I love Michael Wood and I love what he is doing with transport, but a small detail flicked up this week that demands some attention.
Is this universal transport ticket a mass surveillance tool?
The Government is partnering with an American transport and military contractor that promotes its weapons-training systems by showing the targeting of men dressed in robes.
Cubic Corporation of San Diego has won a Waka Kotahi contract to roll out a $1.388 billion system to let people use one card on buses, trains and ferries.
As well as supplying public transport ticket systems in many cities, Cubic does training for US military Predator and Reaper drones.
Of course the woke news story focuses on these pricks using men wearing robes in their training videos, because you know, heteronormative white cis male privilege allows the other to be a Muslim, free the nipple, etc etc etc.
I’m less interested in Cubic’s crimes against woke virtue signals, and a tad more interested in Cubic’s role in providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, because being able to track and trace people in real time on a. public transport system is exactly the kind of mass surveillance tools that could easily be implemented here.
Instead of demanding to know about the capacity to do that and what safeguards are being built to prevent it, the woke news use the identity politics lens and so the story is about Cubic’s use of men wearing robes in their training video rather than the potential to build a mass surveillance tool that can spy in real time on anyone using public transport.
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I’m interested in how we are having facets of our lives necessary to us, directed through a single entity, usually with foreign control and/or ownership. I don’t like having big brother/sister/avatar/robot/algorithm directing or controlling me like a puppet.
It isn’t comfortable to be a thinking individual today. There was no peace and respect for the Amazonian tribe gradually killed out for predatory amoral wannabe settlers for their land, and at the highly ‘cultivated’ end to have our minds and lives colonised by predatory wannabe space pioneers and Getty-like capital accretors or inner and outer space entrepreneurs.
Yes, the ticket is a mass surveillance tool. Good as CCTV, or better.
Over 1.3B $…..how many different ticketing systems does a tiny country with rudimentary public transport need?
AT bought from French defense company. Most players in that market are defence industry heavyweights. Those have experience/expertise in selling vastly overpriced products to officials globally.
Their margins are even more greedy than (600% to 1000%) “original parts and accessories” automotive corporate robbers charge.
They also mastered in adding hidden costs. “This function/feature is not in the original detailed project scope agreement (umpzillion page document) and we can do it at additional cost…as much as we decide to charge.”
Check how much AT paid so far. Although to be fair, AT seem to have mastered the art of incompetence to superhuman level.
1.3B would buy about 2000 electric buses.
There is no money for that. So much about tskong climate change seriously.
With reg to value for money – the millionth ride will cost taxpayers over $1.3k to ticket.
We need more buses, trains and ferries, not anther plastic card.
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