Texas Considers Putting RFID Tags in All Cars

An anonymous reader submits "In section 601.507 of Texas HB 2893, the Texas Legislature is considering replacing all vehicle inspection stickers with RFID tags. The legislation also makes provision for the government to use the devices for insurance enforcement. The bill contains limited privacy provisions, but does not seem to exclude other law enforcement usage."

Comments

Remember...

[daveschroeder]

...RFID works only at a very close range. The tags themselves are powered by the radio transceivers that in turn detect them, making their range, by nature, very limited. This isn't a global universal tracking mechanism.

It's a unique vehicle identifier that can be deciphered using the electromagnetic spectrum, similar to the way human eyes or a tollbooth camera might use visible light to view a license plate, another unique vehicle identifier.

Texas is planning on using it for automated vehicle registration and toll booths (relevant bill excerpt below).

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable use of technology to me. Are we to now fear any new legislation that doesn't specifically and explicitly "exclude [...] law enforcement usage", even if utterly irrelevant?

This may sound trite, but:

RFID != bad

Anything - including a license plate or an old fashioned inspection sticker - can be abused for illegitimate purposes or to abridge someone's privacy. And keep in mind that "illegitimate purposes" is awfully subjective. But trampling - or spreading FUD about - technology is not the answer.

Relevant section:

Sec. 601.507. SPECIAL INSPECTION CERTIFICATES.
(a) Commencing not later than January 1, 2006, the department shall
issue or contract for the issuance of special inspection
certificates to be affixed to motor vehicles that are inspected and
found to be in proper and safe condition under Chapter 548.
(b) An inspection certificate under this section must
contain a tamper-resistant transponder, and at a minimum, be
capable of storing:
(1) the transponder's unique identification number;
and
(2) the make, model, and vehicle identification number
of the vehicle to which the certificate is affixed.
(c) In addition, the transponder must be compatible with:
(1) the automated vehicle registration and
certificate of title system established by the Texas Department of
Transportation; and
(2) interoperability standards established by the
Texas Department of Transportation and other entities for use of
the system of toll roads and toll facilities in this state.

Re:Remember...

[B'Trey]

It works at a range sufficient to work in toll booths. What's to prevent the state from putting up a reader on the street corner? On every street corner? On every mile marker sign on the highway?

Why would they want to do that? Well, how about crime fighting, to start? If a house is broken into, they have an instant record of every car that's been into the neighborhood. How about speeding tickets? If you go from one mile marker to the next in less than 60 seconds, you're going more than 60 miles per hour.

But, even if it might help catch a few burglers, do you really want the state tracking every location where you drive your vehicle?

Re:Remember...

[daveschroeder]

The funny thing is, I actually included a sarcastic disclaimer on the topic you refer to, but I thought the excerpt was clear cut enough to stave off any absurd police state fantasies.

Anyone committing a crime can remove the inspection sticker if they wish, just as they might remove their plates. What's to prevent the state from putting up cameras on the street corner? On ever street corner? On every mile marker sign on the highway? (Cue "they already are in some cities!!" response.)

I guess if you inherently distrust all government, law enforcement, and authority, and don't want them doing anything or using any technology to make their work easier (why not have them wear blinders as they walk around, too? After all, they might see something...) then your response will be predictable.

Sane persons will see Texas' proposal to use it for automated vehicle registration and tollbooths as exactly what it is.

Re:Remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

..RFID works only at a very close range. The tags themselves are powered by the radio transceivers that in turn detect them, making their range, by nature, very limited. This isn't a global universal tracking mechanism.

There are, in fact, RFID tags that contain their own power source. They're called "active tags", and a good example are the toll collection tags that many people use to speed their way through toll booths. These tags can be read at some distance and at speed (in NJ, you can drive through at upwards of 60mph.) I don't know if the stickers being proposed here will contain their own power source-- if not, then they're really not much of a threat. But it's only a matter of time before states begin to issue active RFID tags in license plates or elsewhere. It's simply too useful as a tracking and enforcement mechanism.

