Company owner says officials don’t want a repeat of the Munich attack
Damian Inwood
Province
U.S. Fleet’s tracking devices will monitor equipped vehicles using satellites to create real-time pictures like this. Photograph by: Handout, U.S. Fleet Tracking
An Oklahoma company is shipping 830 vehicle-tracking devices to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics to help prevent terrorist hijackings of athletes’ buses or VIPs’ limousines.
“For the Olympics, we’ll be able to update the vehicles’ positions every three seconds,” said Jerry Hunter, CEO of U.S. Fleet Tracking.
“They haven’t told me what their primary purpose is, but I’m reasonably certain it’s to make sure they don’t have a repeat of Munich — or don’t have a bus full of athletes commandeered or something like that.”
At the Munich Olympics in 1972, 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and one police officer died after a hostage-taking by Black September, a Palestinian militant group. Five terrorists were slain in the rescue attempt.
The system uses up to 16 satellites to triangulate the device’s location, giving latitude, longitude, heading and velocity, Hunter said.
It takes six-tenths of a second for the tracking device to send the data by wireless transmission to an Oklahoma server and make it available on-screen.
The system gives the speed and direction of the vehicle and options include locking the doors, disabling the starter or honking the horn.
“It gives Olympic organizers the ability to follow those vehicles and make sure they’re where they’re supposed to be,” said Hunter.
Hunter said that there are three different devices available: a hard-wired version, a portable version and a navigation device that can send messages to drivers and direct them to their destinations.
Hunter said about half the devices will be the portable ones, which are the size of a razor phone, can clip on a belt and cost $399 US.
Monitoring costs about $1 a day, he added.
“We’ve got 830 units going to Vancouver and Whistler and they will be on buses, on security vehicles, limousines and dignitaries’ vehicles,” Hunter said. “We set up virtual fences and every time the vehicle enters or leaves the fence, it sends us text messages and emails.”
He said the maps showing the vehicles’ locations will be monitored by the RCMP, Vancouver city police and provincial officials.
“They’ll have screens up with all these vehicles, but if a vehicle deviates from its assigned route, it can send messages the minute that vehicle veers off route,” he said.
Hunter said it’s not just mega-events like the Olympics or emergency and police services that use the system.
“We’ve got small businesses using it, husbands tracking cheating wives, wives tracking cheating husbands and we’ve got parents tracking their teenage drivers,” he said. “A gentleman in San Antonio decided to put tracking on his vehicles after he came around the corner and saw four of his plumbing trucks, all lined up with their logos showing, in the parking lot of a topless club.”
He said drug-enforcement agencies have used the portable tracking device in bags of cocaine during sting operations.
“Eighty per cent of our business is commercial, seven per cent is parents tracking teens and seven per cent is cheating spouses,” he added. “The remainder is law enforcement and ambulance services.”
He said while the majority of the company’s business is in North America, the tracking system is also used in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Bangalore, New Zealand and Europe.
U.S. Tracking is sending six software engineers to Vancouver to help run the system.
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