American Civil Liberties Union

Data from license plate readers in Minnesota was obtained by a St. Paul car dealer using open-records laws, and used to repossess at least one car, according to a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The article included this amusing tidbit:

When the Star Tribune published data tracking Mayor R.T. Rybak's city-owned car over the past year, the mayor asked police Chief Tim Dolan to make a recommendation for a new policy about data retention.

A disgruntled worker at a Texas auto dealership hacked into a vehicle-immobilization system and disabled more than 100 vehicles. Our automobiles are getting more and more computerized, so the threat of hacking vehicles is being taken increasingly seriously, according to this interesting article in CIO Magazine. And as computerization proceeds, with cars tied in to GPS, social networks, and who knows what else, the threat will increasingly be not just to security but also to privacy. Already today’s cars contain as many as 70 independent computers with up to 100 megabytes of code. And, vehicles—perhaps we should start calling them “transportation computers”—are increasingly being plugged into various networks, which greatly increases their vulnerability. Already, the job description “car thief” has come to take on some of the qualities of “hacker,” with today’s thieves plugging into vehicles’ data ports, replicating RFID key fobs, and otherwise manipulating data rather than hardware. It’s always seemed to me that one way to increase the security in cars and other publicly important software, is to require that their code be open source.

I recently wrote about how difficult it is to know which technologies on the horizon will turn into genuine privacy nightmares and which remain menacing but distant threats. One group of technologies that we’ve had our eyes on for a while are those that purport to read minds. On Sunday the Washington Post ran an article on a Maryland case where a murder defendant is trying to introduce fMRI “lie detector” evidence in his defense. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to look at neural activity in real-time by using powerful magnets to trace blood-flow changes in the brain.