Ultimately, I think preventing that is going to be a fools' errand. Most law-abiding citizens don't even understand why you might not want law-enforcement tracking you en masse, and it doesn't seem likely to change in a hurry. One thing at least we can do, though, is ensure that other people can't piggyback onto the system and track you as well. Since most RFID tags offer no privacy or security protection at all, there is a lot that can be done in this area.

Re:Remember...

[EEBaum]

Anyone committing a crime can remove the inspection sticker if they wish, just as they might remove their plates.

Indeed. And in this case they would track and detain all vehicles in the area EXCEPT the one they're actually looking for. Sounds like a great system, no?

Re:Remember...

[daveschroeder]

The RFID tech is relevant because the RFID industry is lobbying these lying politicians to buy their products, with private promises of easy privacy invasion, and public lies.

You really think that's literally what's going on? That politicians are just licking their lips at the prospect of dismantling everyone's privacy, and the first thing on Texas' minds is abusing this tool, and the tollbooth business is just a charade? And do you honestly think that these backroom deals you envision include sleazy promises of how easy it will be to endlessly abridge the privacy of the working class (thereby solidifying their power structure, of course)?

That's an awfully sad view of the world.

The RFID technology itself is hardly relevant. Any other identification mechanism can be abused.

Re:Remember...

[NanoGator]

"The privacy implications are mind boggling...."

I wonder what Slashdot would have said if it had been around for the invention of the license plate.

Re:Remember...

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> On every mile marker sign on the highway?

that's the only problem I have with this really. It would be so easy to turn into a cash cow

Imagine this for a minute:
An RFID tag in your car gets read at mile-marker 100.
It gets read again at mile-marker 101 57 seconds later.

elapsed time against known distance==speeding ticket in the mail...

Re:Remember...

[Waffle Iron]

Do police or government have any role in a society based on rule of law?

Yes, they do. But the role they have does not include automatically tracking and logging the movements of ordinary citizens going about their daily lives.

Re:Remember...

[Waffle Iron]

because "tracking" is not even the use of the system!

And your SSN was originally designed as a convenience to help make sure that you get your share of some government handouts.

Since things never expand beyond their original purported purpose, surely you'd have no qualms about posting your SSN here.

Re:Remember...

[Anonvmous Coward]

"I wonder what Slashdot would have said if it had been around for the invention of the license plate. "

One would complain that this is an attempt by Ford to maintain it's evil monopoly by providing the only cars that have a license plate holder.

Another would write a mini sci-fi story about how the big bad gov't would use this to track where individuals go even though it's laughable to think that the gov't is competent enough to manage that much info.

Yet another would get a +5 Insightful for claiming that license plates wouldn't do any good because people would cover them up.

And yet another would shoot right up to +5 for claiming that it would affect gas mileage.

And yet another would

Re:Remember...

[bnenning]

Nobody's talking about constant state monitoring of your vehicle's position. Where in the bill does it say that? Yes, I guess they could, in theory, track your vehicle's location, but they're not doing that.

And the income tax was originally 3%, and those who warned it might one day reach 10% were told they were paranoid. And your Social Security number was never to be used for identification purposes. The slippery slope is not always a fallacy.

Re:Remember...

[homer_ca]

How close is close range? Walk up with a handheld scanner? Section (c)(2) talks about toll roads, so it would be reasonable to guess it has the same performance as a toll road transponder. Those things can be read from the side of the road while you drive by at 70mph. That doesn't sound like close range to me, so excuse us if we don't find your assurances of nothing to worry about very assuring.

Re:Remember...

[R.Caley]

if they [enforced the speed limit], there would be a rebellion,

The middle classes hate the idea that they might be subject to the law. The way things are donw at the moment is designed to allow the police to enforce the law only on people they choose. Try being a young black man in an expensive car and see how far abovethe speed limit they will let you get away with.

immense lost productivity due to the traffic slow down.

