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Police and Lawyers Love E-ZPass
John_Schmidt writes "The AP is reporting that police are using EZ-Pass records to solve crimes. Lawyers are also getting the records to use in divorce cases. The article also mentions that the NYS Thruway has sensors to read the cards along the highway (not just at toll booths) but says the data is scrambled and not stored."
EZ-Pass commissions have always operated under the promise that this would not be done. If it were ever to be enacted, you would see a lot of people dumping EZ-Pass, since many of the roadways in EZ-Pass areas have average traffic speeds over the speed limits, and the cost of even a small speeding ticket is ridiculous with the current insurance regulations and policies.
This could work both ways. Give your EZ pass to your buddy(or clone it and attach it someone's car) and send them on their way.
STOP ROCK VIDEO
I will shortly be selling a kit that allows you to clone an EZ-pass card through my regular channels (read: guys in the states who advertise in the back of magazines sell COD) for selling cable descramblers. My hand held tag reader, concealable as a road side rock with a battery that lasts 3 days, is priced out the range of causual snoopers -- but some reporters have already used to collect the tag ids of a number of celebraties and politicians and start monitoring them.
No problem at all for me, my EZPass literally saves me hours a week since I'm on the NJ Turnpike regularly.
If I was planning on doing something seriously illegal, I'd just ditch the tag first. The cops who got caught claiming false overtime deserved it, not because they did wrong, but because they were stupid enough to think they weren't leaving an auditable trail behind them.
FIVIn nearly every place that is not enough evidence to prove speeding. Similar things were tried with paper toll booth tickets, and judges tossed them out.
That said, why does anyone have a problem with this? Highways are public. Where you go is [largely] public information. If you have a problem with speeding laws, change the laws, not the enforcement. Would people be less upset if they paid tons more money to post a guy with photographic memory at each toll booth and watch everoyne go by?
The only problem I have is that people aren't more honest about the system.
I used to work for a home contractor in the NYC suburbs. We crossed the Hudson river every day over the Tappan Zee bridge, and used EZ-Pass to pay the tolls. (Those out of the area, please be patient.) Now, contractors are notorious for taking cash payments whenever possible, and how much of this income they report in taxes is no doubt a small fraction.
So, what happens when any one of these contractors, or businessmen in similar circumstances, has their tax returns audited? How long will it be until EZ-Pass and other similar systems are used to "establish a pattern": meaning, evidence that you do business every day of the year, even though you report your income as seasonal, occasional or whatever?
And that's just taxes!!!
We're being watched, and the full implications of this are scary.
Here in California, we have FasTrak. They already acknowledge that they use sensors on the road to determine traffic conditions. They also said that you can opt-out of this. They even supply the mylar bags so that you don't get tracked this way. They sent out a letter informing users of this earlier this year and even sent an additional mylar bag.
The FAQ for Fastrak mentions the mylar bags in relation to carpool lanes. Same principle for traffic conditions.
It's possible to do this on a voluntary basis. For instance, I heard of a car rental agency that gave a big discount if you'd use a GPS that would alert them to excessive speeding. Coercion or good business? I could imagine a setup where insurance companies give people money off if they go along with this, and many might be willing to make that tradeoff.
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
The Houston area version is called EZ-Tag. In addition to the "go through the toll booths" quickly aspect, data is fed into the Houston TranStar system along most of the major freeways.
The TranStar site is great because you can easily get an idea of traffic conditions before leaving your home/office. Interesting data includes historical speed graphs.
The automatic garage doors at our office building can also be set up to read the EZ-Tag and automatically open the doors when we pull up.
Someone builds their own EZ-Pass readers for fun and profit. I'd assume anyone with RFID engineering knowledge could find out what frequency the tag operates on, either by bringing some kind of radio monitor to an EZ-Pass booth or by taking the tag apart. Each TAG should send a unique response, encrypted or not. It could for example be used by high schools to make sure kids don't leave, for one thing. I'm sure the rest of the slashdot crowd could come up with plenty more big brother like scenarios.
In the last couple of years, there has been a greater push to get "tough on crime" (or appear so, but we won't split hairs here, will we?) which basically means "put more people in prison than we did last year"
/shrug
Because of this push and the fact that various law enforcement / "civil defense" agencies aren't really "up with the times" (sheer incompetence and the apparant inability to convict someone in a "regular court" might be a better way of stating this), in order to keep up - these same folks HAVE to turn to technology and to to push through poorly written legislation (or interpret it in interesting ways)in order to make their "quota".
Dunno, I probably have no credibility, but my belief that law enforcement is embracing all these new things is not because they are new, but they are too incompetent to keep up their statistics using traditional means.
