LAWRENCE -- Jerome Dobson wants to make sure his field of research doesn't
aid the greatest threat to personal freedom.
As a pioneer of geographic information systems (GIS), Dobson, a researcher
at the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program at the University of Kansas,
helped develop the technology that now is commonplace in government, business
and practically every aspect of modern life.
Since 1975, Dobson has used GIS for a number of applications -- from conducting
environmental analyses to identifying populations at risk of terrorism
and natural disasters -- by combining data sets such as detailed population
counts of every country in the world, terrain and nighttime lights interpreted
from satellite images, road networks and elevations. Dobson, who is a
professor of geography at KU, also is president of the American Geographical
Society.
Unfortunately, the same technology that has so many beneficial uses also
has the potential to create a highly sophisticated form of slavery, or
"geoslavery," as Dobson calls it. What worries Dobson is that
GIS technology easily could be used not only to spy on people but to control
them as well.
"It concerns me that something I thought was wonderful has a downside
that may lead to geoslavery -- the greatest threat to freedom we've ever
experienced in human history," he said.
By combining GIS technology with a global positioning system (GPS) and
a radio transmitter and receiver, someone easily can monitor your movements
with or without your knowledge. Add to that a transponder -- either implanted
into a person or in the form of a bracelet -- that sends an electric shock
any time you step out of line, and that person actually can control your
movements from a distance.
Sound like something from a bad sci-fi movie? Actually, several products
currently on the market make this scenario possible.
"In many ways that's what we're doing with prisoners right now, but
they've been through a legal process," he said.
In fact, many of the existing products are marketed to parents as a way
to protect their children from kidnappers. Dobson, however, said parents
should think twice before using such products.
"A lot of people think this is a way to protect their children,"
he said. "But most kidnappers won't have any compunction about cutting
the child to remove an implant or bracelet."
Furthermore, these products rely on wireless networks, which are notoriously
easy for hackers to break into, potentially turning the very products
meant to protect children into fodder for tech-savvy child predators.
Dobson outlined the dangers of geoslavery in an article that appears in
the most recent issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers'
Technology and Society magazine. Peter F. Fisher, editor of the International
Journal of Geographic Information Science, co-wrote the paper with Dobson.
More than 375,000 scientists read the IEEE magazine.
One of the greatest dangers of geoslavery is that it doesn't apply just
to governments. For example, individuals could use the technology to perpetuate
various forms of slavery, from child laborers to sex slaves to a simple
case of someone controlling the whereabouts of his or her spouse, Dobson
said.
"Many people have concerns today about privacy but they haven't put
all the pieces together and realized this means someone can actually control
them -- not just know about them, but control them," Dobson said.
As the price of these products gets cheaper and cheaper, the likelihood
rises that the technology will be abused, he said. To prevent this, Dobson's
paper outlines a number of actions that should be taken, including revising
national and international laws on incarceration, slavery, stalking and
branding, and developing encryption systems that prevent criminals or
countries with bad human rights records from accessing GPS signals.
Still, the first step is making people aware of the very real threat that
geoslavery poses. The potential for harm is even greater in less developed
nations without strong traditions of personal freedom, he said.
"We need a national dialogue on this if we're going to go into something
so different from our traditional values of privacy and freedom,"
Dobson said. "We need to think about it very carefully and decide
if this is a direction we as a society want to go."
Dobson said he doesn't consider himself a crusader. Instead, he is a scientist
who is working diligently to ensure that people really understand the
good and bad sides of the technology he helped create.
"There certainly are many, many good uses for the technology -- that's
not the issue -- the issue is that it can be so easily misused,"
he said. "My role as a university professor is to alert people and
make sure there is an informed debate."
http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2003/03/12/gps_spawns_fear.html
CNN reports on Jerome Dobson's concerns that GPS technology may be hazardous
to personal liberties. Dobson is president of the American Geographical
Society. "Geoslavery" is a good word for describing one of the
biggest downsides to smartmob technology.
Deep inside the United States Department of Transportation, Big Brother
is rearing his head. On the third floor of the USDOT building in the heart
of Washington, DC, a shadowy government agency that doesn't respond to
public inquiries about its activities is coordinating a plan to use monitoring
devices to catalogue the movements of every American driver.
