A study prepared for the U.S. Department of Transportation shows that less “than 7 percent of the respondents expressed concerns about recording their vehicle’s movements” when people willingly sign up for government-issued GPS vehicle tracking devices that can also remotely shut off their vehicle at the government’s command.

Declan McCullagh writes about the DOT’s ongoing work in bringing GPS tracking to everyone’s car.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has been handing millions of dollars to state governments for GPS-tracking pilot projects designed to track vehicles wherever they go. So far, Washington state and Oregon have received fat federal checks to figure out how to levy these “mileage-based road user fees.”

Now electronic tracking and taxing may be coming to a DMV near you. The Office of Transportation Policy Studies, part of the Federal Highway Administration, is about to announce another round of grants totaling some $11 million. A spokeswoman on Friday said the office is “shooting for the end of the year” for the announcement, and more money is expected for GPS (Global Positioning System) tracking efforts.

The GPS systems would be used to implement congestion pricing on certain crowded highways, where drivers pay more during peak times, and less during off-peak drive times.

This is otherwise a good idea, but the devil is in the details. That convenience comes with a price.

The problem, though, is that no privacy protections exist. No restrictions prevent police from continually monitoring, without a court order, the whereabouts of every vehicle on the road.

No rule prohibits that massive database of GPS trails from being subpoenaed by curious divorce attorneys, or handed to insurance companies that might raise rates for someone who spent too much time at a neighborhood bar. No policy bans police from automatically sending out speeding tickets based on what the GPS data say.

The Fourth Amendment provides no protection. The U.S. Supreme Court said in two cases, U.S. v. Knotts and U.S. v. Karo, that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy when they’re driving on a public street.

That’s right, if you want to drive, you have to get a GPS tracker for your car, and allow the government to know where you are all the time, even when you aren’t driving on the congested roads.

But wait, it gets worse.

A report prepared by a Transportation Department-funded program in Washington state says the GPS bugs must be made “tamper proof” and the vehicle should be disabled if the bugs are disconnected.

“This can be achieved by building in connections to the vehicle ignition circuit so that failure to receive a moving GPS signal after some default period of vehicle operation indicates attempts to defeat the GPS antenna,” the report says.

It doesn’t mention the worrisome scenario of someone driving a vehicle with a broken GPS bug–and an engine that suddenly quits half an hour later. But it does outline a public relations strategy (with “press releases and/or editorials” at a “very early stage”) to persuade the American public that this kind of contraption would be, contrary to common sense, in their best interest.

One study prepared for the Transportation Department predicts a PR success. “Less than 7 percent of the respondents expressed concerns about recording their vehicle’s movements,” it says.

That whiff of victory, coupled with a windfall of new GPS-enabled tax dollars, has emboldened DMV bureaucrats. A proposal from the Oregon DMV, also funded by the Transportation Department, says that such a tracking system should be mandatory for all “newly purchased vehicles and newly registered vehicles.”

This isn’t about congestion pricing at all; it’s about being able to track everyone at every time without a warrant or any of that pesky judicial oversight that police hate, because it forces them to actually investigate crimes rather than just going on the fishing expeditions they love so much.

The sad reality is that there are ways to perform “value pricing” for roads while preserving anonymity. You could pay cash for prepaid travel cards, like store gift cards, that would be debited when read by roadside sensors. Computer scientists have long known how to create electronic wallets–using a technique called blind signatures–that can be debited without privacy concerns.

That’s right; the congestion pricing could be done entirely without tracking anybody, with technology that already exists. But the government doesn’t want that. They don’t want any sort of untraceable commerce at all, either.

(Hat tip to Hit and Run)