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With EZPass, you don't have the option to pay cash and remain anonymous - you MUST be linked to thing even though there's no good reason for this to be the ONLY option. I can understand that some people don't give a shit about privacy and want to billed, but I'm guessing that there's a LOT of people out there just like me (in the cashonly lane) who would rather prepay in cash and be left alone.
I'm wondering if it would be illegal to setup a EZPass proxy organization?
--
Power to the Peaceful
You were seriously going to suggest that putting an end to the needless deaths of hundreds of motorists each year is a little temporary safety, and that speeding unobserved by law enforcement on a public tax-payer funded road is an essential liberty?
Select the 85 percentile of that for the speed limit.
Enter politics, so write down 55 or 65 no matter how safe the road is.
Oh, and the standards used for road speed is still 1950's vehicles on skinny tires, no matter that even cheap cars have anti-lock brakes.
So yes, if speed limits had ANYTHING to do with what the roads could bear, perhaps we're respect the signs. Again: if the laws were based on reason (*cough*), they'd be respected. When speed limits are imposed because to raise ticket money, then it's wrong and the authoritive gov't needs to be kicked in the knees for it.
And instead of the police enforcing safe driving by ticketing people cruising along in the leftmost lane without passing anyone, or for lane changes without signals, or for eating/phoning while driving taking important attention away from piloting a 3000lb SUV at 90 feet per second...
No, they'll enforce "speeding laws" only.
Clearly, when I'm on a Calif Superhighway with few people on it - a road that's larger and its in better shape than parts of the autobahn I've seen - clearly, it's only safe for 65 when going 110 on the autobahn was almost dangerously slow. Because a sign says so.
Give me a driving test that 40% of the people fail the first time they try it, give me road that you have to have the "proven able" license to drive and I'll go for it.
RE: EZ Pass? It's in a lead bag (for film) in the glove box when I'm not going through a toll booth.
After our officials "promised" and swore up and down it would only be used for tolls, NJ and NY authorities have been caught MANY times abusing this.
Ready for your implanted RFID yet sir?
Bend over now
The parent may have an extra dose of soma for his obedience.
After reading the title I thought it was going to be about the police using the records to catch criminals, and the lawyers using them to help the innocent exonerate themselves. But I guess such balanced storytelling wouldn't sell as many ads, or something.
Anyway, if a criminal is dumb enough to use EZ-Pass, she deserves to get caught. As for the suggestion that it be used for automated speeding tickets, I think that'd probably be a great thing. When 50,000 people a day show up in court, they'll have to raise the speed limits, right? It won't happen because the government doesn't actually want people to slow down, though. They just want an excuse to pull over minorities and a nice steady revenue stream.
If you keep a daily routine & use the EZ Pass on your way to & from work, you would incriminate yourself if you didn't use the card, say, on the way home the same day someone in your office was murdered after hours. It would be circumstantial evidence, but nonetheless it would give the police cause to put your life under a microscope.
I think there may have been a Law & Order episode that revolved around this idea.
Already been done in England.
Someone once recounted to me how a video-based speed camera would take a snapshot of the plate, do OCR on it...and, wait for it....do a lookup against the UK motor vehicle registry. About 500 feet down the road was a digital sign, and it would display personalized messages. As in, "Mr. Bean, you are going over the speed limit, please slow down".
I think he said it freaked out people enough(surprising, given how London has more security cameras than people -wanna see 1984? Go to the UK) that it was pulled.
Please help metamoderate.
I remember attending a series of lectures on sensor technology given by a professor from rtgers university, and one of points he made on the topic of these RF based toll booths in NJ was that given the cost of installation and maintainence it would have been substantially cheaper to PAY motorists a few dollars each time to use the road and not install the system at all!
These EZ-passes are very weak transmitters. I'm not sure how they work exactly, but they might even be passive ones where they take the energy from outside and retransmit using that.
In any case, a cell phone requires the ability for the cell tower to hear you from a few miles away. The EZ-pass works in a couple dozen feet.
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I tried this once. I was in a downtown area and staying extra time and had to change hotels.
No car, just me and a bag. Credit card was close to maxxed and I was surfing ATMs until a payment got through.
The hotel wouldn't do it.
I gave my (real) name. No address (not their business) and offered to pay whatever deposit they needed. Not a fancy hotel, not a dive. Just a holiday inn class hotel. I needed a room and a desk. I was at the clients site for 15 hrs/day anyway.
What is wrong that you cannot travel in this country without identification papers?
Contrary to their words, there are ZERO laws that you must show state issued identification to travel. More, any 9/11 terrorists HAD IDs that were just fine. So it's not been an issue in the past. At least they dropped the useless "did you pack your own bags" question. the only incidents that ever occurred in that light were when a SPOUSE was trying to do in a partner.
Even if they operate under the premise that it will not be done today doesn't mean they won't change their minds in the future.
