Big brother's name is Erp

Electronic Road Pricing ("ERP") is the wave of the future. Roads are a common resource, almost always paid for out of a common purse, the government. Economists know that this is asking for trouble. Individuals will use them to the maximum, overloading them, since the more they use, they more benefit they will get out of them at the expense of others. That is why the seas are overfished, the air polluted, forests stripped and many countries' welfare systems broke. 

Singapore inaugurated its ERP this month. It works like this: Every vehicle in Singapore has to have an electronic gadget affixed near its windscreen, into which is to be inserted a cashcard. A cashcard is a card with a magnetic strip that stores a monetary value. When it runs out of money, you go a bank ATM and add value to it.  

On some roads, usually chokepoints, steel gantries have been erected, on which are mounted electronic sentries. When you drive your car under a gantry, the gadget in your car communicates with the sentry above, and a toll is deducted from your cashcard. The toll amount can vary by time of day and by location, being computer-programmed by the road authorities.

ERP is therefore a very flexible system for putting a price to certain roads, reflecting the demand placed on the limited supply of road capacity. By managing the usage of roads, it prevents the kind of gridlock many cities are now prone to.

I am all for ERP, and from the lack of reaction among Singaporeans to its implementation, so are many others.

Then a funny thing happened.

It happened during a dry run of the system on August 28th, just before the start of implementation on September 1st. The electronic sentries were activated for a test. Driving under them, the gadgets beeped, indicating that they communicated successfully with the sentry above. Unfortunately, for 42 minutes until the error was discovered, the gantries also deducted tolls from cashcards in 1,562 vehicles. That wasn't supposed to happen; it was supposed to be a dry run. The tolls deducted varied from 50 cents to $3.

The Land Transport Authority ("LTA") realised its mistake immediately and apologised to all affected drivers, saying it was a computer error. In compensation, it would give free $10 cashcards to the affected drivers.

How? Well, the LTA will mail them to the 1,562 drivers.

But how will the LTA know who they are? Ah! It turns out that they have complete record of who drove under the gantries that morning. Each car's gadget has a unique identification number, and the computer recorded the whole lot!

One day later, the LTA realised this had become an issue. I saw their representative speak on TV, assuring the public that such data about who drove under its gantries, when and where, would be purged as soon as billing was done. The data is not meant for any other purpose. Only senior officers of the LTA may hold back the purging of data, and then only for good reasons, such as when a crime is committed.

That seemed to be the last word on the affair, except that that I was still very troubled by it. Firstly, we have nothing but this middle-level officer's word on it. I would think these guarantees should be enshrined in law. Secondly, the more I think about it, the more I find the "crime" exception to be highly debatable.

Take the second reservation first. When is a crime a crime? Strictly speaking, when a court of law finds it to be so. But hearing the officer's TV statement, I can't imagine that the LTA would wait for a court of law before it passed the data to another agency. What he meant was that they would hand over the information whenever another agency asked for it, on the basis of a suspected crime. This suspected crime could be anything from murder, to drug-trafficking, to bigamy, to sedition. What happens if an authoritarian government considers anyone speaking out against it as an act of sedition, and wants to track that person's movements? What happens if a highly-placed person wants dirt on his opponent, and bigamy, e.g. regular visits to a mistress' apartment, will do just fine?

So what's new? You may ask. Governments have dug up dirt on their opponents through the tax records, for decades. Telephones have been tapped and computer hard-disks have been electronically searched while they were connected to the internet. And by that, I mean in Singapore. No one is sure what guarantees exist, if any, against such official acts. To know where your car was at any given time, hardly changes the already intrusive nature of government in Singapore.

Yes and no. Just because there are plenty of unsolved murders in this world does not mean we make no effort to solve the one that did occur yesterday. Just because the Singapore government is already so intrusive does not mean we should let it get even more so.

This ERP thing is a good place to start. It is a new technology without past abuses to cloud the issue. The data is discrete and at the point of collection, is contained within one government department, the LTA. In other words, it is easily controllable. As I said earlier, the guarantees should be enshrined in law. Now, I'm no lawyer, but I would think the following would be needed:

 

1.	Write into law that only prescribed persons in the Land Transport Authority may have access to the data, and that these persons are charged with the responsibility of maintaining its confidentiality. Neglecting this duty shall be an offence.
2.	Write into law that beyond the prescribed persons, it shall be an offence for others to knowingly possess or pass on such data.
3.	Exceptions may be made under a court warrant. Before issuing a warrant, a judge must be satisfied that there are reasonable grounds associated with serious crimes. These crimes should be listed, so as to make it clear that minor offences or anything that could infringe on civil rights would not be permissible grounds for a warrant.
4.	Make it clear that any information obtained as a result of ERP data would not be admissible in court as evidence, unless a warrant had been issued to permit the transfer of such information by the LTA to the receiving party.
5.	If someone's ERP data has been passed on by the LTA to another agency under the authority of a warrant, that person should be notified within 72 hours with full details of the information that had been passed on. He should have an opportunity to challenge the warrant.

Think about it. It's so easy to put in simple controls to prevent abuse of the data collected. The problem is that Singapore does not have a political tradition of defending individual rights and privacy, so no one has even made an issue out of this in any significant way. We have a long way to go, to become a mature and robust society.

© Yawning Bread 

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