CircleSoft is concerned that the safeguards implemented in Dr. Bayen's traffic monitoring system are entirely software in nature. It would take literally seconds to bypass these safeguards and allow the described system to report the identity of the cell phone data. In fact, if the system were to be compromised, it is possible the identity information may be tapped without the administrating body knowing that it is being reported.
CircleSoft wishes to point out that the public would have never been aware of the out-going administration's illegal phone taps without the extra hardware that was discovered by an alert technician in the city of San Francisco. The taping of the identity information from Dr. Bayen's traffic system would not require any extra hardware and therefore will be impossible to detect. The argument that the privacy aware citizen may easily opt out of the system by simply turning off her phone greatly inconveniences the citizen.
This traffic monitoring system, as implemented, is at fiscal discretion of private telecommunication corporations. These corporations are well known to have initial attractor rates to draw new business. Once the American public user is committed to this service, there will be rate raises. I am not aware of any federal or state regulations that will cap the price of these services.
This system need not be restricted to monitoring and reporting the location of cell phones on the nation's roads. There is no technical reason which prevents the removal of the velocity and road location filters from this data stream. These filters reasonably restrict reports to cell phones which are only in motion on a recognized road. These filters are also implemented in software. This means that the abusers of the system will have the whereabouts of every cellphone user in the country at their fingertips.
CircleSoft urges public officials examining this technology not to adopt it.
Link to San Francisco Chronicle article on Bayen's prototype
Link to University of California News Article on Bayen's system
Examination of Bayen's security techniques in the publication Virtual Trip Lines for Distributed Privacy-Preserving Traffic Monitoring exposes flaws in the system's privacy protection.
There are three points of penetration, two of which need only be momentary to collect encryption keys, and then a single point of penetration thereafter that will enable an intruder to abscond with the entire data set.
Bayen's system does not protect the public from intentional illegal government intrusion, the likes of which we have already observed in this country. The legal solution to this type of intrusion was that congress legalized the criminal act and protected the participating conspirators with immunity from prosecution. Bayen's privacy system will certainly fail in these perilous times.
Even if Bayen were to adopt a peer to peer anonymous transfer of VTL data along multiple clients before turning the report over to the central servers, a motivated government would simply update the clients to directly report, as they do in Bayen's system.
IR optics at high vantage points would be just as effective to report traffic conditions, assure anonymity, and would not provide the government with an exploitable surveillance tool.