That is one reason I really don't trust those 'ezpass' systems. Those pushing this tech will swear on a stack of bibles that they aren't doing, and have no plans to do anything evil with the information they are capable f collecting. The easy way to find out exactly how truthful about this they are being is to try to buy one anonymously ith no identification with cash. You simply can't do it here in texas from what I understand. Sure, they can get your plates off the cameras they inevitably install, but simply tracking the comings and goings of a tag is much easier.
If there were no nefarious intentions on their part, I'd be able to stop by the local quickie mart, buy one of these things with cash, and simply use it until it ran out. Then I could either recharge it, or get another one. This isn't going to happen, because they want to be able to easily track you wherever you go, just in case you might do something naughty.
I can't believe we allow them to put up cameras all over the place on light poles, stoplights, and the like. I'm abaolutely amazed that there isn't an incredibly high mortality rate on them, because they deserve it.
This is an ex-parrot!
Why do they insist on this devices being registered and what not? Why can't I anonymously buy and/or recharge it at a gas station? If it can be done with cell phones, it is certainly possible with these -- much simpler -- devices.
I suspect, it is so by design. We are dealing with the government, after all...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Quote "I don't agree with this line of thinking. Typically, when speeding isn't enforced, it's for a reason -- the officer realizes that if the person is going over the speed limit, but is driving responsibly -- staying in the center of their lane, not constantly changing lanes and cutting people off -- they're not a danger. The danger comes from people who drive aggressively, and these people are threatening at any speed. Speeding laws provide a pretext to pull these people over, because "he thought I was driving too aggressively" is debatable in court due to its subjectivity. "My radar clocked him going 10 miles over the speed limit," however, is much harder to refute."
This attitude is exactly what is wrong with this country. Laws are enforced when convenient, whether it is traffic or drug use or financial accountability. Law makers rush to pass new laws when something bad happens. They do this in spite of the fact that there were already laws in place to prevent the bad thing from happening.
I am a long haul truck driver. Granted, not everyone who drives a truck does it as they are supposed to. However, I drive according to the laws that govern my vehicle operation. I have all kinds of things to deal with that I don't like. There are split speed limits, where trucks have to travel 5-20 MPH slower than cars. These laws are not safe, yet I don't have the luxury of choosing the laws I wish to obey. I don't care if you feel that the roads that are governed at 55 MPH can be safely traveled at 70 MPH. That is not your decision to make. Personally I don't care how they nail you for speeding as long as the laws are enforced. If there is a problem with the law, law abiding folks should stand up and make an effort to change the law.
Civil disobedience may be a way of getting attention, but don't tell me or anyone else that your speeding is civil disobedience. It is simply selfishness. You don't have time to do the right thing and the cops aren't watching so stay out of my way. As long as that is the prevalent attitude, my attitude will continue to be: "Nail em any way you can".
Like voter registration and driver's license records being sold to marketers.
Like data that the driver wasn't told existed being pried from OBD II vehicle computers.
Like telemarketers scanning entire phone books for target lists.
Like phone-sex and psychic lines nabbing your home phone number through their ANI service.
Like HTML "web bugs" embedded in email messages.
Like bars and clubs reading your ID, then secretly entering the info into a database.
Right... in the trunk. Because your trunk is behind you and doesn't go where you go. They'll never associate that thing "back there" with you.
They have no problem using their cell phones, have blogs, PDA's, WiFi, and all sorts of other goodies. As if all those are real private and not giving off anything.
There is a bit of a difference. Who I talk to, what I think, what websites I visit and what games I play on my Visor don't make much evidence that can be used to falsely implicate me in a crime.
Where I am, can be! Before you start talking about how far fetched it is, I'll tell you that I was threatened by a cop once with precisely that. Sgt. CJ Hartman, formerly of the North Versailles PA police department threatened to do just that.
I will do everything I can to prevent men like him from having access to data that can prove that I was within 10 miles of a place where some crime was committed.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Don't these things have a 5mph limit for when you go through the booths? I'd imagine there's a reason for this that'd have to do with keeping good records of the data. Do these road side sensors really track your movements, or do they just give an estimate of the amount of traffic passing by? If they can collect everyones EZPass id's as they drive by road side sensors at 70mph, what's the point of the 5mph lanes in toll booths? I can understand so you don't have people sneaking into the ezpass lanes and going with the traffic flow and not having an EZPass, but even so, what's stopping them from opening up the lanes a little wider and letting you do, say, 30 through them?
My mom's boss borrowed his brother's EZpass for his trip down south to VA or SC or something, and he thought you could just drive through without slowing down. A few days or weeks or whatever after he got home he got a envelope full of pictures of him flying through the ezpass lanes and just had to pay for all the tolls.. no speeding tickets or anything.
