"If they encrypt and they really do discard the key to the encryption it's possible that they will have nothing but aggregate or anonymized data to give John Ashcroft," he said. "It all depends on how they handle the encryption, and we just don't know."

Contact Sean Holstege at mailto:href= ">sholstege@angnewspapers.com .