Loss of Privacy

In case you missed Bernie Sanders on the floor of the senate last week, here’s a great summary of what happened.

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In an effort to cut carbon emissions, The Netherlands is implementing a scheme that will tax vehicles by the kilometer. Officials believe that this new tax, set to go into effect in 2012, will reduce traffic conditions in half. The Dutch cabinet approved the bill, but it needs the backing of Parliament before it can become a law.

“Each vehicle will be equipped with a GPS device that tracks how many kilometres are driven and when and where. This data will be then be sent to a collection agency that will send out the bill,” the transport ministry said in a statement.

By forcing people to have GPS devices in their cars, the government must be ready to deal with the fraud that will come with it. The devices will be tampered with as there will be people that do not want this new tracking system.

The simplest answer is to raise the tax on gasoline. It, in effect, does the same thing, taxing mileage, without the use of a complicates GPS system or the tracking of individuals in their cars.

Ownership and sales taxes, about a quarter of the cost of a new car, will be scrapped and replaced by the “price per kilometre” system aimed at cutting the Netherlands’ carbon dioxide emissions by 10 percent.

Every vehicle type will have a base rate, which depends on its size, weight and carbon dioxide emissions.

Taxis, vehicles for the disabled, buses, motorcycles and classic cars will all be exempt.

“An alternative payment will be introduced for foreign vehicles,” the ministry statement added.

While the ownership and sales taxes will help those who only drive occasionally, not exempting vehicles for business is a bad idea. That delivery company is now going to pass their tax onto you. Now, you’re not only paying your tax for peak times, you’re paying for other companies too.

Dutch motorists driving a standard family saloon will be charged 3 euro cents per kilometre (seven US cents per mile) in 2012. That would increase to 6.7 cents (16 US cents per mile) in 2018, according to the proposed law.

If you want to cut down on rush hour traffic, then introduce a system that rewards drivers, not one that punishes them. Taxing people more is only going to anger them. Offer discounts if they travel by train or bus. Creating a tax that penalizes people because they have to go to work is illogical. Taxing everyone taxes unfairly. The Dutch need to find a way to implement a road tax that is fair and does not track people. Until then, they are only leading the charge to ubiquitous tracking.

The US General Accounting Office (GAO) has released its report [pdf] detailing how the IRS website is still vulnerable.  Despite the fact that only three months have passed since the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reached a similar conclusion, nothing has changed at the IRS.

The report shows that taxpayer and other sensitive data continues to remain dangerously underprotected at the IRS. According to the GAO, while the IRS has addressed 49 of 115 previously reported security issues, several critical areas remain vulnerable.

A lot of the issues are the result of a continued failure by the IRS to implement any agency-wide information security program or review risk assessments annually, the GAO said. As a result, the agency remains “particularly vulnerable” to insider threats and malicious attacks that could expose financial and taxpayer data.

The GAO pointed to specific security problems, including the following: Exposed usernames and passwords on an IRS contractor-maintained Web site; authenticated users on the IRS network with access to shared drives containing taxpayer information, performance appraisal data and sensitive data such as Social Security numbers for other IRS employees; financial information and account data that was transmitted in the clear from the IRS’s financial accounting system; inadequate logging of security events for Unix and Windows servers at a data center, and a similar lack of controls for logging changes to mainframe data sets at another data center; a failure to maintain or enforce a baseline configuration for a mainframe system, which supports the revenue accounting operation of record and other critical applications.

The webmaster should have been fired for not securing the website in the first place.  Your personal information should never be part of the URL query string and secure sessions should always be monitored.  It is only asking for trouble.  As far as I’m concerned, you can’t call it hacking when you can simply change one digit in the URL string to get other people’s information.  It’s called complete idiocy by the webmaster.

In a one-page response to the report, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said data security and privacy are of “utmost importance” to the IRS, and he pledged that the agency would provide a “detailed corrective action plan” that addresses the concerns raised by the GAO.

Oh, it’s of the utmost importance, eh?  And you’re going to make a detailed corrective action plan sometime soon and that will be implemented some time after that.  Oh, that makes it okay then, because you’re “really” serious about fixing the problem.

While you’re at it, how about not giving people access to people’s private data that they can change or delete at will without any consequences to the employee?

We really shouldn’t be surprised at any of this.  The contract work for securing databases, copier repair, computer maintenance, etc., is doled out to the company with the lowest bid for the job.  If they can’t fix a copier, they probably can’t secure a network.  Those that can, long ago took jobs in the private sector where they’re paid more.

Oregon Governor, Ted Kulongoski, has proposed a new tax to raise money for the state’s roads by implementing a mileage tax, tracked through GPS.  The proposal is in response to people driving less and demanding more fuel efficient cars.

The governor wants the task force “to partner with auto manufacturers to refine technology that would enable Oregonians to pay for the transportation system based on how many miles they drive.”

The online outline adds: “The governor is committed to ensuring that rural Oregon is not adversely affected and that privacy concerns are addressed.”

“The concept requires no transmission of vehicle travel locations, either in real time or of travel history,” the report said. “Accordingly, no travel location points are stored within the vehicle or transmitted elsewhere. Thus there can be no ‘tracking’ of vehicle movements.”

Also, the report said, under the Oregon concept of the program, “ODOT would have no involvement in developing the on-vehicle devices, installing them in vehicles, maintaining them or having any other access to them except, perhaps, in situations involving tampering or similar fee evasion activities.”

So, in order to receive the refund, there has to be a wireless connection somewhere to know how much fuel you put into the tank and to receive a discount.  Yet, they aren’t tracking where a person is when they fill up their tank.  Exactly how can you receive a discount or refund if they do not know where you are getting the gas from?

Since ODOT will have no involvement in developing, installing, or maintaining the devices, how are they to know that they aren’t being tampered with?    How can they tell if there was really 10 gallons put into the tank and not 8?  How can they discern if someone has hacked the system and tracking their girlfriend?

This is a terrible idea for two reasons.  First, GPS can be “turned off” with a little bit of tin foil placed over the antenna or the signal could be jammed.  Second, you are charged per mile.  Even though an SUV and other heavy trucks do more damage to roads than a small car, such as a Toyota Yaris, they will be charged the same rate.  Therefore, owners of smaller, more economical vehicles will be paying more to maintain the roads than they heavy, road-destroying, gas guzzlers.

Whitty said last year it might take about $20 million to establish that the mileage tax is commercially viable. Eventually, GPS devices would have to start being built into cars, and fueling stations would have to be similarly equipped.

The devices will cost a lot of money and the state of Oregon is going to, eventually, force car manufacturers into putting GPS devices permanently into cars, yet this is still, somehow, not an invasion of privacy?  The current gas tax will not be eliminated however, as the governor plans to implement a two cent rise in the current tax.

Claiming that it might take about $20 million is disingenuous.  After that money is used to get the program established, the tax payers will also have to pay for installing GPS in their cars, installation of GPS monitors in gas stations, and hiring and paying people to monitor the system for fraud.

A more simple and less costly alternative is to use the odometer that is already in cars to track mileage.  GPS is expensive and, if a person chooses not to have it, would be a forced invasion of privacy.  The tax on gas could also be raised to solve the same problem.  It’s just easier, politically, to force tracking on people than to raise taxes, despite the fact that raising taxes is exactly what they are doing.  It probably also has nothing to do with the fact that one of Garmin‘s two US offices is based in Salem, Oregon.