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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.'"
My big concern with this is of course, privacy. Survelance cameras are already very common in major cities, adding this technology to the cameras or to areas near the cameras would be trivial. Using this technology to monitor access to corporate parking lots would make this very attractive to the private sector. Companies could band togethor to sell data, or sell it to private investigators, who will combine the data into one large database. Your employer can determine the RFID tag for your car by comparing the ID read with the ID used to get into a corporate controlled parking lot. Then the company (or your significant other) can search in some pay-for-use database maintained by firm X to find out where your car was on tuesday when you wern't at work (or missed that dinner date). If your car spends too long near your competitors office, who knows what the corporate response would be.
Government of course will respond in turn, DMCA laws in the US would prevent anyone there (assuming a similar thing was implemented) from determining what their code was (since it is 'encrypted'). The curious would be thrown in jail, or sued, and the major corporations would still enjoy the power.
paul reinheimer
... because, at least in central London, all car number plates are OCR'ed for use in the Congestion Charge scheme; RFID would have less inaccuracies (like the Somerset farmer who got a demand for his 17mph tractor being 150 miles away in London).
James F.
As an outsider, I have noticed that there is not much in the way left of Privacy in the UK.
Is this just not considered important over there? Is a "greater good" mentatlity strong? Or, is it just a no one really cares so the government can get away with anything put on your tinfoil hat oh fuck I got a ticket for going 5mph over attitude?
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
...and speeding tickets in the mail. 'Nuff said.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
Yeah, but I can read a license plate without any special equipment, and therefore I know exactly what information is being given to anyone who sees my plate. If you start putting RFID tags in license plates, who's knows what "extra" information they might start encoding on them.
from the 90s here in the U.S.A was a change to vehicle OBD (on-board diag). OBD III was to transmit to roadside nodes any vehicles that had slipped into emissions failure. The LE (law enforcement would then send a 'fix or else' citation in the mail. One feature of this was vehicle location, direction and speed were also sent, so although they would 'never' use said information, it was an easy extrapolation to speeding tickets.
No, the people are willing but a blind man named Blunket is trying to remove all privacy for everyone else. He's blind so he cannot drive, so penalties for drivers are always good. He's blind so he cannot read his own mail, so mail privacy is not necessary.
The man is totally unfit as a home secretary, yet nobody here wants to tell the blind bastard to fuck off, its not politically correct.
I'm moving out of the UK soon and I won't look back.
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
Time to get one of these for my car...
Which I submitted yesterday, but they rejected. Putting them into people seems FAR more interesting than into licencse plates.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Um . . . I'm sorry, I'm coming up short here.
Can't think of a Simpsons license plate reference? Come on... there are dozens:
Just a few:
[8F14] Krusty's pink convertible: KRUSTY
[8F15] Quimby's vehicle: I RULE U
[8F15] Snake's car: EX CON
[8F20] Sideshow Bob & Selma's honeymoon car: IH8 BART
[1F14] Ned's car: JHN 143 (John 14:3)
[2F09] car in lot of nuclear plant: 3MI ISL (3 Mile Island)
[2F13] Hitler's Mercedes Benz: ADOLF1
[2F32] Lionel Hutz's white Bronco: NOT OJ
[3F09] President Ford's limo: MR DUH
[AABF06] Comic Book Guy's car: NCC 1701 (Star Trek)
[8F20] Sideshow Bob's creations: RIP BART, DIE BART, BART DOA, IH8 BART
DIE BART - "Nobody who speaks German could be evil..."
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Let's say I'm a Muslim in Oregon, and I'm accused of committing a terrorist crime in Cleveland. I have multiple people willing to testify that I was in Oregon at the time. But the police have three different RFID reads placing my car in Cleveland at the time. Which one of these has more credibility in a court of law? Which one should have more credibility?
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
...look at stories such as this and worry about the loss of privacy. What makes you think you have any privacy now? I'm not trying to be flippant, but privacy in the US and most of Europe has become an illusion. Your cell phone can or will be able to track you; your use of credit cards tracks you; the fact that you have a social security card (in the US) or a license can be used to track you.
