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NYC Is Tracking RFID Toll Collection Tags All Over the City
In the northeast U.S., most of the tolls people encounter when driving make use of a system called E-ZPass to let them pay the tolls electronically. Drivers are given small RFID transponders that are scanned in tollbooths, at which point the toll is automatically deducted from a pre-paid account. One hacker got curious whether the RFID tags were being scanned elsewhere, so he tweaked his E-ZPass to blink a light and make a noise every time it was read. He tested the streets of New York City, and wasn't surprised to see it light up in plenty of places where there were no tollbooths to be found. From the article:
"It’s part of Midtown in Motion, an initiative to feed information from lots of sensors into New York’s traffic management center. A spokesperson for the New York Department of Transportation, Scott Gastel, says the E-Z Pass readers are on highways across the city, and on streets in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and have been in use for years. The city uses the data from the readers to provide real-time traffic information, as for this tool. The DoT was not forthcoming about what exactly was read from the passes or how long geolocation information from the passes was kept. Notably, the fact that E-ZPasses will be used as a tracking device outside of toll payment, is not disclosed anywhere that I could see in the terms and conditions. When I talked to the E-ZPass Inter-agency Group — the umbrella association that oversees the use of the pay-toll-paying tags in 15 different states — it said New York is the only state that is employing this inventive re-use of the tags. ... 'If NYDOT can put up readers, says [the hacker], 'other agencies could as well.'"
Do a lot of tracking of everything a person does and only come clean when someone calls 'em out...
I hope this "hacker" is anonymous... Otherwise he's headed for a jail cell...
It used to be okay to point out when your government was being shady...
Not anymore!!
Yay!
Welcome to 1984!
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
...when you put a RF transponder in your car with identifying details unique to you?
I have a tupperware bin in my car lined with foil that I leave my Fastrak (Bay Area equivalent) in, and I pop the lid whenever I pay the bridge crossing. They know when and where I commute to work (they'd actually know that anyway because of the bridge cameras), but I won't make it that easy for them anywhere else.
I've heard from the truckers that use it the weigh stations have scanners for the GoodToGo car passes. This might sound innocent (ie. you know when a truck is passing a weigh station), but that isn't listed anywhere in the terms. I wouldn't be surprised if they are scanned in many more places.
Does it also chart the size of the soda in your cup holder?
This kind of thing isn't even a surprise anymore. Something I learned as a kid: "You pay for convenience" It's just that today you're paying with more than just your wallet.
CalTrans does the same thing with FasTrak tags in California
I'm still pissed I was labeled a troll when I mentioned that there was no privacy in the US. And since then 1/4 of all news stories have been about how we have so much less privacy than anyone thought.
Want to discuss wireless tire pressure gauges in your tires, how 4 somewhat constant numbers (or at least predictable changes) can be read from sensors in the road, and have been on cars for 10+ years? I know, another conspiracy theory.
For every 4 surveillance things you know about, there are 100 others you don't, half of which have been used somewhere sometime.
So give up on the privacy whining. You don't have and will never get it back. And the biggest point, WTF do you care for? You think anyone cares you are butt fucking your same sex roommate? Society doesn't care anymore. The poeple who will use that info against you will find out some other way. The only dumbasses who care about privacy are the ones doing something they know to be illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous. I bet Castro was a privacy advocate.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
In NJ, buried in the fine print, is a line that reads something like "other information may be obtained by the the Consortium at their discretion", which easily translates to: "We're going to use this to monitor traffic flow, and by doing that, we're monitoring you".
If you're driving on the Parkway (a New Jersey toll highway), there are plenty of places where you can see EZPass pickups buried in the road surface that are nowhere near the toll sites.
Chris Knight is my hero.
Time to put your transponder into a flip-lid Faraday Cage that springs open only when you require it, then closes by default.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
They also use the data for Traffic information purposes, but only on the tollroads. That is how they get all the travel time information for the traffic signs on the toll road. They have several data collection locations that are not used for tolling at all, but only at the ends of the tollways not covered by toll booths. To my knowledge, the data isnt kept longer than the time required to traverse the tollway.