Most people have probably never heard of the agency, called the Intelligent
Transportation Systems Joint Program Office. And they haven't heard of
its plans to add another dimension to our national road system, one that
uses tracking and sensor technology to erase the lines between cars, the
road and the government transportation management centers from which every
aspect of transportation will be observed and managed.
For 13 years, a powerful group of car manufacturers, technology companies
and government interests has fought to bring this system to life. They
envision a future in which massive databases will track the comings and
goings of everyone who travels by car or mass transit. The only way for
people to evade the national transportation tracking system they're creating
will be to travel on foot. Drive your car, and your every movement could
be recorded and archived. The federal government will know the exact route
you drove to work, how many times you braked along the way, the precise
moment you arrived -- and that every other Tuesday you opt to ride the
bus.
They'll know you're due for a transmission repair and that you've neglected
to fix the ever-widening crack that resulted from a pebble dinging your
windshield.
Once the system is brought to life, both the corporations and the government
stand to reap billions in revenues. Companies plan to use the technology
to sell endless user services and upgrades to drivers. For governments,
tracking cars' movements means the ability to tax drivers for their driving
habits, and ultimately to use a punitive tax system to control where they
drive and when, a practice USDOT documents predict will be common throughout
the country by 2022.
This system the government and its corporate partners are striving to
create goes by many names, including the information superhighway and
the Integrated Network of Transportation information, or INTI. Reams of
federal documents spell out the details of how it will operate.
Despite this, it remains one of the federal government's best-kept secrets.
Virtually nothing has been reported about it in the media. None of the
experts at the privacy rights groups Creative Loafing talked to, including
the ACLU, the Consumers Union and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, had
ever heard of the INTI. Nor had they heard of the voluminous federal documents
that spell out, in eerie futuristic tones, what data the system will collect
and how it will impact drivers' daily lives.
Buried inside two key federal documents lies a chilling cookbook for a
Big Brother-style transportation-monitoring system. None of the privacy
experts we talked to was aware of a 2002 USDOT document called the "National
Intelligent Transportation Systems Program Plan: A Ten-Year Vision"
or the "National ITS Architecture ITS Vision Statement," published
by the Federal Highway Administration in 2003.
What's more, no one we talked to was aware of just how far the USDOT has
come in developing the base technology necessary to bring the system to
life.
More than $4 billion in federal tax dollars has already been spent to
lay the foundation for this system. Some of the technologies it will use
to track our movements are already familiar to the public, like the GPS
technology OnStar already used to pinpoint the location of its subscribers.
Others are currently being developed by the USDOT and its sub-agencies.
Five technology companies hired by the USDOT to develop the transceivers,
or "on-board units," that will transmit data from your car to
the system are expected to unveil the first models next spring. By 2010,
automakers hope to start installing them in cars. The goal is to equip
57 million vehicles by 2015.
Once the devices are installed, the technology will allow cars to talk
to each other in real time, transmitting information about weather, dangerous
road conditions ahead and even warning drivers instantaneously of an impending
collision. When used in combination with GPS technology already being
installed in millions of cars, the INTI will be able to transmit real-time
information about where your car is and where you've been.
Though Joint Project Office officials refused to talk to Creative Loafing
about the next step in their plan, one official defined it simply in a
presentation before the National Research Council in January.
"The concept," said Bill Jones, Technical Director of the Joint
Office, "is that vehicle manufacturers will install a communications
device on the vehicle starting at some future date, and equipment will
be installed on the nation's transportation system to allow all vehicles
to communicate with the infrastructure."
"The whole idea here is that we would capture data from a large number
of vehicles," Jones said at another meeting of transportation officials
in May. "That data could then be used by public jurisdictions for
traffic management purposes and also by private industry, such as DaimlerChrysler,
for the services that they wish to provide for their customers."
According to USDOT's 10-year plan, the key "data" the INTI will
collect is "the identity and performance of transportation system
users."
"It's going to happen," said Jean-Claude Thill, a professor
at the University of Buffalo who specializes in transportation and geographic
information and who has done research for USDOT. "It's probably going
to start in the large metropolitan areas where there's a much larger concentration
and more demand for the services that are going to be made available."
With this system, and the fantastic technology it will enable, the government
and the auto industry claim they can wipe out all but a fraction of the
42,000 deaths on America's roads by literally intervening between the
drivers, cars and the road. But as they careen toward making it a reality,
its costs in terms of individual privacy have barely been contemplated.