Many of us, myself included, thought that our privacy would be robbed of us by some huge, overbearing government like a thief in the night. But you know what? We gave it up for nothing but convienence and our never-ending desire for newer and better gadgets.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
The UK is really descending into a Big Brother state, with Blunkett trying to get all the draconian measures in he can.
I wonder, if there was a list of steps that a state needed to take to be completely like 1984, how many of these steps the UK government would have taken?
Man arrested at work for sending a text (SMS) with a few "questionable" keywords
I think the government will only be happy when they tax us so much that we can't afford to do wrong, and they can monitor our movements all the time.
I also think the UK wouldn't be so high on the list of targets if we didn't blindly support whatever the US does, which usually seems to anger much of the world.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Over the next few years, there's going to be a huge market for redio jammers to block RFID chips. If I had some money to invest, I would start looking there. Just a thought.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Very true, but you could change your broadcast to another valid car, or change it every 30 seconds, or a number of things (including no broadcast)...
Just wondering, sort of, if I have 3 or 4 nice doggies in the car, all of whom have RFID chips (at least here in the US, it's a nationwide pet recovery ID system) implanted. What are the chances that their 4 numbers will get intermingled with the licence plate ID?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
It's the same discussion as with biometrics.
No solution will cover all bases, I think I don't need to say here that *any* system eventually is broken by someone who tries to get around it. Security systems like this one are not meant to be perfect.
However, that doesn't mean it's useless.
The idea is to make forging or falsification more difficult (as much as possible), and police work easier or faster. Sure, eventually someone will make a false biometric passport, or a false plate. But how many people will do it? how many people will get one? how many people make false plates/get false plates NOW?
If the technology can reduce the numbers significantly (they will never drop completely), then it might be worth using (I'm intentionally leaving privacy issues aside, that's another topic).
It it can *help* policemen get a car thief, the it might be pretty useful. It doesn't have to be admisible as evidence, just give a lead to the cops, like where or who to look for. If, say, 80% of car robbers can't get around these measures, then i'd say it's a pretty good tool to reduce car theft, don t you think?
How many people in the US buy pirated software? how many people know how to get a keygen or a cracked exe or whatever, put it in the right place, etc? maybe a lot, but it's still probably a lot less people than would use pirated software if it was just a matter of plain copying.
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
The obvious difference between breaking the copy protection on DVDs or software and tampering with this tag is that no one is coming to your house and checking your computer for illegal decryption software or software without the proper licenses.
Anyone with the right equipment can and will read the tag on your car, though. If this anyone happens to be the police, they might also check to see if your hacked tag corresponds to the physical description of your car, or perhaps a license plate number (which it won't).
In other words, heavy fines would be a pretty effective deterent because your chances of getting caught messing with the tag (even if successful) are far higher than your chances of getting caught with a copy of DeCSS.
A border crossing is a HELL of a lot different than when you are just driving down the road minding your own business.
Sometimes I think the British government completely missed the message in 1984. They seem to view that bleak future as a goal instead of as a warning.
As draconian as various US laws are, there is one country (these days) that I can always count on to out do us on the big brother front and that is England.
-sirket
You grab the RFID of plates for whatever dumb politicians allowed this to go though, and then replicate them for anyone who feels like taking a quick little spin down the road?
You don't even need the RFID on your plates, in fact it might would better with a seperate RFID responder (RFID is fairly passive, can you send a boosted return signal?).
The safety/privacy concerns of this are staggering. Yes, I can always sit and watch for "license plate X" on the highway, but I'm sure that it wouldn't be hard for a non-governmental person/corp could actively scan plates with a homebrew scanner. Think advertisement, lots of advertisement (as they start to track your movements and where you frequently park your car), or perhaps even stalkers.
Somehow, there is a good side to all this (the RFID and other various tracking/IDing/syping govt goodies).
