DARPA’s Project GANDALF puts GPS locator tools to government use
By Leslie Poston
Having “always on” geolocation functionality in our portable devices has always given me a bit of the creeps. Sure, I enjoy having a GPS system in my car that helps me find my way around, but I’m not one to leave the location based programs in my cell phone or laptop set to “always on”. You never know who’s got better, more invasive tools than you do.
In this case, it is DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, who is using their more advanced tools and technology to track geolocation for the government. They have developed a system for taking RF signals (the key radio frequency component in geolocation) and SEI (which stands for Specific Emitter Identification) and pinpointing signals that it deems “of interest”.
I was fairly up in arms over putting RFID chips into passports and driver’s licenses, but I have to admit this is even creepier. In part, it seems creepier because it could enter our lives in such a benign way, disguised as every day tools we use for work and play. Think of all those obnoxious iPhone locators in Twitter showing a longitude and latitude of the iPhone user as a tongue in cheek way of saying where they are. That means they have their geolocation set to “always on”, which means that should this technology ever be deployed here at home they have already invited it into their lives.
Granted, DARPA is a defense agency, and this has concrete uses for military deployment into hostile territory. Being able to track your troops on the ground with the hope of bringing everyone out alive is a good thing. But we all know how often things that start out in the military end up in our civilian life, and we should proceed with caution in any instance where the word “tracking” is used.
I don’t know about you, but a little bit of privacy is key, not only to freedom, but to sanity. Being in the social media space, I spend a large amount of my time plugged in. I love being connected, but there are plenty of times I need to be able to hide out for a while. That we have gotten so close to constant tracking of people and objects makes me incredibly nervous for how things will play out in the future. For now, I’ll just leave my geolocation set to “always off” and try not to think too much about DARPAs research.
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October 9th, 2008
Silly. They can already track you close enough just by cell tower triangulation and A-GPS. Don’t think for a minute that the tech used for 911 can’t be used for other purposes. This is nothing new dude, if you carry a cell phone of anything close to modern vintage you can already be “tracked” whether you set yourself to “always on” or not. And every car/handheld GPS mapping device has some sort of track history that with the right software can be retrieved.