BC town votes to install imaginary GPS trackers in criminals

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Williams Lake will request assistance in implanting non-existent devices from the Union of B.C. Municipalities and the North Central Local Government Association.

I find it interesting he asked his fellow politicians for help and not… say… some engineers or scientists.

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What the fuck…

Why is the US exporting crazy to decent countries like Canada?

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The largest implants are e.g. cardiostimulators, quite bigger than “couple grains of rice”.

While GPS signals are strongly attenuated by tissues, lower-frequency ones could get through; triangulation by the cellular network could still work.

The show stopper is the power supply.

Some future cellular standard, possibly driven by IoT, could support low-average-power burst communication where a supercap paired with a glucose fuel cell (or other blood-powered power source), but not today.

Other approaches, pairing something along the lines of NFC and an external device, e.g. a cellphone, could work, though. Perhaps a low-power Bluetooth beacon authenticating the person to a cellphone which would then serve as a tracker. But then there is the problem with enforcing surveillance target’s compliance.

And any implanted radio device would have the compliance issues, as the signal is fairly easy to jam or shield.

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Here is some graffiti I recently took a picture of that I think is an appropriate response.

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This would very likely fall afoul of “Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Security of the Person”

I think the general idea of that section is, unless it is to save the person’s life (and even then only in some cases)… you can’t force medical procedures or treatments on people.

Possibly the politi-creatures have seen too many dystopian sci-fi movies and thought: “Hey that’s a great idea!”
Remember: Popular (or unpopular) fiction and wishful thinking is not a substitute for reason and evidence when making public policy.

Signed: A Face-Palming Canadian.

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Am I the only one here that thinks this bill doesn’t goes far enough?? Why install a GPS tracker when you could install a though monitoring system and find out what their plans are for their next crime?

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I think Tom Cruise did a movie about that!

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Yeah, and why are we keeping these criminals in insecure Earth-based prisons when we could be shipping them all to Mars!?

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Taking cues from the Sanford city council now, are we?

While I can’t quibble with the main point, I have to point out that my father’s implanted defibrillator is CONSIDERABLELY larger than a grain of rice…

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Serves them right for some of the music they’ve exported to the US. :wink:

Canada’s been growing its own crazy for a while, though… it just doesn’t usually get as much attention, or become as predictable as Florida Man.

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I think that there’s a chance that word should have been “smallest” instead of largest in that sentence, because it’d make more sense? I dunno, if the word were intended to be smallest it could be referring to the little rfid things we poke into our pets.

But don’t anyone tell this “Nelson” clown about tht as it’s pretty clear he’d settle for rfid tagging in conjunction with ankle cuffs.

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Canada Man!

Yeah I definitely had a double take and WTF moment when I read this was Canada…
Sheesh we do have crazies here, but this one was surprising to me.

Have they looked into a homeopathic version? That’d also help with that pesky gluten problem!

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Maybe he’s just going for a placebo affect. As long as criminals (and anyone else this guy wants to track) think they have a GPS tracker implanted in them they’ll behave.

Hell, if you’re gonna utilize an imaginary device why not include a mind reading function? No more thoughtcrimes.

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I am pretty sure that it is not within the city council purview let alone constitutional.

[quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:74298”]you’d be talking about implanting something the size of a cellular phone, with an external lead for charging and antennas.[/quote]Maybe he was looking at http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/170112-brave-idiot-transhumanist-pioneer-self-implants-a-computer-into-his-arm ? I would post the pic, but it ain’t pretty.

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

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