When a government/organisation relies totaly and fully trusts a computer system to do its work, then, in the end, it gives us more freedom. Computers can be hacked, cracked and controlled by whoever actualy tries hard enough. A real person cannot be so easily fooled.
There are two types of people who criticize technology: those who understand nothing about it but fear it or want to use it to control everything (like the senators who pass stupid laws), and those who make this technology and don't want it to be used against them. Do the math: WE got them by the balls.
The more society will rely on technology, the more freedom we can get. Freedom will be "underground" though...
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
Public transport works, and works well. I don't need a car where I live (london), even though I work miles away from where I live. I just jump on a bus, then change for a train. That takes me clear across London in well under an hour.
You see people driving around on their own in cars, taking up as much room as half a bus (yet half of the bus carries over 30 people, as opposed to just one).
I see motorists as a large source of pollution and wasted space. I think it's absolutely fine to tax motorists. In london especially, there really is no need for a car. Got something to take home? Stick your hand out in the road and climb into the big, shiny black thing that's pulled up within a minute. The taxi driver will know his way to your house better than you will, and you don't have to drive all the way there yourself.
If someone can please explain to me why people feel the need to drive a large, wasteful, polluting machine around already congested roads and not get charged a penny for it, I'm all ears.
Really? When your 128-bit RFID key is registered along with your license plate number in a database that all the police cruisers can access in real time and your license plate comes back with 0xdeadbeef four times in a row with 'YHBT' with the license plate number, you don't think they'd pull you over?
And do you really think you could guess another vehicle's 128-bit RFID code? And do you think you can break a system involving public/private-key crypto with a 128-bit code?
Just because there are a lot of stupid implementations of encryption doesn't necessarily mean that the next one implemented will be broken by some script kiddie in her parents' basement.
And the govt. is in control of maintaining roads. So aside from law enforcement, this data is useful for determining driving habits and how they relate to traffic congestion. This data can be used to determine how to best expand roadways and find methods for alternatives to rlieve congestion, such as carpooling or mass transit. I don't see how privacy is an issue since it's a public road. If you want privacy, you should ask yourself why the govt. is in charge of roads in the first place. At least with private roads, you have the option of choosing roads where companies have policies that don't involve selling your driving habits data.
I know that in the case of vehicles, these types of things are designed to create revenue for the local police departments and whatnot, but honestly, I don't think this will help make the roads any safer. All it will do is force you to mind every little detail of the law, no matter how insignificant, even in situations where it really doesn't make much sense, as in the case of standing at stop signs for 3 seconds when there are clearly no cars around. I do NOT advocate running stop signs, or even just slowing down and then blazing through them. On the contrary, I hate it when people do that. But if you're stopping, and the car is almost at a complete stop, and you can clearly see that there are no cars approaching, and it is perfectly safe, then what difference does it make if you actually come to a halt and wait for three seconds?
The officer who stops you for that should be looking for the reckless driver, late to work, who is weaving between the cars, going twice the speed limit, and so stressed out that he's about to get someone killed. But instead, the officer will wait on some secluded street, where about three cars pass in an hour, because he knows that none of those three cars will make a 100% stop at the stop sign, and then he'll write those drivers tickets. Meanwhile, on the main road, someone is driving drunk on the wrong side of the road. If you've ever wondered why the police are always there when you do something insignificant that is "wrong" but they're not when something truly dangerous is going on? That's why.
So the short version of all that is that I am against putting any kind of tracking technologies in vehicles because first, it will be for convenience, then, it will be for safety, and finally, when nobody is noticing and the technology is widespread and in place, it will be for revenue purposes. Without adding safety.