Note: Anything using EZ-Pass tags will contain a tag identity number, the agency that issued the tag, and potential, a weight or vehicle size class, with the number of axles of the vehicle. Nothing in the tag itself, identifies the vehicle it is in, or any account holder information, That is up to the agencies to maintain.
I have never kept my FasTrak (our version of EZPass) stuck to the windshield. It lives in its mylar foil bag in the center console until I’m approaching a toll. Besides, people will break a window and steal it. It can’t be linked to a different vehicle, at least not without me setting that up, so it’s pretty much worthless to anyone else, but crackheads don’t know that.
It's called a license plate. With technology that allows license plates to be read by cameras, any government organization could track the movements of every vehicle everywhere in their jurisdiction. Don't think you can't be tracked because you don't have an RFID tag in your vehicle.
They are probably tracking people to find another good spot to setup a toll booth
they want to tell you what to eat and drink, what doctor to go to, and even who your neighbors should be
It's a tactical mistake borne of hubris. When the RFID chips came out, people were paranoid they'd be use to track instead of ease on off congestion in toll roads as advertised. Officialdom trotted out the usual assurances. Now they're using them to track cars.. (as if they can't already do that through other means).
The long term effect is to breed distrust of government and technology. To induce a cynical turn of mind .
Seeing as 99% of security relies on public buy in , cooperation, the feeling of a shared purpose and identity and absent those things or if those things are greatly degraded, we have no effective security, this has to be seen as a big security blunder.
Tricking, coercing, forcing, sneaking by people what's needed for security is a bad idea. It was a bad idea when the NSA started doing it whether they were getting away with it or not. It's a bad idea wherever it goes. It works against security in a million ways none of which anyone can control.
The way to security buy in is through more openness, more sharing of the problems and threats we face and above all the verifiable protection of our civil liberties against the abuses which inevitably occur when identity and details of people's private lives are exposed for examination by the state.
You have to firewall international (or national) terrorism from all other concerns. You cannot use this information to, say catch drug dealers or common murders. Neither can you over-define what terrorism IS. Copyright violations aren't terrorism and neither are the activities of organized crime. Mainstream , even violent political protestors aren't terrorists and neither are the Tea Party or anarchists. That's called- regular life, normal criminal deviance that is NOT terroristic; the goal is not to undo Western civilization.
Deniers are of course not terrorists, despite my hyperbolic moniker.
Because that IS a slippery slope and what will happen is there will grow widespread, covert, person to person rebellion ande non-cooperation, subversion and ultimate undermining of security.
People don't want to live in Stasiland, whatever benefits there are to living in Stasiland and it' takes not very much to get people to thinking that they are living in Stasiland.
I am to the right of most people on this forum, (yesterday's rating drubbing) which is to say in the middle of the political spectrum. Even I am creeped out by some of the things that have been going on. It's human nature to abuse power in ways that lead to undue influence by the power wielders and then on to a kind of defacto fascism. That's not a political perspective, that's a historical and psychological fact and moreover instinctive knowledge. It is not possible to talk your way around instinctive knowledge.
http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/build-your-own-faraday-cage-heres-how/
Since the law was passed that cars need to have airpressure sensors, your tires now help to track you. Don't think that not having a EZ-pass is making you safe.
Yeah, and a sample license plate tracker comes with openCV these days. Takes about 20 minutes to put together a tracker that observes all visitors to the adult movie booth place down the street, and another hour or two in front of the government offices to associate license plates with bureaucrats. You know what they say, "information is power."
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
everyone complains how government is so dumb in how they build out the wrong infrastructure in the wrong place
and when they try to study things for future build outs its suddenly a huge violation of privacy
The reference to 1984 correlates the political disposition of the state of NY (and NYC in particular). A dogma of leftist political ideology that the state Is Good For You(TM) to the point that you shouldn't want anything BUT the state to intervene in your life. So it is not surprising that a state dominated by Left-Liberal politics is taking a lead in using tracking technology to find out how its happy masses are managing their lives -- and to keep them happy by doing so.
...Not sure if this was just Science Fiction, but how hard would it be to clone an EZ pass off a random stranger and then reprogram a second random stranger's pass with said data?
