Blunkett and satellite tags again

wtwu

on July 20, 2004 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

One feature of the Blair/Blunkett 5 year plan to reduce crime seems to be a plan to increase the use of electronic tagging of offenders and of people on bail.

We have already criticised the prospect of electronic tags being used inappropriately on offenders who are highly motivated to re-offend.

We also have extreme doubts about concepts such as enforcing "no go areas" through Global Positioning Satellite technology - it simply does not work well in the the crowded narrow urban streets of the UK, which is at a northern latitude which means that the GPS satellites in geostationary orboit over the equator appear relatively low down in the sky, and therefore suffer from many reception blackspots. Just because some technology works reasonably well in the wide open desert spaces of the southern USA does not mean that it is suitable here in the UK.

Blunkett claimed in Parliament that:

"Mr. Blunkett:

Yes, the prolific offenders programme will involve electronic tagging and satellite tracking. The hon. Gentleman asked me whether that would be instead of prison sentences. No, it will be part of the new supervision programme that was passed in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and it can really be effective as part of that programme only if we know exactly where people are and can track their movements down to the last few metres."

Even combined GPS and Cellphone technology can only achieve this sort of accuracy in the most favourable circumstances. There are literally millions of locations where this level of accuracy is simply not possible at all - mobile phone reception blackspots are a nuisance for a normal user, but are a huge security hole for a system which relies on them for monitoring. This is not good enough if an attempt is made to use it as a security measure against uncooperative or desparate people who may well resort to jamming, shielding, tampering, GPS spoofing and replay etc. How well will the parole system respond to a large number of false alarms which then mask the times when the offender actually enters the so called "no go zones" ?

Nevertheless, it seems as if the Home Office is planning to try out this mobile tagging technology this September, and plans to double the number of people being tagged to 18,000 by 2008.

The suspicion must remain that this is being seen as a cheaper alternative to building and staffing more prisons, as the plan seems to be to increase the current 75,000 inmates to only 80,000 prison places by 2008.

It is utter madness to electronically tag the people on the Violent and Sexual Offenders Register - these people should be in prison if they are at risk of re-offending. If they are not at risk of recidivism, then they should not be on the ViSOR system in the first place.

CORRECTION: - thanks to those people who have reminded us that GPS satellites are mostly not geostationary about the equator.

"GPS has poorer coverage the further you go from the equator, but the GPS satellites are NOT geostationary, they are in a 55 degree inclined orbit, which gives poorer coverage away from the equator.

There are 4 augmentation satellites (WAAS and EGNOS systems) that ARE
geostationary that can also be used for navigation, but the 24 GPS
satellites are NOT geostationary."

8 Comments

By Lee on July 20, 2004 6:10 PM

Regarding the limitations of GSM tracking - obviously. And ankle bracelet tracking systems use a combination of both GPS and mobile networks to determine position (sometimes referred to as "Assisted GPS").

In urban areas there is likely to be a higher density of cellular transmitters, improving cellular positioning. In the less-urban rural areas the GPS is likely to be used more.

The emphasis on satellite is made either for or by the media, since most people seem to base their ideas of how GPS works based on its unlikely dramatic use in movies and TV.

(which is not to suggest that any aGPS tracker implementation is not going to be fallible in some way).

See the BluTag as an example of the ankle tag
http://www.onguard-plus.com/english/04track.html

By wtwu on July 21, 2004 4:56 AM

If the Government was only planning to use these mobile tags on non-violent first time offenders then that would be worth investigating.

Instead of quietly conducting a trial of the technology, they have proudly trumpeted this as
the core of a new policy to be used for monitoring paedophiles and violent offenders i.e. just the people who will be driven to break their curfews regardless of the consequences, or who will be motivated to try to jam or spoof the system, which the average poll tax defaulter on bail etc. will not bother to try to do.

Combined GPS and Mobile phone systems have not been as successful in urban areas for tracking high value delivery vehicles etc. compared with such systems as Quiktrak, which uses a dedicated infrastructure of radio beacons and calculates the location of their tags via the network rather than via the GPS/Cellphone handset device.

http://www.quiktrak.co.uk/techniek.html#how

This infrastructure does not cover th whole country (neither, for that matter does the Mobile Phone infrastucture) and there is no way that for a maximum of 18,000 people (many of whom will remain tagged to fixed rather telephone lines rather than mobiles) it can be cost effective to build one.

By john on July 21, 2004 8:51 PM

Perhaps the iridium sats are still up there and will be used for this new fiasco.
Last I heard was that they were supposed to have been destroyed by forced re-entry.
Maybe not.....

By wtwu on July 22, 2004 6:12 AM

The Iridium low earth orbiting mobile phone satellite network is still up there and in business (military and government work)

http://www.iridium.com/corp/iri_corp-news.asp

but that is not a GPS system and needs a much bigger antenna to transmit up to the satellite compared with that needed to communicate with a terrestrial mobile phone network.

