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RFID License Plates in the UK
An anonymous reader writes "The UK Government is studying license plates with embedded RFID tags. The plates can be read from 300 feet away and in rapid succession by readers embedded in the road or by 'surveillance vehicles.'"
A key benefit of the e-Plate is that the tag provides an encrypted and secure ID code which is registered in the UK Ministry of Transport's vehicle database. This code prevents tampering, cloning, or other forms of fraud that can currently happen with camera-based systems. Additionally, the e-Plate is designed to shatter if anyone tries to remove or otherwise tamper with it, and the tag can be programmed to transmit a warning if any attempt is made to dislodge the plate.
They said that for DVD encryption too, but look where that got us. Eventually, someone, somewhere will find a way to tamper with it and the best the government will be able to do is, like always, use heavy fines to curb the spread, but it will be futile, just like it was with DVD encryption.
I bet I'll have the plate transmit "YHBT" within two years.
When will they learn?
why bother with plates when you already have cell phones?
Tampering with plates is a bit easier to track than ripping your DVD's to PC.
Pass by a cop broadcasting l0s3r, and I'm sure he will not say, "Oh well, I guess we can't track him anymore.'
One possible good use for this would be paying tolls. I am constantly annoyed by people who pull up to the toll booth, peer at the booth in befuddlement, realize Oh! I have to put something in before the gate moves!, look again to find out how much they need to put in, discuss it with their passengers, take up a collection, thrown it in the hopper, watch the gate rise, work out which peddle they need to press, and go.... Read their plate. Bill 'em, or have them put it on a credit card.
Some feel thinking is a pleasure. Others feel it's a chore. Most, having never tried it, have no feel for it at all.
How so? All this technology enables is the ability to read the tag off the plates more accurately. Search and seizure is, well, just that. They are not searching your vehical, just identifying it.
The UK government, especially under Blair, has long used the motorist as a large source of tax revenue. Whether it be through high Fuel costs, a large number of hidden speed cameras (most of which do little in the way of preventing accidents), toll roads, and various other initiatives under the banner of "increasing the use of public transport".
The government would only invest in this with one motive and one motive alone, squeezing more money out of the motorist through draconian fines.
with the recent spike in US gas prices, I'll bet some companies would like to put this in gas pumps to track drive offs.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
If this was attempted in America, I wonder if it would be considered as allowing "unreasonable search and seizure."
How would this be unreasonable search and seisure? They aren't seasing anything and they aren't searching anything
My worry would be if the police started tracking speeders with this.
Otherwise, I'm not worried about them tracking my moves. Who wants to track me? And how can they track me and everyone else at the same time and keep records of this. The states don't have that kind of money.
Evolution or ID?
I'm really glad this new technology will soon be available to our brave boys in blue, valiantly battling crime on the streets of the UK.
</Sarcasm>
Honestly, aren't the motorists here persecuted enough? We have speed cameras popping up in every lucrative "accident blackspot" in the UK (I have a number near me that appeared on roads where I can honestly never recall hearing of any accidents, but the local school curiously has none outside the gates), we're getting taxed off of the roads despite the fact the public transport system would be ridiculed by any visitor from afghanistan. So what does our "brilliant" government do? Find a new way to bring in the much needed revenue from those crazy car drivers....
I can't see this going live until after the next election though - it would be political suicide after everything else Blair and co have done.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Just stick a transmitter in my arm already, I give up.
in bed.
Are these people stupid. Are they thick. Have they no idea what they're saying?! Don't they read history books.
One of the corner stones of our democracy is anonimity from the government. People will say: "Oh your just a crank. _OUR_ government will _NEVER_ abuse this to repress us!". Say that to someone in China when RFID is introduced over there.
Will all this new survelience technology emerging, the rights we took for granted are being eroded.
I'm sick of morons introducing all this stuff without thinking past their next meal. I for one will be removing/disabling these tags the minute they come out on a _Volutary_(i.e. manatory) basis.
Though they'll be extremly difficult to find and remove i'll bet. I wonder why?
May the Maths Be with you!
Do the UK police have time for this sort of thing? Is crime really so low that they can chase after motorists when the inevitable false alarms, tampering (accidental and otherwise) take place if the RFID tag system is deployed? I mean really, collecting data is the easy part, but at the end of the day real live humans have to follow up on this "data".
Ugh, can't you just feel Big Brother's breath on the back of your neck? In the end though, I have faith that the Britons won't take this lying down.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
This also gives the government (or anyone else who can hack into their systems) the ability to locate your car at any point in time.
Fight Spammers!
therefore I know exactly what information is being given to anyone who sees my plate
Surely the problem is not the information that is transmitted, but how it can be related to other information?