I mean, if you have an RFID chip, wouldn't it be detecting that it's being read whenever it passes near *ANY* scanner, whether or not the people who operate the scanner are actually even interested in that RFID? All someone else would know, in general, is that the RFID isn't one that they are trying to track, and I'd imagine at *MOST* they may be able to know which company was tracking that RFID (although I'm not even sure they could do that). And even then, without access to the other company's database of users they would have no way to know who it was who had that RFID or any other personal information.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Are you implying that this makes it right?
Microchips in people will be the next step, this way your injectable bio chip would eliminate the need for cash, the need for ID or the reason for having to carry a wallet. Crime would disappear. Identity theft would go away. No need for EZ Passes as a reader would be able to read your bio chip. Everything in your chip would be tied to your bank account and the government's central database. You will be tracked by a government database and by local and national 'security' agencies for your protection and for the overall good order of society. If East Germany still existed today, this is the system they would be using.
As others have mentioned, if gubmint wanted to track you, they'd use your license plate because everybody has to have one of those whereas these toll passes are optional... In my city (Calgary, Alberta) the municipal government uses bluetooth ID's to track phones/cars as they travel down the roads to generate traffic information. We have handy signs that report the expected time to various exits. I've found it handy because I know about how long it should usually take to a specific exit and if the reported time is wildly different, I can choose to exit sooner and take an alternate route...
I suppose I could surmise that the municipal government has some way to tie my cellphone to my name and is tracking me... But I think it largely improbable and I can always turn off my bluetooth if I'm doing something nefarious just as NYCers can put their tags in a metal box.
I would like to see regular citizen's have license plate scanners installed on their cars like many police vehicles already have, only specifically looking for license plates associated with the police. With enough people doing it and uploading to a central database we could have a real-time update of where police cars are located and maybe integrated with google maps in an app. Watch the watchers.
government organizations do track the movements of every vehicle everywhere in and out of their jurisdiction
Fixed that for you.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
everyone complains how government is so dumb in how they build out the wrong infrastructure in the wrong place
and when they try to study things for future build outs its suddenly a huge violation of privacy
You(and many others) are quick to suggest that people are being paranoid/ridiculous/stupid for fearing this type of tracking. But the fact of the matter is that the privacy advocates have been railing against these tracking technologies from their inception, for fear of abuse/misuse. Repeatedly the proponents, government, and people like you have shouted them down saying that these technologies will only be used for this specific purpose or that and that they'll be protected against misuse. But, here we have yet another story of the tracking technology being used for unintended purposes without disclosure and when specific requests ofr information are made, they are ignored.
Yet, despite all this you still suggest that it is somehow inappropriate for people to be concerned about misuse, demand accountability from their government, or simply maintain their privacy.
Specific to your traffic analysis assertion, it is no more difficult nor less accurate for the traffic department to use good old fashioned counters for their analysis as has been done for decades. There's no need for them to use individually identifiable tracking information, nor is it easier/less expensive/etc. This is yet another case of overreach that will be used against the citizenry and the fact that you lack vision doesn't invalidate those concerns.
Here are a couple of likely possibilities for you to consider:
1. The tracking program is a trial run to test the effectiveness of the devices for implementing a Londonesque traffic congestion charge, where they charge YOU a fine/fee for driving into a district.
2. It allows the government to maintain a detailed history of your activities and travel for their convenience and later use against you. This is especially prescient in light of NYC's unconstitutional stop and frisk policies.
In Florida, we have a toll transponder system too. Recently waves of notices have been going out that the older style transponders are being deprecated for newer ones. I always thought that was kind of silly because the new style transponders are currently compatible with the existing system just like old ones are, so it's not really a "protocol" type change (I'm a software guy, not an EE, so there is likely some RFID stuff I don't know about).
The biggest change? The older transponders would beep when scanned, the newer ones no longer have that functionality. Sounds like perpetual tracking is coming to my state.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I only take it out to go through the tolls.
The rest of the time it's in the console glove box.
And yes, I've confirmed that that's sufficiently far enough from the window to not get double charged when I opt to pay cash at, e.g. a NY toll booth that does double duty as both manned and E-Zpass.