No need for any traffic slow down/ Set the speed limit at just above a sane speed for the road and enforce it rigorously. everyone wins except the idiots and corrupt police officers.

You've already got "RFID"

[Sheetrock]

Your license plate.

This takes very little away, but think about what it might add: the ability to pay for tolls, gas, or parking meters without swiping a card. You have to admit that'd be pretty cool.

Re:You've already got "RFID"

[rebeka thomas]

> This takes very little away, but think about what it might add:
> the ability to pay for tolls, gas, or parking meters without
> swiping a card.

Cool. So when a thief takes off with my car, they pay for gas, pay for tolls, pay to park, all under my account. When the car is discovered burnt out & dumped, there's no trail going back through the thief's finances to see who paid for gas in my now useless burnt out car.

Cool.

Re:/me microwaves sticker

[wowbagger]

"Very well. Here's your ticket for failing to have proper vehicle registration - you can show up for court on a week from Thursday if you want to try to fight it, or you can pay the $100 fine. Either way, you will need to get a new registration tag within three business days for $50, and show up at a vehicle inspection station to get it checked out - failure to comply will cause your driver's license to be revoked.

Now, about your driver's license - you need to get THAT replaced within three business days as well - you'll need to go down to the DMV for that, and it will cost you $35.

Good day, drive safely, buckle up, and, uhhh, try to avoid those "stray electromagnetic fields" in the future, sir."

Re:Hmm, this presents a bit of a problem...

[EEBaum]

Does anyone have a really big microwave oven I could put my car in for a few minutes?

Surely the microwave would only damage the RFID tag.

A few points that need clarification:

[Pig Hogger]

• Driving is NOT a right, but a PRIVILEGE.
• Privileges can be revoked if you abuse them.
• People driving on PUBLIC roads have absolutely, positively NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY.
• The thousand of lifes lost to careless and/or stupid drivers most definitely warrant that public authorities to the utmost to increase road safety.
• Rules of the road are implemented to maximize road safety. Including a 50 km/h speed limit on a 10 lane-wide ultrastraight strip mall at two in the morning on a clear night with no other traffic.
• Police find ticketing drivers a demeaning task, so they will only do it when pushed or shoved.
• Therefore, it is only logical that the State implements automatic means of enforcing road rules, such as red-light cameras, radar cameras; tracking vehicle position can also be used to punish speeding.
• The next logical step would be a black-box that also records what the driver has seen.
• That black box can be used to exactly determine the blame for road accidents, thus darwinizing bad drivers out of the roads.
• With all the above said, there is nothing wrong, illegal, immoral and unethical to have the black boxes used to automatically ticket bad drivers. Aircraft have been thusly monitored for generations; if it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander.

Re:A few points that need clarification:

[YrWrstNtmr]

Driving is NOT a right, but a PRIVILEGE.

Agreed. Totally.

With all the above said, there is nothing wrong, illegal, immoral and unethical to have the black boxes used to automatically ticket bad drivers.

"The black box says you crossed the solid yellow line in a residential area. $150 fine"
"But I was avoiding a little kid chasing a ball!"
"Too bad. Prove it."

In the city I live in, they are getting ready to put in a bunch of red light and speeding cameras. You know what the most reported effect of this will be? "The city will get approx. $X.X million per year in revenue." Not the safety aspect, not reducing speeding. Money. Now...this is partially the fault of the news reporting agencies, but I have heard little else besides the money aspect.

Re:A few points that need clarification:

[Kingstrum]

Hmmm, where to begin...

* Driving, per say, isn't a right; however, freedom to travel without producing papers is. Read up on the actual law for a "driver's license"...it's not as bad as the conspiracy nuts make it out to be, but it's not what you think it is either. Much like the "opt-out Social Security System" that seems to be pretty darn mandatory.

