"Steven M. Bellovin" writes, in part: -+----------------------------------- | There's a limit to how far they can go with that, because of the fear | of people abandoning the transponders. | <snip> | As for usage-based driving -- the first question is the political will | to do so. | <snip> | Finally, the transponders may not matter much longer; OCR on license | plates is getting that good. |
I don't think whether it is a transponder or not actually matters, Steve, since, as you say, OCR of the license plates makes whether a transponder is in place totally irrelevant. As to public resistance -- look at the revenue coming in to, say, Chicago from the red-light cameras and tell me that this won't spread. Similarly, per-mile road-use pricing will be all about revenue enhancement but it will be painted DHS-faireness-green ("So as to fairly fund the maintainance of this State's critical infrastructure, this Act converts the funding mechanisms over to a fairer road-use policy but, at the same time, it leaves in place the State gasoline tax, thereby penalizing the people who continue to drive gas guzzlers"). Which leads back to the recording of travel and the handling of those recordings. When New Jersey signed up with EZ-Pass it required the company involved to retain toll records for ten years (as an aid to law enforcement). Since that is the same company in lots of states even if it is called something else (like FastLane in Massachusetts), the rational thing for the company to do is to just keep everything forever. With disk prices falling as they are, keeping everything is cheaper than careful selective deletion, that's for sure. --dan --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]