GM's EDRs are the basis for the OnStar system, which includes two-way voice and data communications -- ostensibly designed to help drivers who find themselves headed down an unmarked country road or in an uncomfortable situation with a pallid hitchhiker. Even without an active subscription, these mobile phone-based systems -- with remotely activated audio monitoring -- turn on and register with Verizon, Sprint or AT&T every time the vehicle is turned on.
A spook targeting anyone with a pattern of behavior in a neighborhood or city might just gain access to the mobile phone provider's location database. After all, cellular phone systems inherently report cell site location as part of handset registration and the cell-to-cell handoff process. As more and more mobile phones incorporate true Global Positioning System tracking capabilities, all it takes is an unwary user turning on a phone that has GPS location reporting turned on, which it often is by default. And surveillance scales down to a most granular level. A suspicious parent might go to the trouble of placing a cheap GPS tracking device in a child's bookbag or car -- a surveillance device reporting data on one person to one person.
You don't even need to leave your home -- or even your bed -- to be tracked. Taking another example, home electric and water meters report minute-by-minute usage levels and patterns that reflect how many people are home, conveniently stored in the public utility's systems until someone wants to check out which service plan might be better for you ... or aggregate the data with something you've never thought of. Soon, all sorts of devices will have small data harvesters that collect and send little bursty data reports of activity, perhaps as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices watch retail door movement and aggregate the radio frequency identification (RFID) inventory of your shopping bags and wallet.
Someone is listening
This swamp of information isn't just ebbing and oozing -- it's being watched, filtered and used. Telecommunications companies, broadly speaking, are the worst offenders, as old habits of turning a blind eye to unjustified wiretaps turn to new habits of quasi-commercialized monitoring services.
What's changed is that wiretaps of yesteryear were against an identified individual -- if not always for properly justified reasons. Now we've moved into the age of midnight fishing trips: roving wiretaps, e-mail filters and large-scale searches through online documents and sites. Just a couple of months ago, the U.S. Congress passed yet another exception for domestic spying not against individuals, but for "blanket wiretaps" for six months.