* Driving on public roads doesn't automagically negate your rights...especially when "We the People" are "The Public" and paid for those roads.

* We apparently have different definitions of "public safety". Preserving such safety does not warranty *ANY ONE* to violate said rights. Hence, the cops not being able to roust you on the road just because you're on it ("Sir, we pulled you over because we don't like your face."). Personally, I'm all for such things as "Kill someone while DUI, get a bullet on the spot", but I'm a capricious bastard that way.

* Rules of the road are implemented as any other civil rule of law: by whomever is in power at the time for whatever gain they may get from it (including, but not limited to, personal sexual gratification from knowing they can make others do what they want.) We had 55MPH held over from the '70s to appease the MADD loonies instead of something based on actual science and current socio-political circumstances.

* Some police find it a demeaning task; others fall into the above catagory of power-trippers.

* So basically you'll be all for writing automatic tickets when you pass a given 1/4 mile stretch randomly chosen by the state? No appeal, no ability to explain that you were going 8MPH over the posted limit to get around a dangerous driver? These days Big Brother gets just as much of a whacking as Nazis, but it really does push to a very scary future, don't you think?

* Under no legal standard that I'm aware of is anyone required to be a mobile snitch for the law. For other victims of American Education who didn't bother to get better informed later: our system of law is *POSTSCRIPTIVE* not *PRESCRIPTIVE*. "Innocent until proven guilty" means "do whatever you like, but if we catch you, your ass is grass". Much like the Ten Commandments, you're free to be an asshole, but you can't whine later that you didn't know there was a punishment for getting caught.

* Planes are a lot different from cars. My car can't wind up in your living room unless there's a road nearby. My plane can destroy your remote log cabin and you'd never know it until someone contacted you. The ability to cause harm is much more limited and requirements for operation are way lower for a car. Applying a blanket standard for wildly different things is rather silly and, well, unsafe for the public, eh?

Time to stop pandering to the narrow-minded nimrod special interests and actually excercise some Freedom for a change.

Kingstrum

"He had that rare weird electricity about him -- that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandon all hope of ever behaving 'normally.'"
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"

it's just a license plate

[bombastinator]

All this really does, assuming they don't add annoying additional data, is make a license plate readable by machines. Heck they could even attach it to the license plate tags for convenience. Make distribution easier.

It's the access, not the medium

[gidds]

Well, yes...

But IMO the issue isn't really electronic vs visual ID. The issue is electronic vs human reading of that ID.

Up till relatively recently, a numberplate could be read by any human, but not by an automated machine. So it could be easily checked when really necessary (e.g. when stopped by the police, when photographed leaving a petrol station without paying, when photographed by a speeding camera, &c). But it wasn't checked as a matter of routine.

Now, though, there are machines which can look at a numberplate and automatically recognise the vehicle ID. And there are RFID chips which can be automatically read by machine. Both of these have a similar effect: car IDs can be read as a matter of course, and checked against whatever information they want to.

Arguably, when used to stop cars which have no tax or insurance, that could be beneficial. But would you want your husband/wife to be able to subpoena records of all your movements in a divorce case, say? ("You claimed to have been working late at the office, but your car was recorded as having driven to your girlfriend's house at 5.27pm that evening!") And if the system is widely used, how easy might it be for people to gain unauthorised access? You have only to look at any detective novel to see how people can have good, legitimate reasons for wanting to conceal their movements. And it'd be a gift for stalkers and paparazzi...

Here in the UK, we already have automated numberplate recognition, not just for speed cameras and red-light cameras, but also for the recognising cars entering the London congestion zone, and sending out appropriate bills. (And I gather there's a good number of people who were billed incorrectly...) There's also a new type of speed camera, which recognises your numberplate as you pass fixed locations on motorways, and issues a speeding ticket if your average speed between two such points exceeds the limit. (Which is fair, but worrying for the privacy implications.)

So yes, I agree with your conclusion that RFID doesn't seem to have any intrinsic dangers over and above those which are here already...