1974
Not at all. I just think it's important that people understand that they can be and most likely are being tracked regardless of whether they have an RFID in their vehicle. I think it's likely a losing effort to try and thwart government privacy invasion by avoiding technology. Things like license plate scanners, face recognition, drones, backdoors to hardware, backdoors to service providers, etc. make it really difficult to pratically avoid detection and tracking. It seems like it would be better to change the mindset (and legal precedent) that makes the governement think that it is okay to track us. That might be even less practical, but it's the avenue I would prefer to pursue.
why is there any expectation of privacy when driving on public roads? do you get equally offended when your face is captured on a security camera (used nearly EVERYWHERE)?
Right here in this public press release from 2011
Cameras, Microwave Motion Sensors and E-ZPass Readers Provide Real-Time Information Used in Wireless Adjustments to Traffic Signals
http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/menuitem.c0935b9a57bb4ef3daf2f1c701c789a0/index.jsp?pageID=mayor_press_release&catID=1194&doc_name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyc.gov%2Fhtml%2Fom%2Fhtml%2F2011b%2Fpr257-11.html&cc=unused1978&rc=1194&ndi=1
In the conditions of your contract you gave up a specified amount of privacy (your time/location information at toll booths) in exchange for the consideration of the convenience the service provides. They have now taken more privacy than you willingly gave up, providing more value for themselves than the contract gave them, and have provided no further consideration to you.
Classic example of "Give government a tool, and it will be abused."
If it wasn't EZ-Pass, it would be something else. Your car was sold to you with 4 RFID transponders.
TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitoring System)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tire-pressure_monitoring_system
Ever wonder how your car knows when the tire pressure is low? RFID is used to convey this information from each tire to the vehicle. Mandated in US since 2007. In Nov 2014, all new cars sold in EU must have it as well.
The threat of tracking has been known for a while:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/tracking_automo.html
http://www.cse.sc.edu/~wyxu/papers/TPMSUsenix.pdf
The second item suggests a working distance of 9m (31 feet), but had examples working at 40m (130 feet).
Even active tracking, where a tracking system prompts the TPMS chip to reply, is hard to identify because the car is interrogating the tires periodically. Worse than that is that passive listening of the comm between car and tire is easily done (although the polling rate is only about every 60 seconds).
I haven't heard of any commercial systems exploiting this. Instead, there has been more going on involving tracking the location of cell phones:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/metro-vancouver-project-monitors-private-cellphones-to-track-traffic-jams/article13756279/
Apparently Vancouver is doing this already - again for traffic management.
Traffic counters like the Traf-O-Data? :)
Playing devil's advocate here, knowing the specific flow of multiple vehicles can help with more specifics of popular routes. Using the across-the-road counters won't do that, and snow plows rip them up, so you can't reliably use them for 1/4 of a year.
I don't know about NYC, but at least outside of Boston, the general trend for road planning isn't for throughput but for traffic-causing "traffic calming" measures, designed to make driving slower and push people to mass transit.
All cars both old and new should be retrofitted with RFID tags that broadcast far enough to allow constant monitoring, you speed you get a chime warning you, if you don't slow, a moment later you get a electronic ticket attached to your RFID number, you park incorrectly, you get a chime, moments later you are electronically ticketed and a tow truck is called.
Face reality, the majority of people out there aren't even as smart as my dog and I don't let my dog drive. The only way these ignorant masses learn is when it hurts, you can not reason with them, you can't legislate stupid away, you can not expect or hope "They will make the right decision" they are dumb animals pushing tons of metal with their irrational egos, you have to hurt them by taking their money, yeah I said that, and who ever thought flying cars were a good idea was a sociopathic moron.
The reason I'm behind this is simple, a car is a form of transportation, it isn't your living room, the road does not belong to you simply because your car is sitting on it, and that is the attitude I see in so many drivers.
The ideal World would not allow the average citizen to manipulate a +ton vehicle with only minimal licensing and testing, the ideal World would realize the absurdity of this idea.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
eventually it will be illegal to drive without EZPass, and you will be billed for driving all over the place. All roads will be toll roads.
We already are billed for driving all over the place. It's called taxes and it requires no special equipment for your car.
I'll take an extra one to put my head in!
Makes putting my passport in some sort of signal-baffling enclosure feel a bit less paranoid.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
This is already used all over the country via traffic cams. Even petty repo men can access this information to find cars that are behind on payments.