If a policeman can scan your numberplate and from that tell who you are and access your medical records to see that you went to the doctors last week to have your piles examined, does it matter that they only thing that is transmitted is a number?
I don't understand why everybody in the US, UK and other powerfuel economies worries about this. Why not look at the good side of this tracking system? It could help law enforcement: got a ticket for speeding? Well, duh, that's written in traffic regulations. I find this good, coming from a city where everyone drives like crazy, causing fatal accidents (e.g. drunk drivers). Also, what about tracking stolen cars?
If you don't like the idea of your car being tracked, just microwave the license plate. It will fry the RFID tag and make lots of pretty sparks too.
Please flee in terror in an orderly manner.
Well, yes. It IS possible to install a tire without special equipment. IF RFID tags are required by law in tires, obviously the government would not want to allow people to have tire mounting machines to make things harder. Then, they will make it impossible to buy the tires without the tags. Finally, once all the used tires run out, you will probably have a really difficult time finding a tire with no rfid tags...
I think the truth is that people in the UK get upset about what the newspapers tell them to get upset about. There is very little about this kind of thing in the papers, so people don't get upset about it.
However, you can be sure that if the EU proposed RFID license plates, the newspapers would be all over it and there would be national outrage. People seem so concerned with opposing anything the EU does that they don't notice the things their own government is doing.
And here we have the classic straw man argument. "Why should I care if I don't have anything to hide..." All resource issues aside (because if they don't have the ability to do it now, they will certainly be able to in the near future), there are many of us who value our privacy, and this is one more invasion of it. Just because you don't care about people knowing intimate details of your life, don't ruin it for the rest of us by propogating this argument.
Unless the government is suspecting me of being a criminal, there should be no reason for them to be able to track my every move. Period. And god have mercy on our souls if they decide to use this for ticketing.
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Additionally, the e-Plate is designed to shatter if anyone tries to remove or otherwise tamper with it,
The pranksters in the UK are going to LOVE this one.
My opinion..
Useful applications:
1) Easier to implement no-toll-booth toll roads
2) Police purposes
Drawbacks:
1) Privacy - but I'm thinking of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and it doesn't seem to conflict with anything. Is it our right to drive unfettered on roads paid for by taxpayers?
2) Cost
3) Battery power
Should be interesting. I have a feeling that this is going to go through and 50 years from now, we'll wonder how ancient peoples from 2004 managed to get away without RFID license plates.
Very true. Often it's ten over. I've been in bumper to bumper traffic, in a narrow-lane construction zone, in 15 over traffic. Michigan highways are crazy. Situations like these would certainly prevent this technology from being used for blanket-ticketing. However, it would likely be trivial to determine the *actual* speed of traffic on a given route, and thus ticket those who are 10 over the average speed. So this sort of technology might actually be useful for enforcing speed limits in a sensible way, by only ticketing those who are driving significantly faster than the rest of traffic.
Wonder how susceptible this is going to be to a microwave oven. Sure, it's going to fuck your oven, but it should also provide an easy way to disable the tag. Drilling a hold through the RFID would also be effective I suspect.
I understand the need to monitor criminals and terrorists, but I really don't like the idea of having the government (anyone in fact) able to freely track my every movement. We have the Oyster card (RFID enabled travelcard) for the Underground over here, os it will get to the point one day that you won't be able to buy or sell or travel without being monitored. Kinda biblical almost.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
So you're in favor of RFID then? After all, if tickets are auto-generated then there would be no more discrimination. Everyone who speeds would get a ticket, from the mayor down to the out-of-town tourist.
If speed limits are set too low, then thousands of annoyed drivers would petition to raise them rather than just ignoring them and hoping that they are in the group that doesn't get singled out for selective enforcement.
A criminal who needs to drive around isnt going to prevented by the RFID tags, she'll just drive a car that isnt tagged: the only way that can be caught is by police checking that every car that passes has a valid tag - how is that different from using the current 'dumb' numberplates against a database?
Meanwhile, the law-abiding have lost the right to lose themselves in a crowd, keep who they choose to associate with secret etc. (i.e. without taking heroic measures to ensure that privacy)
Of course, the real power brokers are either using taxicabs or chaffeur-driven cars from the car-pool, so their rights arent affected...
(tinfoil hat)
I know wheresgeorge.com does this for fun, but how come Ashcroft isn't using serial #s in US dollar bills to track their journey from corrupt hand to corrupt hand in the name of terrorism?
Think about it: You withdraw cash from an ATM, it records the #s on the bills handed to you. 2 weeks later FBI agents bust an anthrax transaction, and some money is confiscated. The money in the confisaction found has serial #s on the bills that matched the ones givent to you by ATM. Are you a suspect now?