An example of possible abuse

[gzearfoss]

Personally, I think the idea is good, though it has potential for abuse.
Once such example could be automated issuing of speeding tickets. There are some towns and villages that people know to be speed traps. Two examples of these from the news are New Rome and Macks Creek. I can picture a small town or village like one of these places investing in a pair of readers. Install them on the local highway, and calculate how much time a car should take to travel between these points. If a vehicle goes faster than this, it must be speeding. Use the database to find the driver's address, and send them a ticket. The bill does allow local law enforcement to access the database in Section 601.501 b.

As abusive as this may sound, though, it's nothing that couldn't be done with tracking license plates.

So?

[UserGoogol]

Legal code reads like Perl to me, so I'm not really sure how much information they're planning on the chips, but how would this be any different with the current system: where every car is required to have a metal plate which projects an ID code and information on when the car was last inspected over the visual spectrum?

I can understand the need for privacy, but when the information is already out there, it seems silly to get excited about something like this.

Many Houston Drivers Already have RFID

[jefftp]

The Harris County Tollroad Authority already uses RFID tags (call EZ Tags) to pay for tolls. Recently, the Houston and Dallas toll systems were integrated so drivers from one city could pay for tolls in the other city with their RFID tag.

The tags could be easily abused to monitor speeding, but they are not. Real-time traffic maps are generated from the travel speed data:

http://www.houstontranstar.org/

Metallic Windshield Tint?

[ArticleI]

Are we talking windshield or license plate stickers here? Because with EZ-Pass certain cars with metal-oxide window tinting have to get an exterior tag to place by their license plate instead of behind the windshield. Would this metallic tint also block the RFID signals?

Big Brother Alert: Loop detectors

[pair-a-noyd]

I've installed "vehicle loop detectors" inground for traffic control, security, etc..

They are everywhere. At most intersections you will see diamonds cut in the concrete and covered with tar and a line from the diamond that runs to the curb, usually headed towards a big silver box that operates the traffic lights.

When a car passes over the loop the magnetic field changes and the system knows a car went over. Not only can it count cars, it can tell the size of the vehicle (motorcycle v. car v. truck) and estimate the speed and direction. This is usually to help control traffic lights so that the light doesn't sit on red when there are no cars there. It also is used in apartments and mini-storage areas to let cars out and shut the gate behind the car to prevent tailgaters from sneaking in.

This loop can also act as a receiving antenna and it would be a very, very simple matter to have these loops "light up" the RFID chips and read them, then the equipment could pass the data upstream to what ever EVIL BIG BROTHER system you want (or don't want) to imagine.

This is BAD... My suggestion? If this passes, you should destroy the chips. A couple hundred thousand volts should do it. A $30 stun gun should fry these nasty little bastards.

Texas WILL pass this. I know how they work, Texas is very much into being a BIG BROTHER state.. They are wanking off at the thought of this right now..

Wrong

[Safety Cap]

Yes, I guess they could, in theory, track your vehicle's location, but they're not doing that.

In Houston, EACH AND EVERY car that has a transponder is tracked when it is on the freeway.

The point was that the transponders were originally sold as a way to auto-pay on the toll roads, not as a tracking device for anything else.

Now that "mission creep" has happened, as with so many other government programs, it would be trivial for local law enforcement to track any "EZ Tag"-equipped car for any reason, or no reason at all. Want to fill the city coffers? Start auto-generating tickets for any vehicle that exceeds the speed limit.

I guess while you were not looking, they went and took another of your "rights." Enjoy those you have left.

Re:Speed traps a thing of the past

[erroneus]

When the choice is (a) legal infraction or (b) survival, I think I'll choose legal infraction as would you. The fact is, you too would choose to survive and risk being caught... or am I assuming you'd rather just give up and die or be homeless. As it is, there are times when there are no alternatives. I take it you've never seen days like that so you simply wouldn't understand.