If the government has its way, these technologies will no longer be optional.
They'll be buried deep inside our cars at the auto factory, unremovable
by law. If things go as planned, within the next decade these devices
will begin transmitting information about us to the government, regardless
of whether we want to share it or not.
More chilling still is the fact that Creative Loafing isn't the first
to use the "Big Brother" label to describe the system. Even
the corporate leaders working to create it refer to it in Orwellian terms.
At a workshop for industry and government leaders last year, John Worthington,
the President and CEO of TransCore -- one of the companies currently under
contract to develop the on-board units USDOT wants to put in your car
-- described INTI as "kind of an Orwellian all-singing, all-dancing
collector/aggregator/disseminator of transportation information."
This story really begins in 1991, the year Congress established a program
to develop and deploy what is now called "Intelligent Transportation
Systems," or ITS. At the time, most ITS technology was in its infancy.
But even back then, the long-term goal of the federal government and the
automobile industry was to develop and deploy a nationwide traffic monitoring
system. A transportation technology industry quickly sprang to life over
the next decade, feeding off federal money and the corporate demand for
wireless technology.
Since 1991, the driving force behind the INTI has been the Washington,
DC-based Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITSA). This powerful
group of government and corporate interests has spent tens of millions
of dollars lobbying to bring the INTI to life and worked side by side
with USDOT and its agencies to create it.
A look at its shockingly broad 500-organization membership base shows
just how much clout is behind the push to create the information superhighway.
Forty-three of the 50 state Departments of Transportation are members,
including the North Carolina DOT. Dozens of transportation departments
from large and medium-sized cities, including the Charlotte Area Transit
System, are also members. So are most of the key corporate players in
the transportation technology industry and America's big three auto manufacturers.
Though the membership of the Board of Directors changes every year with
companies cycling on and off, over the last two years, ITSA's board members
have included executives from General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor
Company, and executives from the technology companies helping to develop
the on-board units, including TransCore and Mark IV Industries. The board
has also included federal transportation bureaucrats like Jeff Paniati,
the Joint Program Office director. ITSA president and CEO Neil Schuster
says the bulk of the group's $6 million annual budget comes from its corporate
members, money that ITSA then turns around and uses to lobby Congress
and the federal government for further development of the INTI.
So why haven't you heard about ITSA or the INTI? Until recently, most
of the groundwork necessary to lay the foundation for the system has been
highly technical and decidedly unsexy. That's because before industry
leaders and government officials could hold the first transceiver in their
hands or bury it inside the first automobile, they had to create a uniform
language for the system and convince the Federal Communications Commission
to set aside enough bandwidth to contain the massive amount of data a
constant conversation between cars, the road and the system would produce.
A half-decade later, with the computer standards 90 percent complete and
the bandwidth set aside by the FCC, they're on the brink of a transportation
revolution.
To most drivers, the above probably sounds pretty far-fetched. National
databases to track our every move? A national network of government-controlled
traffic management centers that use wireless technology for traffic surveillance
by 2022? But the reality is that much of the technology and infrastructure
needed to bring the system to life has already been put in place.
In the old days, if you turned on your windshield wipers, power just went
to the wipers. But in the cars of today, a miniature self-contained computer
system of sensors and actuators controls the wipers and just about everything
else the car does. All that information winds up on something inside your
car called a data bus.
"We have the ability to communicate essentially any of the vehicle
information that's on that data bus, typically encompassing the state
of about 200 sensors and actuators," said Dave Acton, an ITS consultant
to General Motors. "Anything that's available on the bus is just
content to the system, so you could send anything."
For automakers and tech companies, the databus is a goldmine of information
that can be transmitted via imbedded cell phone or GPS technology. This
year alone, 2 million cars in General Motors' fleet were equipped with
the GPS technology that would enable customers to subscribe to OnStar-type
services if they choose. Eventually, says Acton, all cars will likely
be equipped with it.
But the same technology installed in GM's fleet is also capable of transmitting
the car's location and speed to any government agency or corporate entity
that wants it without the driver knowing, whether they subscribe to OnStar-type
services or not.
Though government-run transportation centers across the country are not
yet collecting the data, Acton predicts they will begin to within the
next decade.
Ann Lorscheider agrees. She's the manager of the Metrolina Region Transportation
Management center on Tipton Drive in Charlotte.