Seems like # tracking on bills would prevent any coverups by going "cash-only"(ie no bank transactions, etc)
(/tinfoil hat)
A few years later, the govt requires everyone to carry personal RFIDs when out in public, 'for your protection.' You think, "that's not cool, but I haven't done anything wrong." So you let it happen. You probably believe the the few who bother to protest are in the tinfoil hat-wearing crowd. "Only people who have something to hide should be concerned," you assure yourself. Besides, nothing bad happened when the govt started tracking vehicles. "Alarmists," you think. So you swallow another one.
Then the govt decides that every room in every home should have a camera, 'for your protection.' At this, you balk: "that's going way to far!" you cry.
Too late. You didn't care when they put protection devices on cars, or on people, but why do you care now? Surely, you must have something to hide. "Don't worry," grins the guard, "they'll cure you of those subversive thoughts at the Ronald W. Reagan Memorial Reeducation Center.
Moral: Every right you abnegate while gaining nothing in return is another proverbial nail in your coffin. Unless there is a demonstrated benefit (Fox "news" saying there is does not count) for your tact acceptance, your acquiescence robs us all.
Yeah, right.
That's how it starts. Then it'll be sold to new parents as a way to "protect" their newborn children. Prisoners will be forced to accept the mark. Then the rest of the world.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
This is a very good point, but let's take it to the next level. If I witness a hit-and-run accident I may be able to write down the offending drivers license plate # and when the cops come nail the sucker. If we replace licence plates with RFID plates I can't do that unless I always carry my after market RFID scanner with me. Unless you have RFID sensors all over the place (expensive!) we're going to lose functionality we have with the current license plate systems. Furthermore, states will lose a lot of revenue from vanity plates. My bet is that if RFID technology starts being in such a manner it will be in combination with traditional license plates. Just my two cents.
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I think one of the possible differences is that the RFID solution has a much lower bar to entry for those who would like to use it. Yes, I know, anyone can look at a plate and record the number but it takes a lot more to OCR it (and hence the higher bar to entry). Another disturbing thing about the RFID solution is that it makes it all much easier to automate and therefore do on a much much larger scale. Instead of needing a slick camera and computer based system all you need is an inexpensive reader. Those differences will make proliferation of the system much much more likely. Where will they be instituted and for what purposes? That's what has a lot of us worried.
Unfortunately, you're absolutely right. We have CCTV cameras covering most public places, we're about to get compulsory biometric ID cards, and now this.
Political debate on this has become monopolised by the law-and-order brigade. Any attempt to raise a protest about privacy and citizens' rights is met with one or more of the following responses:
1. If you've nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear
2. If you don't support us, you're helping terrorists/criminals/illegal immigrants
3. The "people" have no time for "bleeding heart liberals" like you (the favourite put-down of our beloved Home Secretary)
Funny thing is at the same time the government is taking away the last shreds of our privacy, they're talking about changing the freedom of information laws to prevent citizens from finding out what _they_ are up to.
Why don't the people react? I don't know. Maybe it's the incessant banging on from the press about the crime, immigration and terrorism. I'm starting to think it's because most British people couldn't care less about their rights so long as there's beer in the fridge and football on the telly.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Why would this worry you?
Because it's tracking people in case they commit a crime, not because they are a suspect. It's the classic "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument. Unfortunately it completely violates the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
If you speed, you have broken the law and have to take whatever punishment is deemed to be appropriate.
A) Speeding does not necessarily endanger other people every single time. There are times when 80mph is not reckless and times when 25mph is.
B) The penalties for speeding are set to be a deterrent with the understanding that speeders will be caught a small percentage of the time. If that percentage goes up, the fine becomes unfair.
C) The law is not always reasonable.
D) Getting a ticket in the mail a week later doesn't slow anyone down.
E) Devices like this make it too easy for the government to use the fines as a source of income by setting the speed limit unreasonably low knowing people will exceed it.
Should I get away with a burglary just because I wasn't caught red-handed?
There is necessarily harm to a victim in every burglary. Not so with speeding. There's a reason that burglary is punished more severely than speeding. Because it's a worse crime.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
RFID will drastically ease the ability of anyone to perform surveillance of everyones movements. The article reports that they can be read from distances of up to a hundred meters distance.
Let me put it this way:
My license plate number is public knowledge. You can come take a look at it without me complaining. For around 2 decades my Email address was also public knowledge (my first Email@ was on a Multics system connected to the Arpanet). With the abuse of Email through SPAM this is no longer possible. The proposed RFID system is apparently almost as easy to abuse as is SMTP. The widespread deployment of RFID, the extremely low barrier apparent and the absence of any penalty for the abuse of this system will make it possible for any organization with enough motivation & funding to spy out who goes where & when. The potential for abuse is boundless.
