Watch out....

[Welshcookie 17]

Big Brother bugs British bins

RFID spying on your trash habits

By Chip Mulligan: Tuesday 29 August 2006, 09:41

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UK RESIDENTS may or may not be surprised to learn that our voyeuristic government has taken on a tactic more commonly used by identity thieves and, without notifying anybody, has installed electronic monitoring equipment on over half a million dustbins (trash cans to our transatlantic chums) to look through our rubbish and report back to base on our habits.

Located in the lids of the now familiar standard issue "wheelie bins", is a German-manufactured RFID serial number tag which communicates with transceivers and sensors installed on the collecting lorry, and allows the reporting back of statistics for how full each property's bin is, how much the rubbish weighs and God only knows what else.

It is rumoured that this is a precursor to some form of additional tax on throwing things away; presumably in addition, that is, to the local "council tax" we pay already for, er, such things as removing our waste. It should be noted for the benefit of foreign readers that waste is collected just once a week, and we are expected to manually sort out the detritus of daily life into categories of paper, glass, plastics, and so on.

The UK is still far behind many EU countries on recycling, however the verdict on how useful or energy efficient recycling actually is, depends on who you talk to. To pave the way for the tax, Ben Bradshaw, minister for the environment, has been talking of think tanks promoting pay-as-you-throw taxes as being taken "very seriously indeed" over the past week.

This is just one of many massive IT-based "monitoring initiatives" the British government have put into practice at huge cost over the past few years, and which many members of the public are beginning to get rather sick of.

Other projects include a vast number of CCTV cameras covering every square inch of our little island, many with facial recognition and tracking, various different speed limit and red light enforcement cameras, collection of Internet and phone data, a tracking system recording the path of every car around the network of major roads using an automatic number plate recognition system, RFID-equipped passports, and are investigating satellite-based tracking and speed limiting of all cars as well as the ever-popular national ID card project.

We're sure somebody's making an awful lot of money out of all of this scary loss of privacy: presumably the IT consulting and outsourcing houses of this world with their teams of ludicrously highly-paid Oxbridge arts graduates who now are theoretically leading technology experts.

Anyway, if you're happy with this, then feel free to carry on just as you were, citizen, or alternatively you could go outside to your dustbin and look for a small cylindrical electronic gadget in the lid, and send it to your member of parliament with a firm letter telling them exactly what you think of this. μ

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34010

HA! My government looking for yet another way it can fu....I mean, tax me....oh, and removing these 'bugs' is not advisable because you can be prosecuted for tampering with council property

[Lizzy 0]

WOW.