Freedom to travel anonymously?

One of the many advantages of living in the United States as opposed to, say, the Soviet Union circa 1950 is that you can live wherever you like without need for a residency permit. If I wake up tomorrow and decide I'd like to live in Milwaukee, I can pack up my bags, drive to Milwaukee, sign a lease and do so without standing in line at a government office to get papers signed.

This is a good thing.

However, while Americans can relocate or visit where we want and when we want, we are losing the ability to do so without some government agency finding out.

Growing up in New York, I paid for subway trips in cash and gained entry with a token, a completely untracable transaction that never generated a paper trail or a log record in a computer. You can now only travel with a stored-value Metrocard, which, while disposible, is tracable by police if you still have the card in your possession.

Some transit systems, like Washington's Metrorail, offer a sturdier card that can hold more money and can be "wanded" over a sensor instead of going through the gate reader. Although it could save me a fraction of a second on each trip, adding up to two or three precious saved minutes after years of use, I choose not to, since the card is delivered by mail and thus connected to me by name. As a law-abiding citizen, I don't fear my current government all that much on an individual level, but I fear a future government or marketing firm inheriting years of information on where and when I travel.

In London, it's even scarier. For some passes, a serial number written on the card is connected to a serial number on a photo ID badge that riders have to bring on every Tube trip. Therefore, with a few more controls (like a requirement to provide another photo ID to get the Tube ID), no pass can be purchased without first identifying yourself and linking your pass (and the data it generates in central computers) with a name. A few policy changes justified by terror threats, and Transport for London could easily take away the ability of Londoners to use the Tube without identifying themselves.

Paranoia about some future totalitarian government aside, why is this bad? Think of the children.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Jim Doyle recently signed legislation requiring libraries to turn over a minor's book records to parents upon request. In my opinion, there is inherent value in allowing children to see things parents don't want them to see. Parents have some rights over their children, but locking them up in an information straightjacket until their 18th birthday is probably not one of them. If that were the case, there would be no broadcast TV or radio on the same grounds naughty words allowed on cable are not allowed on broadcast (which is complete bollocks, but anyway): parents have the right to keep some things out of their homes and away from their children. The Wisconsin law and others like it essentially say parents should have the same rights to stop their kids from hearing a cable comedian make a weed joke as to stop them from reading Darwin.

Now let's talk about how this relates to transit. If you have IDs linked to the transit payment system, parents may one day be able to demand a transit agency tell them where their kid has been. This would have been a disaster for me. I can remember many happy afternoons after school buying fireworks in Chinatown, exploring forbidden sectors of town or just hanging out with friends when I told my parents I was studying at the library. I haven't had to determine the cosine of anything in years and nobody has ever asked me what year the Defenstration of Prague took place, but my secret little trips have taught me lessons I still use today, such as how not to get my hand blown off when handling an incindiary device. Was the example little silly? Perhaps. But I could just have easily been studying a religion my parents thought was heresy or doing something else more noble-sounding.

Don't think private companies would solve this problem, either. Before the US turns facist and Subcommandante Ashcroft goes after people who visit red-light districts on a regular basis, some company will get the idea that they can effectively target customers by figuring out where they travel. Whether you end up drowning in a pile of junk mail instead of a vat of boiling oil, it's still a violation of privacy.

It's already happening with cars and congestion charging. The London congestion charge scheme has cameras that read information from your car and uses a database to figure out whether or not you've paid. Efficient for them, scary for the person who would like to drive where they please without the intelligence services knowing.

Fee-for-use enthusiasts elsewhere have advocated using this technology on non-limited access roads where toll booths for those who choose not to participate in the identification system can pay are impossible. Soon, road pricing schemes will mean the loss of the right to drive or ride wherever you want without first "registering" with the government by identifying yourself and paying.