NYC Is Tracking RFID Toll Collection Tags All Over the City 314
In the northeast U.S., most of the tolls people encounter when driving make use of a system called E-ZPass to let them pay the tolls electronically. Drivers are given small RFID transponders that are scanned in tollbooths, at which point the toll is automatically deducted from a pre-paid account. One hacker got curious whether the RFID tags were being scanned elsewhere, so he tweaked his E-ZPass to blink a light and make a noise every time it was read. He tested the streets of New York City, and wasn't surprised to see it light up in plenty of places where there were no tollbooths to be found. From the article:
"It’s part of Midtown in Motion, an initiative to feed information from lots of sensors into New York’s traffic management center. A spokesperson for the New York Department of Transportation, Scott Gastel, says the E-Z Pass readers are on highways across the city, and on streets in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and have been in use for years. The city uses the data from the readers to provide real-time traffic information, as for this tool. The DoT was not forthcoming about what exactly was read from the passes or how long geolocation information from the passes was kept. Notably, the fact that E-ZPasses will be used as a tracking device outside of toll payment, is not disclosed anywhere that I could see in the terms and conditions. When I talked to the E-ZPass Inter-agency Group — the umbrella association that oversees the use of the pay-toll-paying tags in 15 different states — it said New York is the only state that is employing this inventive re-use of the tags. ... 'If NYDOT can put up readers, says [the hacker], 'other agencies could as well.'"
Trending political procedures... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do a lot of tracking of everything a person does and only come clean when someone calls 'em out...
I hope this "hacker" is anonymous... Otherwise he's headed for a jail cell...
It used to be okay to point out when your government was being shady...
Not anymore!!
Yay!
Welcome to 1984!
Re:Still pissed (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny you mention gay sex and then go on to list the only ones that care about privacy are those doing something "illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous." Have you not been paying attention to Russia lately? Gay sex recently became illegal again. Just because society and politicians don't care NOW doesn't mean they will continue not caring.
Don’t keep it on the windshield (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never kept my FasTrak (our version of EZPass) stuck to the windshield. It lives in its mylar foil bag in the center console until I’m approaching a toll. Besides, people will break a window and steal it. It can’t be linked to a different vehicle, at least not without me setting that up, so it’s pretty much worthless to anyone else, but crackheads don’t know that.
You already have something like this on your car.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called a license plate. With technology that allows license plates to be read by cameras, any government organization could track the movements of every vehicle everywhere in their jurisdiction. Don't think you can't be tracked because you don't have an RFID tag in your vehicle.
Hubris (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a tactical mistake borne of hubris. When the RFID chips came out, people were paranoid they'd be use to track instead of ease on off congestion in toll roads as advertised. Officialdom trotted out the usual assurances. Now they're using them to track cars.. (as if they can't already do that through other means).
The long term effect is to breed distrust of government and technology. To induce a cynical turn of mind .
Seeing as 99% of security relies on public buy in , cooperation, the feeling of a shared purpose and identity and absent those things or if those things are greatly degraded, we have no effective security, this has to be seen as a big security blunder.
Tricking, coercing, forcing, sneaking by people what's needed for security is a bad idea. It was a bad idea when the NSA started doing it whether they were getting away with it or not. It's a bad idea wherever it goes. It works against security in a million ways none of which anyone can control.
The way to security buy in is through more openness, more sharing of the problems and threats we face and above all the verifiable protection of our civil liberties against the abuses which inevitably occur when identity and details of people's private lives are exposed for examination by the state.
You have to firewall international (or national) terrorism from all other concerns. You cannot use this information to, say catch drug dealers or common murders. Neither can you over-define what terrorism IS. Copyright violations aren't terrorism and neither are the activities of organized crime. Mainstream , even violent political protestors aren't terrorists and neither are the Tea Party or anarchists. That's called- regular life, normal criminal deviance that is NOT terroristic; the goal is not to undo Western civilization.
Deniers are of course not terrorists, despite my hyperbolic moniker.
Because that IS a slippery slope and what will happen is there will grow widespread, covert, person to person rebellion ande non-cooperation, subversion and ultimate undermining of security.
People don't want to live in Stasiland, whatever benefits there are to living in Stasiland and it' takes not very much to get people to thinking that they are living in Stasiland.
I am to the right of most people on this forum, (yesterday's rating drubbing) which is to say in the middle of the political spectrum. Even I am creeped out by some of the things that have been going on. It's human nature to abuse power in ways that lead to undue influence by the power wielders and then on to a kind of defacto fascism. That's not a political perspective, that's a historical and psychological fact and moreover instinctive knowledge. It is not possible to talk your way around instinctive knowledge.
Re:Trending political procedures... (Score:5, Insightful)
It has never been secret.
Except for:
- where the RFID detectors are.
- if they store the ID of the EZ-Pass tag.
- if they store the geo-location data.
- how long the keep the data.
- who has access to the data.
- if they sell the data.
So you're right, no secrets here.
Re:Quick hardware hack (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'll bet somebody has patented the 1836 technology.
Re:Trending political procedures... (Score:4, Insightful)
This should have been in the agreement. Most would have no problem with it -- as long as it wasn't secretly used for law enforcement.
Lawyers started supoenaing driver self-cams used in driving safety research, and volunteers dried up.
Of even greater concern is illegal NSA type stuff. I suppose more people will put in these read-detectors to map them all out and force government to explain them all. This is a good thing.
Re:Trending political procedures... (Score:5, Insightful)
initiative to improve traffic flow in Manhattan
If your goal is to improve traffic flow, you don't use EZPass, you use traffic counters that get laid down on the street (or use the pole-mounted radar counters) that are probably cheaper than the RFID devices they're using. Those don't identify each individual vehicle's path, but they do make it really clear where people are going (e.g. "the exit ramp has a count of 400 per hour, and and there's 350 more just to the right of that ramp than there was coming from the other way you can get to that spot.").
Alternately, you can ask yourself how many major construction projects have occurred in Manhattan to improve traffic flow in response to the data from this program. I'd be really surprised if New York City even considered, say, rerouting 5th Avenue.
Ergo, traffic flow isn't the problem NYC is trying to solve.
Re:Trending political procedures... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Still pissed (Score:5, Insightful)
My rule #46:
The number of skeletons in [most famous person]'s closet is usually directly proportional to how sanctimonious or pious they act in public.