At the center off Statesville Avenue, traffic management specialists stare
at dozens of television screens mounted on a massive wall, watching for
accidents or anything out of the ordinary. From their workstations, they
surveil 200 interstate miles, including I-77 from the South Carolina state
line to US 901 in Iredell and I-85 from the state line into Cabarrus County.
When they need to, they can swivel the cameras mounted along the interstate
or zoom in to get a better look at an accident. Sensors in the road constantly
dump data back to the center on traffic patterns and speed. A system based
on predictive algorithms tells them if a traffic pattern signals a potential
problem.
The cameras and the sensors were installed by the state in 2000, at a
cost of $41 million. Traffic management centers like the one Lorscheider
runs can now be found in just about every major to mid-sized city or region
across the country, most constructed in over the last decade or so.
News reports show that over the last five years alone, there has been
an explosion in the construction of these centers. During that time, over
100 such centers have opened across the country, part of a boom driven
by the USDOT and its sub-agency, the Federal Highway Administration, which
has secured funding to help bring the centers to life.
"They're booming," said Lorscheider. "They're all over
the place now."
Everywhere they've opened, the centers have decreased response time to
accidents and slashed, sometimes by as much as half, the number of law
enforcement personnel needed to respond to accidents and get traffic moving
again. Congestion and travel times have also improved.
This all sounds fine and safety-centered. But in the future envisioned
by USDOT and ITSA in federal documents, the centers will be far more than
a handy congestion management tool. They'll form the very hub of the INTI
itself, interacting with regional and national traffic centers and, ultimately,
with immense national databases run in partnership with the private sector
that will cull data from vehicles, crunch and archive it.
To bring the INTI to life the way the government plans, the system will
have to do far more than use GPS technology to transmit where cars have
been and what they did along the way. Cars will need to swap information
instantaneously with each other and with roadside readers at highway speeds
in real time, something today's GPS technology can't do. To solve the
problem, the federal government is pushing back the boundaries of wireless
technology to create devices that can make the vision possible. Using
something called Dedicated Short Range Communications, or DSRC, the transceivers
the government is developing would allow cars to carry on simultaneous
conversations with each other and with corresponding roadside units, sending
messages or warnings throughout the transportation management system instantly.
These "conversations" could prevent collisions or stop drivers
from running off the road, while giving transportation managers an instantaneous
view of road and weather conditions. With a DSRC transceiver and GPS technology
in every car, automakers believe they can wipe out nearly all automobile
fatalities in the US. It's a goal they call the Zero Fatalities Vision.
"There is a basic consensus that we have to change the safety paradigm,"
said Chris Wilson, Vice President of ITS Strategy and Programs at DaimlerChrysler
Research and Technology North America, Inc. "Everything we've done
up until now -- airbags, seatbelts -- was to mitigate accidents once they
occur. Now we're looking to prevent accidents. To do that we need live
vehicle-to-vehicle communication and vehicle-to-vehicle infrastructure."
The tantalizing prospect of saving thousands of lives comes with a heavy
price. The same technology that will allow cars to talk to each other
in real time would also allow the government and ultimately private business
to use the INTI to track every move American drivers make -- and profit
from it.
This is the dark side of the information superhighway, the one executives
and federal bureaucrats don't like to talk about. That's probably because
they know it's entirely possible to use the technology the government
is developing to prevent fatal collisions without harvesting information
from automobiles and archiving it.
For all their talk about saving lives, there's ample evidence that the
driving force behind the push to develop the national information superhighway
is to profit from the data it collects. Both the corporations and the
government -- including the more than 40 state departments of transportation
that are members of ITSA -- stand to eventually rake in billions in revenues
if they can bring the system to life. (See sidebar, "A Marketer's
Dream.")
But first, they must find a way to harvest and archive the data.
That's where the ADUS, or Archived Data User Service, project comes in.
For the last five years, while they were laying the foundation for the
INTI, USDOT and ITSA have also begun setting standards for the massive
databases that will collect and archive information.
According to federal documents, when it's completed, the brain of the
INTI will essentially be a string of interconnected regional and national
databases, swapping, processing and storing data on our travels it will
collect from devices in our cars.
According to the "ITS Vision Statement" the Federal Highway
Administration published in 2003, by 2022, each private "travel customer"
will have their own "user profile" on the system that includes
regular travel destinations, their route preferences, and any pay-for-service
subscriptions they use.
