The D.C. Examiner reported yesterday that the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles plans to embed drivers’ licenses with SmarTrip chips, the RFID chips increasingly used to access the Metro system.
This is another step taken to make Metro access more convenient – oh, and more subject to surveillance.
The SmarTrip card is an RFID-chipped card that controls access to Metro stations and deducts fares from users’ card-based accounts.
Metro has long encouraged people to register their cards, because this allows lost cards to be cancelled and new ones issued, preserving the value of the lost card. Registration of the card, of course, allows Metro to correlate use of the card with a particular person. It’s a bearer document, but a SmarTrip card is usually used by the same person, which is usually the person who registered it.
In 1998, to promote public transit, Congress gave employers a tax break for providing money to employees for use on transit systems. Metro has offered a program called Metrochek, in which employers have given employees farecards, a magnetic-striped paper stored-value card. Farecards are generally given out to employees without records of which went to whom, giving users effective anonymity because use of a card could only be associated with an employer, not a particular employee.
However, because of fraud in the program – not discouragement of commuting mind you, just people trading their Metrocheks to others for cash – Metro is transitioning to a thing called SmartBenefits. This is where the value is added automatically to a SmarTrip card, the serial number of which is given to the employer by the employee. This will help suppress the fraud, while expanding the capability of the Metro system to track users. The serial number of the employee held by the employer can be matched to Metro system records to reveal the comings and goings of the worker.
Still, a person could always decline registration, or swap cards with others to perfect their anonymous travel.
Adding the SmarTrip chip to the driver’s license constricts that loophole quite narrowly. It is very unlikely that people would trade drivers’ licenses in order to avoid tracking. It’s a step forward in convenience (assuming the D.C. DMV gets it right), but it’s a step down a primrose path toward comprehensive surveillance of Metro users.
Discussion of this latest development on DCist follows the pattern that is typical when a technology useful for surveillance is offered as a convenience. Along with practical questions about what happens when the RFID chip in the license breaks, the majority don’t see the privacy problem. Their Metro travels aren’t private, and there are all kinds of other things that track them. It’s a barn door they don’t seem to want closed.
And they won’t, until divorce lawyers routinely make use of Metro/DMV records to reveal long lunchtime excursions to the Maryland suburbs. Or when D.C. government employees look up the movements of former spouses or lovers. Or when having a D.C. license is the only way to access the Metro system without submitting to a pat-down search.
Obviously, you can’t yell and scream at a small step forward for the surveillance infrastructure premised on convenience. You can only point to the trend, point out how a transportation subsidy ends up eroding privacy, and perhaps look for alternatives.
Anyone got a plan for anonymous commuting that serves all the wonderful goals of the SmarTrip and SmartBenefits programs?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