So I'm guessing if you go fast enough the sensors don't have enough time to pick up your information?
I was doing commuting for my old job and the EZpass was a godsend when the roads were trafficky. No way did I want to wait in a mile long line waiting for some retired guy to hand me my ticket.
So The Man knows I drove from Albany to Binghampton... Uh oh!
If you're not committing crimes, what do you have to worry about? I wouldn't say EZpass is any means of an invasion of privacy.
If I start getting brochures from various Cape Cod resorts anytime soon though, because they've heard I was in Cape Cod for a week last summer and they wanted to offer me their great vacation package, then I'll start getting worried.
I lived in NJ through driving age. Now I live in PA.
As a child, I heard complaints about how the tolls did not disappear after the roads were paid off. When I moved to PA, I learned that having somebody pump your gas was to cut down unemployment, not somehow a safety issue. I also heard that the toll systems kept people employed.
I was poor in both states. I know all the roads to use to avoid the tolls, but they are much slower. Now my time is worth more than the tolls, but a decade ago I often took the back roads to avoid tolls.
NJ is willing to implement EZ-Pass because it allows them to keep the tolls while disrupting the driving less. Obviously the tolls are important revenue. Also obvious is that they are using EZ-Pass for the convenience. They even moved the toll at the Delaware bridge to make the untolled exit easier, and to build a fast lane for EZ-Pass users.
PA does not have an untolled exit; you must give PA money to use the Delaware bridge. PA is also building new exits on the Turnpike that only accept EZ-Pass. There was a rumor that EZ-Pass would only pay for itself if enough people ran the tolls and were fined. Then it was rumored that enough people were not doing it. Now PA is making it impossible to exit without EZ-Pass. And if you think that signs make anything obvious, you have never driven in PA. (I made a wrong turn today because the signs said the left lane turns left and the right lane turns right. The road did continue straight, but I think you had to drive between the lanes to stay on it.)
People like tolls and taxes on gas because they believe that the revenues are collected from the people who benefit from their use. They need to feel this money is used for the roads. If it was announced that toll money was going to be used for education, people would revolt.
If you wonder what NJ does with the money, try driving in PA. The roads are awful compared to NJ. I saw NJ repave about 40 miles of the Parkway over a weekend, one lane per day. PA cannot repave 20 miles of a highway in less than 2 weeks. It took PennDot 6 months with one lane closed at all times to "widen" a 2-lane highway to 2 lanes with better shoulders. Part of this may be because NJ uses blacktop and PA roads are typically concrete. Part of it may be because PennDOT is a very unorganized and/or corrupt department.
NJ roads are some of the best I have seen. A report in the 80s listed the Garden State Parkway as the safest road in the US, and I wondered how it could be when it was usually 70mph bumper-to-bumper traffic. A factor is that in NJ you always move right when a faster car is coming behind you. NJ drivers keep moving in heavy traffic; it takes an accident, bad weather, or a patrol car to get them to slow down (a little.)
PA has some of the worst roads I have seen. PA passed a "stay right" law recently, but no one noticed. The left lane of most 2 lane roads often moves slower than the right lane. And when it is bumper-to-bumper in PA, everybody slows down to 20mph and stops erratically. This may be necessary to avoid all the potholes.
In NJ, I worried that salt from the ocean and the weather would ruin my cars. In PA, I worry that the roads and the potholes are going to shake my cars apart. (Do you plan to have a flat tire at least once per year?)
Some factors for the difference in road quality:
- NJ is a richer state with a denser population. - The tolls contribute to road upkeep, and...
- NJ has 2 toll roads that cross the state in different directions, while PA only has one and it misses most of the state. (Not that you'd want to go there.)
- NJ just cares more about roads, and has a DOT that works.
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Side note: I refuse to get EZ-Pass, even though driving to my best client almost requires the PA Turnpike, because I believe the issues in this article are inevitable. I don't have a tinfoil hat, but why make it easy for them? (And I drive sports cars that get lower mpg when under 70mph.)
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
This is where I start to lose the will to live. If you start with the assumption that speed limits are too low and so speeding is NOT dangerous (at least its not when I do it), and you assume catching speeders is solely a cash raising excercise automated capture seems evil.
If we have automated capture that catches and fines 100% of offenders - and that fucks up peoples lives far enough - the law will change. And then we're not all doing 85 in a 70 limit. We're doing 85 in an 85 limit.
Automated capture also costs less, on the whole, so the good policemen and women can be out hunting down murderers and the like - instead of fighting the endless war against speeding.
Personally - I find that quite attractive - assuming everyone stops being pussies and actually gives a fuck about CHANGING laws, not just BREAKING them.
SHIT - my hat!! my hat!!! WHERES MY TINFOIL HAT!!!!! that fucking cat has taken it again I bet!