Alan Massey is one of the ones who is supposed to be watching. The 27-year-old former U.S. Army sergeant oversees S3's monitoring center, where 17 video screens track some 10,000 vehicles and people. By the end of this year, that number is set to at least double.
Some screens display maps of areas where the clients are located. Others scroll through text describing key events, based on data from the satellites and other sensors installed on the buses to monitor whether the engine is on and other conditions.
Maribeth Luftglass of Fairfax County Public Schools said drivers were initially nervous about having their movements monitored with GPS, something she can do from her laptop.
(Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)
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The computers note that at 9:02 a.m. Eastern time, for instance, a D.C. school bus closed its doors at the 1300 block of Allison Street, and at 9:03 a.m. the ignition of another one turned on somewhere on New York Avenue. At 9:03 a.m., a Fairfax County driver had just turned off his engine and parked at the 7500 block of Jackson Street in Falls Church and another was on Lee Jackson Highway going 45 mph.
Massey said that most of the monitoring is automated and that the S3 staff is there mostly there to help out in emergencies. He said he takes a detached, unemotional view toward the tracking and respects people's right to privacy. "We only look at them when we have to. It's not like we're spying on them."
Most clients have ready access to 45 days' to a year's worth of tracking data and need to make a special request to see the archives of older stuff. The company's decision to indefinitely maintain the data it collects occasionally figures into criminal investigations. In 2004, S3 says, information collected from its GPS systems led to 70 arrests.
Still, Phillips said he worries that the system, like any new technology, can be abused.
In one case, S3 sold its technology to a pilot in the New York-New Jersey area who hid the tracking device on the car of a female acquaintance. He called the monitoring center constantly to get a fix on the GPS device's position so, unbeknownst to the company, he could follow her around in a low-flying plane. After she became suspicious and called local law enforcement officials, they found the GPS device and S3 cooperated with authorities to gather evidence for the stalker's arrest.
The alerts generated by S3 as it has tracked school vehicles so far have been minor, and more often than not they are false alarms, such as when someone goes outside the boundaries of the county for a field trip and forgets to inform the transportation dispatchers.
Fairfax County Public Schools was among S3's first customers. It has used GPS to monitor 57 technician and security cars for the past three years. Maribeth Luftglass, assistant superintendent for information technology, said that at first the employees in the cars being tracked were nervous. Dave Fry, 47, a senior telephone technician for the school system, for instance, said he worried that there would be "Big Brother watching." But that changed over the years.
"When first put it on, it was, 'Hey what's going on? How are they going to use it?' But now I don't even realize it's there," Fry said. "They call and say, 'You're at such and such site. Can you get over here?' And that's it."
D.C. Public Schools is taking a more aggressive approach to monitoring. The information it receives on each bus and child is detailed: a driver's route throughout the day, when the bus stops, when the doors open and close, the speed, and when the ignition is turned on or off. The system also features a database that will hold information on all the children -- names, addresses, contact information, disabilities, allergies and when their school day begins and ends.
David Gilmore, the court-appointed transportation administrator for D.C. Public Schools, proposed hiring S3 in part to keep tabs on a system that had been expensive to operate and one in which drivers were unaccountable for much of their day. When he announced the implementation of the new systems to drivers last year, he told them, "Life as you know it is over."
"As uncomfortable as this might make them, they are now being watched by satellite every minute of their workday, like it or not," Gilmore said in an interview.
He said he has already seen improvement. Reports of bus drivers using the vehicles to make detours to banks or for long lunches are diminishing, and the system is receiving compliments rather than complaints from parents who say their kids are finally being picked up on time.