Neil Schuster, president and CEO of ITSA, further clarified that goal
in a recent interview with Creative Loafing.
"In fact, when we talk about this, the US government is talking about
creating a national database, because where cars are has to go into a
database," Schuster said.
Most INTI enthusiasts, like Schuster, insist that the lives potentially
saved by this technology are worth giving up some privacy.
"When I get on an airplane everyone in the system knows where I am,"
said Schuster. "They know which tickets I bought. You could probably
go back through United Airlines and find out everywhere I traveled in
the last year. Do I worry about that? No. We've decided that airline safety
is so important that we're going to put a transponder in every airplane
and track it. We know the passenger list of every airplane and we're tracking
these things so that planes don't crash into each other. Shouldn't we
have that same sense of concern and urgency about road travel? The average
number of fatalities each year from airplanes is less than 100. The average
number of deaths on the highway is 42,000. I think we've got to enter
the debate as to whether we're willing to change that in a substantial
way and it may be that we have to allow something on our vehicles that
makes our car safer. . . I wouldn't mind some of this information being
available to make my roads safer so some idiot out there doesn't run into
me."
Schuster insists that drivers shouldn't worry about the government storing
information about their travels because personal identifying information
would be stripped from it.
"They're not going to archive all of the data, they're going to archive
the data they need," Schuster said. "They want origin, they
want destination, they want what route that vehicle took. They don't want
the personal information that goes with that because it's useless to them."
Schuster's words would be more reassuring if they didn't contradict planning
documents authored by his organization and USDOT.
ITSA's own website on ADUS says data archived by INTI databases will include
"vehicle and passenger data." So does the USDOT's Ten-Year-Plan.
In fact, according to ITSA's own privacy principles, which are printed
on its website, transportation systems will collect personal information,
but only that information that's relevant for "intelligent transportation
system" purposes.
"ITS, respectful of the individual's interest in privacy, will only
collect information that contains individual identifiers that are needed
for the ITS service functions," the site reads. "Furthermore,
ITS information systems will include protocols that call for the purging
of individual identifier information that is no longer needed to meet
ITS needs."
In other words, identifying information will be purged when government
and corporate users no longer have a need for it, not when it becomes
a privacy issue for an individual driver.
Everyone Creative Loafing spoke to for this article, and every federal
document we examined, insisted that safeguards would be put in place to
protect this data. So far, though, no one has been able to specify exactly
how these safeguards will work.
It's a problem Eric Skrum, Communications Director for the National Motorists
Association, is familiar with.
"Information on this is awfully hard to get and it's also very conflicting,
where one hand will be telling you one thing and the other will be saying
oh no, we wouldn't possibly be doing that," Skrum said.
It's a problem Creative Loafing ran into as well. For instance, Schuster
insists that the data the system will eventually collect won't be used
to issue people speeding tickets or other traffic citations.
But according to ITSA's own privacy principles, the information won't
be shared with law enforcement -- until states pass laws allowing it.
In fact, the US Department of Justice and USDOT are already working on
a plan to share the data ITS systems collect with law enforcement. It's
called the USDOT/DOJ Joint Initiative For Intelligent Transportation &
Public Safety Systems, and its aim is to coordinate the integration of
the system with police and law enforcement systems by developing the software
and technical language that will allow them to communicate.
After Sept. 11, ITSA and USDOT added a homeland security addendum to their
10-year plan. The system, through wireless surveillance and automated
tracking of the users of our transportation system, could bolster Homeland
Security efforts, it said.
Sensors deployed in vehicles and the infrastructure could "identify
suspicious vehicles," "detect disruptions" and "detect
threatening behavior" by drivers, according to the addendum. Those
who take public transit wouldn't escape monitoring, either. The addendum
suggests "developing systems for public transit tracking to monitor
passenger behavior."
So who will control the information transmitted by the on-board units?
That's still up in the air, too. Like the black boxes now installed in
cars that record data before a crash that can later be used against the
driver, it's possible that the on-board units will be installed in new
cars before the legal issues surrounding the data they collect are fully
resolved, says one industry insider.
Robert Kelly, a wireless communications legal expert who has acted as
legal council to ITSA, says privacy law will have to evolve with the technology.
In other words, privacy issues probably won't be resolved until the technology
is already in place. Legislatures and Congress will have to guide how
everyone from law enforcement to corporations use the data and exactly
what information they have access to, Kelly said.