Just a quick comment, it may be a little offtopic but I think its relevant. For several years here in the US, a large percentage of cars have had a "black box" (just a term, I don't think they are actually black) embedded in your engine. Its purpose has been geared toward use by the insurance companies, it records your speed at the time of a crash. If they were pushing these RFID's to make it easier to give you speeding tickets, why didn't they just broadcast a unique identifier and the speed from each car. Then they wouldn't even have to be stationary to determine your speed. I'm not saying the idea of RFID tags in license plates is good or bad, but the argument that they are being pushed to make speeding tickets easier to give is kind of like saying te internet was created to make identity theft easier. Basically my point is that despite the overwhelming sense of paranoia that has come from this, maybe, just maybe, there are uses here other than tracking YOU all over the country.
The stupidity of your average American is just about the same as the average European, we simply show it off better.
If this is RFID, it's eaasily jammable, as the RFID signal is quite weak.
As a matter of fact, I can't understand how these people are planning to read these things from 160 feet away. Maybe a directional antenna?
On the upside, perhaps these will soon be set up in an automated fashion at measured intervals in the United States. It will become impossible to speed over stretches of highway covered by these. Auto accidents still kill a tremendous number of people annually -- a lot more than "terrorists", whom we in the US have given up a lot more freedoms to combat (and spent more money on) than simply automated license plate reading.
May we never see th
according to the article, the thing needs batteries to work...
remove the battery, no more tracking...
It may be an infraction to have an unreadable licence plate, but that is only because it is trivial for the driver to make sure that the plate is readable.
It NEEDS a battery. Batteries WILL die. The Govt cannot make us verify that the RFID is working without opening it enough so that ANYONE can follow ANYONE ELSE around. See elsewhere why I think that this is a BAD IDEA!
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Driving faster requires a larger following distance, but most people follow way too close at any speed. Simply reducing speed limits will not really make the roads any safer. I don't know what will, except for people taking a more considerate and intelligent approach to driving.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
You should watch Minority Report for a few examples of how this technology could be implemented.
Thinking about the whole personalised advertisements, it's something I doubt I'd be keen on. It's a little like the personalised emails companies send out to customers now based upon previous shopping habbits, and I always make sure they are sent to /dev/null.
One scenario I don't want is to be listening to music when the RFID tag reader from a local "Advertisement Distribution Point" connects to a tag on my Minidisc player pausing my track for 30 seconds while I hear an advert for a certain store.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
That tollway long ago paid for itself [well, the drivers paid for it] but it's interesting to see an old idea crop up in updated form, as it were.
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
Disabling your own tag might single you out for persecution (and prosecution), but doing it to everyone's tag would create a gigantic mess for the perps of this scheme.
The grandparent's use of the slippery slope argument is valid.
The British government is debating bringing in biometric ID cards: it seems logical that if RFID technology proves "useful" to the government in identifying cars, they may also include it in this device, if they are making it anyway.
The later example is speculation, but valid: the widespread acceptance of deeper invasions of privacy is likely to cause complacency. Despite the UK being the most watched (via CCTV in public) of the Western democracies, the introduction of more cameras tends to provoke little public response.
You don't have to get your car inspected in every state....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Suppose they will use RFID to issue speeding tickets. And since RFID as far as I know don't need a power source to be transmitting, would it not be possible that this scenario take place?
You car, on the back of a tow truck being hauled away. This tow truck driver decides to speed through a checkpoint. POW. Your RFID on your car gets tagged as speeding along with the tow truck. A week later, you get your fine without ever having been in your car.
I take your point, but really, the technology to automatically read number plates has been around for years, and is in use at the moment. (For example, the Clyde Tunnel near my house has cameras which are able to tell if your tax disc has run out, and that's just a four inch wide disc on your windscreen. Don't quote me on that, but a friend of mine got nabbed, and claimed he was picked up going through said tunnel).
If surveilance was the aim, I imagine the cost of installing a network of RFID readers (with their inherant short range) would be comparable to the cost of installing cameras all over the place which could read a lot more plates at a greater distance.
My point here is that the technology is fairly limited (in this case) and so the risk to civil liberty is negligible.
If they were asking for GPS systems in every car, *then* I would certainly be worried.
C-x C-s C-x k