I'm not really sure I understand why there may be a problem...

If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. Anybody who uses an ATM or electronic point of use payment system across europe or who travels through a toll booth, for example, is already tracked. What difference will ITS monitoring make??

That it is fraudulently being sold as a way of helping traffic management is surely of greater concern. It demonstrates that either the clowns putting it in don't know what they're doing or do know what they're doing but don't understand how it can be 'abused' or, worse still, do know what they're doing, know the public is (generally) ignorant and want to put it in as they can see the information derived can be readily fitted in to a "better" control and monitoring system.

Oppose ID cards & NIDB, travel by public transport, pay in cash and keep your passport in a foil wallet if you want to retain your annonymity as much as possible. Be prepared for the 4am tap on the door and the official asking if you're dead or not as they haven't seen you about lately...

I always wonder

Let's say they introduce this, logging of movement to the degree that governments seem to want.

and let us do a tought experiment.

A wife runs from her abusive and violent husband, who just happens to have some friends inside the policeforce, or whatever.

The poor woman takes the family car, and is looking for a place to hide, runs to a shelter, girlfriend, or hotel, from the wrath of her husband.

The husband calls in a favour from his police fiends, and find out where the woman is hiding..

The rest can be read in the newspapers the next day, "violent husband kills his wife".

And yet I guarantee, that there will be no mention of the fact that the total surveillance of people's movments facilitated this.

Let's do another one.. A rapist has somehow managed to infiltrate the survilance system, may even appear as a very aggreeable police officer, or official.

He is now able to monitor women moving around, and finding out who has a tendency to walk alone, and what patterns they follow, and when they are in locations where the monitoring system has a few holes.

So one evening the woman takes her regular walk through the streets - the rest can be read in the papers the next day!.

Of course these scenaries does not require the total surveillance systems that are being introduced, but these total surveillance systems changes the opportunities for criminals, as rather than having to stake out someone, and follow them for sometime to find out their patterns, they can access a central database, and obtain all the information about individual movments through time, and find out if there are any patterns, and where a person is most vunerable.

It is ofc political incorrect to mention that this can be done, and most people seem to think that police, and trusted officials are some kind of angels, that are not criminals, and criminals could never obtain access to this movment data... But fact is, trusted persons are just that humans, and have as many flaws as the rest of us, in fact it is possible that they are highly criminal, but they just haven't been caught yet.

Politicians will call the scenaries as "conspriators", or "paraonia" etc, to try to remove focus from the fact that these very scenaries are very possible, and as technologi implements face tracking, resource tracking and so forth, the information will be more complete, and will in increasing degrees facilitate criminality.

Robbing houses, because you Know they're empty, robbing people in their houses, because you know there's only one elderly person at home, and so forth... Thus the risks of being caught can be significantly reduced by the surviellance. Of course there are possilibities of catching some criminals using the surveillance system, it is more likely that people working together can use the system to obscure their activities, and make it safer for criminals to be active.

Perhaps I am paranoid, however, it seems to me that these systems are as dangerous to indviduals as they are to criminals.