But again, with privacy organizations largely in the dark and the development
of the system hurtling forward, the question is how much influence, if
any, privacy advocates will be able to wield before these devices are
installed on the first future fleet of cars.
That's part of what frustrates Skrum, the National Motorists Association
communications director. "Because this is being done behind closed
doors to a certain extent, the public isn't really going to have much
to say about it," said Skrum.
The good news is that there's still time for the public to weigh in. It
will take USDOT at least three more years of development and consumer
testing before the first prototype "on-board unit" is ready.
In the meantime, the federal government, automakers and the state departments
of transportation will have to hash out a couple of billion-dollar details.
So far, the government has borne nearly all the cost of developing the
on-board units. But that will soon change. For the system to work, automakers
must sign on to mass produce the on-board units and install them in cars,
a move that will cost billions.
At the same time, the government must install the roadside readers to
transmit the messages cars send, or the on-board units will be useless.
So to bring the system to life, the government must spend millions, if
not billions, on roadside units to communicate with cars at roughly the
same time automakers begin installing the on-board units.
As Japan, Europe and foreign carmakers dash to develop similar technology,
US automakers are under tremendous pressure. This is creating something
of a chicken and egg situation. Given the nature of federal and state
transportation budgets, the rollout of roadside units is likely to be
gradual, starting at select trouble spots across the nation. But automakers
say they need a mass deployment to make their effort worthwhile. They
want to see a rollout of at least 400,000 roadside readers over about
a three-year period.
A decision is currently slated for 2008, when automakers and the USDOT
plan to come together to hash out a deployment strategy. At stake will
be billions of dollars -- both in investments and profits. If the government
and automakers can agree on a deployment plan, technology companies are
expected to begin investing more heavily in the further development of
programs the technology will enable.
ITSA projects that $209 billion could be invested in intelligent transportation
technology between now and the year 2011 -- with 80 percent of that investment
coming from the private sector in the form of consumer products and services.
Jean-Claude Thill, a professor at the University of Buffalo who specializes
in transportation and geographic information systems, says he believes
the system will be deployed, just not as fast as car makers would like.
"It's not going to happen all at once," said Thill. "Look
at cell phones. Right now in large urban areas you have a high density
of cell towers so you have good coverage. If you venture on the interstate
your signal gets weak and sometimes you lose it. You can't expect this
to be different."
Thill says he believes the automobile manufacturers are playing hardball
with the government to make sure the infrastructure is put in place quickly.
"I think the automobile manufacturers will do it," said Thill.
"There is money in it. I think as the market develops in large urban
areas, they will see that it is in their interest to get on the wagon.
But nothing is going to happen until they are on board."
From the government's perspective, the good news is that a few sensors
in a few cars and a little GPS technology can go a long way.
"Only a relatively small percentage of the approximately 260 million
vehicles on US roads today need to be equipped with communication devices
for the system to start producing useful data," said Bill Jones,
the Technical Director of the USDOT's ITS Joint Project Office in a speech
to the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board in January.
"With 14 to 15 million new vehicles sold in the US each year, within
two years you can have 10 percent of all vehicles equipped. We already
know from our previous studies that a vehicle probe saturation of less
than 10 percent can provide good information."
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
California gang members to be tracked by GPS
Thu Mar 16, 2006 6:31 PM ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California prison officials have begun using
Global Positioning System anklets to track known gang members.
The gritty suburb of San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles,
this week became the first California city to use the GPS satellite navigation
system to track gang members when the devices were strapped onto three
parolees, state Department of Corrections spokeswoman Jeanne Woodford
said.
Six California counties began using GPS to monitor sex offenders in 2005
and some have already been arrested for violating parole after they were
tracked to off-limits areas.
"GPS tracking is just another tool in the bag; we will still use
ground personnel to track gang members," said Sarah Ludeman, another
spokeswoman for the corrections department.
Under an arrangement between prison officials and San Bernardino, high-risk
parolees known to belong to street gangs will be released from custody
on the condition that they wear a GPS bracelet on their ankles at all
times.
They appear as moving dots on a map and if they try to remove the anklet
or enter unauthorized areas the device sends an alert to a base station
monitored by law enforcement officials.
The University of California at Irvine will review the results of the
pilot program for its effectiveness.