I can see how you may have difficulties comprehending my position. As a marxist you may place the purported greater good before that of the individual. As one who believes instead that society is only protected when individuals rights are protected, I do not.
Unless there are clear safeguards against the abuse of the system, I'll zap it.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
License plates are a means of identifying your vehicle while it uses public roads, highways, etc. Nobody ever said you had a right to total anonymity, especially while driving a vehicle on public roads. Get over it!
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
With this system, you could get billed every time you go even 1 MPH over the speed limit, even my accident while coasting down a hill, or when you needed to speed up to avoid something, and there would be no human judgement involved.
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One of the MAJOR factors in a "free government" is the fact that you need RESTRICTSIONS on what the government does, not more power to the government.
Yes, the government can do all the things you mentioned. The truth is they don't need the RFID to do di ti. Want to stop cars from being stolen? Let people put explosive car alarms in them. Set them off, the car explodes.
What you thought that was over-kill? Too many bad consequenses for the little good?
Same thing for RFID. Too much bad consequences for the little good. Stolen cars, and traffic violations are minor problems. But putting the RFID in place lets the government know too much about my life. They do not need to know that I went to a hotel on May 19th that had a Sado-masochism convention, and on April 10th I went to a univesity that was having a lecture about legalizing Marijuana. (Note, If you care about whethter those were false examples you are living proof that the Government can not handle that knowledge).
This kind of information is easily abused. In the 1950's in the USA, that kind of information was used by Congressmen to have people fired and Black-listed - thereby preventing them from working.
That was not in a communistic country, not in a facisist country, the U.S.A.
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I am no political scientist, nor a historian for that matter, but I remember coming across an interesting idea posited by one of America's 'founding fathers' (either Washington or Franklin?)
--begin paraphrase--
It is evident that in history, cultures progress through different states of rule. In many cases, the people are ruled by a strict tyranny. The people will revolt and establish some sort of self-rule. After a period of time, those in power will gradually take freedoms from the people whilst the people slip further into ignorance and laziness, thus capitulating their rights to the elite. At some point, the government has come full cycle and exists as a tyranny. This repeats itself throughout history
--end paraphrase--
All people should voice their opinions about the use of this technology. Technology has a habit of limiting instead of broadening people's freedoms.
Remember, a flood starts with one drop of water...
I am not in favour of all of the facial recognition and other invasive stuff, but picking out crims who are too stupid to get a tax disk seems like something worth doing. People who drive without insurance deserve what they get.
...is where the government obtained the power to track us wherever we go. Requiring a license for public safety purposes is intrusive, but arguably important enough to be a valid exercise of the police power. Forcing people who use autombiles to travel with radio transmitters that can be used to track them constantly is qualitatively different.
For instance, it could easily be used to chill the right to free association. Imagine what the Commie hunters back in the '50s could've done with these (assuming they had the technology, of course). That example only took me a second to come up with, and the people at the FBI are probably much more creative than I.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
"My plate number may not be private, but where I park, how fast I travel, the frequency in which I use certain roads, and so on, is."
No they are not. You do all those things in public view so they are not private. Anyone can observe you doing those things and not violate your privacy. The only difference between a computer tracking your driving with RFID and being observed by a private investigator, jealous spouse, deranged fan, etc., is that it is trivially easy for the computer so there is little barrier to just doing it to everyone. That's the danger. Not that your "privacy" is being invaded, but that your heretofore anonymous public actions will be observed.
... I told you so (although that sentiment's probably redundant by now). RFID apologists defense of choice is that the readers only work at a distance of up to 18 inches, IIRC. Well these work up to 300 feet. Meaning that as soon as RFID is universally accepted, I just get my hands on one of these 300-foot-range scanners, and go driving through the suburbs looking for the house with the most stuff to rob... And yes, I did read the article, and yes, they are battery powered, but so what? Creating a very small battery to go along with the RFID chip is a technical problem that's very easily overcome, just like the 18 inches limitation was easily overcome when many here declared vociferously that said limitation would make RFID all cuddly and innocuous.
The point is that everybody who said that RFID will never have a range longer thatn 18 inches have already been proven wrong, even before RFID has even begun to be implemented. You pro-RFID folks care for some salt with that crow?
The real point of the matter is that NOBODY has a right to see what possessions I have in my house. Not a stranger/burglar on the street, not the government, NOBODY.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
Otherwise, I'm not worried about them tracking my moves.