Galileo the EU rival to the USA monopoly on GPS is in the works, but it too will suffer from exactly the same physical orbital clear line of sight problems here in the UK.

By john on July 22, 2004 2:00 PM

thanks for the info.
are these high orbit sats ????
low orbit one's will be the problem, but not geostationery one's.These are 50,000km up and can have a signal window of around 10hrs.....so even with only 2 sats, they can cover a 24hr period no problems.

The tagging devices would need to operate on microwave freqs.....maybe pulsed transmissions.......buildings and inner city shadows, should not present a problem at all.

I am totally against any form of tagging....good old hard labout like the yanks have, where the prisoners clean the streets are just the trick..

By wtwu on July 22, 2004 2:49 PM

Iridium is a network of 66 (with 13 spares) Low Earth Orbit satellites (780Km - 485 miles high). Originally there were going to be 77 of them, hence the name Iridium (atomic weight of the element iridium is 77)

http://www.iridium.com/corp/iri_corp-understand.asp has a little Flash animation which gives details of how it works:

48 spot beams per satellite (30 miles in diameter each)
Telephone and Messaging: 1616 - 1626.5 MHz L-band
Intersatellite links: 23.18 - 23.38 GHz Ka-band
Downlink: 19.4 - 19.6 GHz Ka-band
Uplink: 29.1 - 29.3 GHz Ka-band
Digital Voice and Data: 2.4 kilobits per second.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_%28satellite%29

They were developed before GSM mobile phones really took over the planet, and made the mistake of putting the expensive telephone switch into orbit, instead of doing all the switching and routing on the ground, like the rival Globalstar system, so they were never competitive on price and capacity. The system effectively went bankrupt, but got bailed out by the US military in 2001.

Apart from the voracious demand for satellite comms bandwidth by the US military (so great that, for example, Powerpoint presentations are now banned from US Navy satellite channels), that it is doubtful if there is enough capacity for thousands of UK electronic tags to be monitored, let alone millions of vehicles on toll roads.

Suspicious people who cannot believe that they could have been so naive commercially, might conclude that there could be some sort of electronic eavesdropping capability in this array of 66 Low or Medium Earth Orbit satellites, and that some of the in orbit "spares" could be cover for secret spy or comms satellites - there is a lot of modern electronics that could be fitted into a 689Kg (1500 pound) satellite without affecting the original capability, which was designed over 15 years ago.

By john on July 22, 2004 4:07 PM

geostationery sats would definetly be the answer.increases in technology will allow for this type of tagging to take place and its just a matter of time.
This new car tracking proposal gets one thinking as well....the infrastructure is already there on our motorways and roads. these could easily and quickly be converted within a few months.

By wtwu on July 22, 2004 4:44 PM

The infrastructure is *not* there at present, that is the point. It could be built, but it will cost billions and it will be hugely intrusive.

This United Kingdom based blog attempts to draw public attention to, and comments on, some of the current trends in ever cheaper and more widespread surveillance technology being deployed to satisfy the rapacious demand by state and corporate bureaucracies and criminals for your private details, and the technological ignorance of our politicians and civil servants who frame our legal systems.

The hope is that you the readers, will help to insist that strong safeguards for the privacy of the individual are implemented, especially in these times of increased alert over possible terrorist or criminal activity. If the systems which should help to protect us can be easily abused to supress our freedoms, then the terrorists will have won.

We know that there are decent, honest, trustworthy individual politicians, civil servants, law enforcement, intelligence agency personnel and broadcast, print and internet journalists etc., who often feel powerless or trapped in the system. They need the assistance of external, detailed, informed, public scrutiny to help them to resist deliberate or unthinking policies, which erode our freedoms and liberties.

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wtwu: The infrastructure is *not* there at present, that is the read more
john: geostationery sats would definetly be the answer.increases in technology will read more
wtwu: Iridium is a network of 66 (with 13 spares) Low read more
john: thanks for the info. are these high orbit sats ???? read more
wtwu: The Iridium low earth orbiting mobile phone satellite network is read more
john: Perhaps the iridium sats are still up there and will read more
wtwu: If the Government was only planning to use these mobile read more
Lee: Regarding the limitations of GSM tracking - obviously. And ankle read more

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Blunkett and satellite tags again

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Blunkett and satellite tags again

8 Comments

About this blog

Email & PGP Contact

Hints and Tips for Whistleblowers and Political Dissidents

Links

Privacy and Security

Human Rights

Internet Censorship

Judicial Links

Parliamentary Opposition

UK Government

Online Media

NIR and ID cards

Surveillance Infrastructures

RFID Links

Genetic Links

Miscellanous Links

Former Spies

Blog Links

Other Links

Syndicate this site (XML):

Follow Spy Blog on Twitter

Search

Recent Comments

Recent Entries

Categories

Monthly Archives

August 2019

UK Legislation

UK Commissioners

UK Intelligence Agencies

Foreign Spies / Intelliegence Agencies in the UK

Campaign Button Links

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