Tracks: Easy Rider
The Metropolitan Transit Authority wants to make everything as easy as possible for you, their beloved riders. That’s why, they say, they’re phasing out the traditional monthly and weekly paper passes to make way for the new Transit Access Pass (TAP) card. The TAP cards are primed to work in conjunction with fare gates being implemented to replace the honor system (in regards to payment) and to assist Metro in being more cost efficient.
But it gets easier still, this time for you, the California taxpayer. The contractor for the fare gates and the TAP cards is Cubic Corporation, and Cubic is being partially funded through a Homeland Security grant, according to a press release put out by the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security.
The fact that Cubic is a defense contract company shouldn’t wrinkle your pretty little brow. “Cubic has a lot of other enterprises. They have long been providing transit boxes for transit agencies,” said Marc Littman, director of Metro Media Relations. Littman said the TAP system and fare gates were for our protection. “It helps to make the system more secure. Right now we have an honor system, but we are going to be installing gates. In this day and age of terrorism we need better control of our system.”
So will it be easier for the defense contractor – and Homeland Security – to get your private information? When asked if projects funded by grants from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allow the respective agency to be exempt from observing the Privacy Act, Amy Kudwa, a representative in Public Affairs at DHS in Washington, D.C., stated, “Of course not.”
(The Privacy Act is one that is meant to protect American citizens’ personal information from unwarranted monitoring and collection.)
A provision in the Privacy Act states: “No agency shall disclose any record, which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains.”
Of course, any regular reader of the news knows that government agencies have been regarding this as a suggestion.
A customer service representative at Metro stated that my personal information was not needed to buy a TAP card, and that there were presently no plans to make it a requirement.
Should we believe Metro? It would be easier to just believe the agency’s press releases than question them. They seem like nice people.
Published: 08/20/2008
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Being a daily rider of Metro in Los Angeles (and formerly of a few other U.S. cities), I have always looked closely at Metro's innards.
One thing I noticed was that Cubic already owns the fare machines on the Red, Blue, Gold and Green lines. Although there is always an armed guard or two present when Metro collects its receipts from the machines, the monitor remains in place. Just as one might see "Windows XP" on a computer screen, so too does "Cubic" appear while the fare machine is being emptied of its revenues.