In that case, you wouldn't mind a police officer pulling you over at random to check your ID, right? And while he has you stopped, you don't mind if he conducts a search of your vehicle and your person, right?
Those examples are a bit extreme, but in the eyes of the courts, they all violate the Fourth Amendment. A police officer has to have cause to search your vehicle, to check your ID, or even to follow you or track your moves. That cause can be that he observed you commit an offense or that he has a reasonable suspicion that you have committed one--but he can't pick your car out of a crowd and pull you over on a whim. You should expect the same deference whether he has the ability to track your vehicle or not.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
The more society will rely on technology, the more freedom we can get. Freedom will be "underground" though...
It's not freedom if not everyone has it.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
So you think the rules are wrong? Prestation contracts don't sound good to me, either. But stopping new technology which will most probably save them money (cameras with OCR, including the errors they make, are expensive) for it doesn't seem right to me. Remember that they can pay for schools and hospitals (and fighter jets and wars... sigh) with the money they save.
The RFID in your license plate doesn't hold any information that isn't on the plate already. It's only easier to read it with a computer. And nowadays, license plates are mostly read by computers, so that doesn't sound like a bad thing.
If the rules are wrong, change the rules. That means writing to politicians and telling people to vote for persons who aren't currently in power (I wouldn't advise the ones who have recently been in power and done nothing about it either ;-) )
What are you saying? That isn't going to change anything? Well, tough luck. Then the choices are to try and start a revolution or to live with it.
There are lots of privacy-invading technologies that are very serious, but this is not one of them.
This confirms what most of us have been preaching for the past couple years: sensitive RFID scanners can operate from a considerable distance. Recall the RFID industry spin some months ago about how this technology was only very-short-range and that you needn't fear someone scanning your credit cards or the items in your house from a distance? Utter bullshit. We knew it and now this license plate scanner proves it.
A scanner with a 300ft range would allow me to scan your home's contents from safely down the street so that I can decide whether your house is worth burglarizing.
How is the RFID industry going to spin this? Are they going to say that only the "good guys" will possess scanners capable of this range? How long before someone hacks together a homemade scanner with similar range (or steals one from an "authorized" user)?
In addition, I have, as of right now, zero wrecks.
Of course, if you *did* kill yourself on a bridge at 85, there's also a good chance that you wouldn't be around saying "Speed *can* be fatal -- why I crashed going 85 and killed myself!"
I certainly do read about fatal car accidents where excessive speed is the major contributing factor, so it certainly *does* happen.
I also feel that people have a pretty strong tendency to misjudge their driving capabilities (nothing is more annoying than people that insist that they're definitely sober enough to drive when they definitely aren't).
Keep in mind two other facts: it only takes a single mistake to be fatal *and* that you may not be the person to pay the price for a bad call on your part -- if a pedestrian gets nailed by a speeding car (and I don't care how great a driver you are, a car going 85 has a *far* greater stopping distance than one at 35), you might go to jail or get fined, but they'll be, well, dead.
May we never see th
Where to begin.... /. the point is the traffic laws passed by people we or previous generations voted for are the rules. If the sign says stop then stop, its really quite simple, stop. That way their isn't a gray area...
/.
I'm so glad we have so many traffic experts on
oh well it's Tuesday at 3:15 am and the nearest car opposing me is almost 3000 feet away I think it's okay for me to just slow down instead of making a complete stop.
If the sign says 35mph then don't go 40 and complain that you were only speeding a little. Man, it's not like they don't tell you what the rules are, they are on big freaking signs that you have to be able to comprehend when you take your test.
Look if it's a stop sign you stop, if you don't like the traffic laws get out and walk, or better yet walk to your polling location and vote for a change.
How quickly we forget that (in the sates at least) driving is a privilege not a right.
I'm also glad we have experts that know all the stuff police officers do and why, look the fact is they answer to the citizens and often citizens in a community will complain to the city government that people are running a stop sign at X or are speeding through their quite sub-division or are disturbing the peace by blasting their music, which means the police will respond.
Furthermore I don't know of any police officers that don't consider DUI a big deal, if they see it they'll pull the person over, trust me they have had to deal with the results of DUI all to often.
They can't be everywhere all the time. If you think someone is driving in a unsafe manor, (by the way running a stop sign is also unsafe, not insignificant like you said, a driver running a stop sign almost killed my father) call the local police dept and call tell them, if you have a cell phone, they might be able to respond quickly enough to get the person your concerned about.
If you can't play by the rules they don't play.
Between the "tinfoil hat" crowd and the "experts" I'm quickly losing the ability to stomach half stuff people post on
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.