Your Kids' School Bus Is About to Become a Roaming Surveillance Vehicle

I read a few different articles such as https://www.thenewspaper.com/news/67/6717.asp and https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/corrupt-public-official-sen...

It seems like it's not BusPatrol, but a company they acquired (Force Multiplier Solutions) that had corrupt leadership. I'm not sure how exactly that went down, or if the same people are still involved, but it does sound pretty bad. Apparently the corruption here caused the Dallas County Schools to go bankrupt and ultimately to be shut down and the school district split into other surrounding districts to take over.

Who'd have thought a bus company would run buses for the various applications that buses are used for.

I guess once someone is a felon, they should never be allowed income? You might be right to criticize the company itself, but is their specific felonious behavior problematic (if so, you haven't spelled that out)? The way you say it, just the fact of them being felons is the problem.

That's not the problem. Wave a magic wand and have all cities walkable and bikeable and you'd still have school busses.

I suppose we could wave more magic wands and say "ok, everybody with kids has to live in a city whether they like it or not" and wave some more magic wands and eliminate all concerns about crime or other dangers, but if we're going to wave this many magic wands maybe we should just wave one that makes it so children don't need to go to school at all because they are all magically educated already.

I have the luxury of being relatively close to my kids’ schools and a grocery store and I’m also fit enough to bike and walk long distances. The only reason I can do this is because I work remote and we have the means to purchase a house almost wherever we want. However even I still drive a car frequently because it can turn a 30 minute walking trip into a 6 minute drive. Multiply that by the trips I take every day and it’s hours saved that I get to relax with my kids instead. Then there’s winter weather where biking becomes infeasible.

It’s not really possible to build a large city where everyone gets to live close enough to their job and their kids’ schools and the stores they need to go to, unless everyone is moving their house every time they want to change jobs.

The best we could do is robust public transportation. Whenever I hear calls to make everything walkable I can only assume the person hasn’t thought about all the people with kids, or who do work that can’t be done remotely, or who don’t want to move for every job, or who can’t afford to live in the nicest parts of town, or who live in places where winter weather would turn a 20 minute walk into a 1 hour hike, or who are too old or injured to be walking long distances, or all of the other reasons people drive cars. Maybe if you’re young, have no kids, and work a high paying job that lets you live wherever you want these ideas seem obvious, but some form of transportation, public or private, is a basic necessity for the rest of the world.

I don't know if that works in the EU but in the US most places are not a city and most places whilst technically walkable the kids will have to start walking at 4am and maybe they will get to school on time after walking along rural highways and on dirt roads. That would be incredibly dangerous, reckless and irresponsible.

As for tracking, I want more of it by individuals just not centralized corporations. The porch pirate bosses often park in front of my place to watch their minions of whom snatch packages around the time that kids are getting home. Some of the porch pirate minions drive vans and could easily snatch kids. I have been encouraging many of the people in my area to install cameras that log license plates and catch faces and vehicles in multiple directions of their roads and highways. We've removed some of the organized crime and pushed some of it out of this area and we will continue to push harder.

Wish granted, now cameras are put up on every walk path and bus stop instead, as people keep getting robbed to/from the stores, so while the school buses aren't fitted with cameras, the streets are instead.

So someone introduces a new, problematic feature to a long-existing technical system, and your answer is to "just" reorganize all of society to eliminate that system?

This isn't any more private. There are cameras with recognition tech just about everywhere now. If anything, this is less private.

The vast majority of folks don't want to walk/bike in Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, New Orleans, etc where it's near or over 100 degrees in the summer.

I've lived next to the bicycle lock-up area of an elementary school for over 20 years. In all those years I've never seen a single bicycle, not once. Of course, every morning and afternoon my neighborhood is grid-locked with minivans, but yeah, no bicycles.

> Maybe design cities to be walkable and bikeable

Why does everyone suggest this like it's easily done and the only reason that we haven't is due to lack of intelligence and/or will?

It's not. It's an effort that will take decades, cost trillions of dollars, and will face both legislative and legal hurdles.

Besides, with individual trait recognition technology and smartphones, you'll just be tracked regardless. You have to hold leaders to account for this sort of abuse of power.

I, for one, do not wish to smell my malodorous coworkers - who have walked or cycled to work and are all sweaty - all day. I already have one of them and it makes me want to vomit.

True, but the article is complaining about other innocent people that might get caught in the surveillance dragnet.

That's only true if the school will actually do something based the surveillance evidence. It seems many do not.

The concern is the sharing of such surveillance with law enforcement and other government agencies.

> how hard is it to simply not be an asshole and not pass school buses when they have their flashing lights out?

As a parent with children who take the bus... this actually doesn't matter. You can't assume that the car's owner is passing the school bus. So, this is a case of finding someone guilty with no physical evidence. And the real fear there is that suddenly you are guilty because someone else was using your Wi-Fi, and you suddenly have the burden of proof to prove your innocence.

> Where I live every intersection has cameras.

And now you are guilty of crimes. Prove you didn't do them.

a) it doesn't actually happen that often

b) when it does it's usually some stupid situation where robotic adherence to the lights is in poor taste (like a bus picking up or discharging an entire team on a right side curb, or a divided median) albeit legally mandated.

c) School bus drivers already radio in plate numbers of anyone who does it in poor taste and the buses mostly already have dashcams so this isn't really solving a problem

Source: bus driver in the family

In a vacuum, I agree. But, license plate readers aren't limited to investigating crime/misuse of vehicle, nor are they limited to the government.

Tracking vehicles and linking that movement to individual movement (and spending and browsing and and and) used to be massively expensive, if not impossible.

Now all that tracking is "cheap" and being done at scale for all sorts of reasons.

Why stop at tracking license plates? Once you've started you should report on pedestrians, bikes, whether people are at-home, which building people are entering, the way they walk and many more. Those are all "alternative revenue streams" that are as valid from the operator/investor point of view and completely unrelated to whether the way of transportation or activity is meant to be untrackable or unrelated to a way of transportation at all.

There is also a factor of scale: a cop can follow you, but a system where everyone is monitored 24/7 is a very different story.

The existence of IDs indicates that people are not intended to be untrackable, whether on or offline.

This is a fair trade off, because…

By your logic, there can be no argument against universal web tracking, let alone universal purchase tracking, etc.

What does being a powerful device mean in regards to location tracking? Safe operation tracking makes sense, but location doesn't.