There are EZ Tag readers on all the freeways in Houston, and have been for years, to track traffic congestion. Compaq Computer (remember them?) used readers to scan EZ Tags to track who came and went from their headquarters, well before they merged with HP. The Houston airport system, for a while, allowed EZ Tag customers to pay for parking using their EZ Tag.
It could be worse! They COULD use the GPS on your phone to track your every move, to find out who you are with and where you go, even when you aren't in your car. Oh but wait, they already do that!
One need only look at key intersections to see the same 'reader' apparatus as seen in the toll plazas.
When this was rolled out, we were assured the data were anonymized - by stripping most of the serial number, I believe. The goal was to better understand traffic patterns.
So far, I haven't heard of any cases where positioning data from those was used as evidence one way or the other.
I'm still pissed I was labeled a troll when I mentioned that there was no privacy in the US.
No, I'd bet cash money that's not what you were modded Troll for.
So give up on the privacy whining. You don't have and will never get it back. And the biggest point, WTF do you care for? You think anyone cares you are butt fucking your same sex roommate? Society doesn't care anymore. The poeple who will use that info against you will find out some other way. The only dumbasses who care about privacy are the ones doing something they know to be illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous. I bet Castro was a privacy advocate.
I'd bet it was this sort of nonsense you got modded Troll for. In a single paragraph, you are hostile & insulting, highly opinionated, dismissive of people with differing opinions or lifestyles, and just flat out wrong on details. You call an opinion other than your own "whining" and tell people to just give up and accept things the way you see them. The Castro thing is just random. Like you wanted to toss in a "you're all as bad as Hitler" comment but were afraid of being called out for Godwin's Law. The sig in which you pat yourself on the back for how "compelling" your own arguments are is also a point against you.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Seriously, I would have been surprised if it would have been otherwise, but suit yourself in your capitalist police state across the atlantic.
This is how we mount our EZ-Pass transponders. You can even request new ones for free from your EZ-Pass online account.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
...I keep my device in a part of the car that can't be read. and I take it out only when I get onto the toll road.
It was obvious from day one, data-collection was at least a secondary objective. Nominally the system is owned by a private company(ies), but with the government-enforced monopoly we get the worst of both worlds — a business' normal desire for profit, with government-style absence of competition.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is, as Binky says, old news. It has come up in
2005 - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144771&cid=12124437
2002 - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=37712&cid=4041961
2003 - http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53299&cid=5272198
and probably a bunch of other times, too.
Actually, it might be useful for long-term traffic planning.
Traffic-counter. You know that 300 people come in from A, 400 people come in from B, and 300 people come in from C
Also, 500 people go off at D, and another 500 at E.
So you know where there's traffic, but you don't know how to direct it.
However, if you knew that most people come in at B and exit at E, while A and C generally exit at D, you might be able to improve traffic conditions by building more direct routes for traffic between B and E.
It's a good thing this "hacker" kept his name out of it. The NYPD would be arresting him on a trumped up "hacking" or "terrorism" charge.
From the Terms and Conditions:
"You expressly understand that the Authority and other Facilities monitor the use of the transponder for the purpose of toll collection, traffic monitoring and detecting violations of this Agreement."
Have fun associating those licence plates with bureaucrats, they figured out this ploy and used "terrorism" as a rational to shield them from discovery. After all we have to protect our bureaucrats from terrorists don't ya know.
No sir I dont like it.
RFID is used in a LOT of places, such as workplace i.d.'s; school i.d.'s; and BANK CARDS, complete with account information. The problem is not the fact a corrupt Person could access the data but the fact the data is there for a corrupt Person to access in the first place.
Having lived in up-state NY and using the thruway with EZ-Pass, I had to slow down to 5-10 MPH else it wouldn't work. Did they upgrade the system and just not let us know about it? If they didn't, it could lose effectiveness. Now, I know, NYC is a different monster in that there are a lot of lights that will stop people making it easier to read these, otherwise, does it work or does it have the limitations that the thruway has?
Organized crime has stopped using EZ-pass, allowing the Criminals to blend in with the rest of the populace.
I'm pretty sure PennDOT is doing something similar with EZ-Pass on many of the highways around here in PA. The sensors mounted overhead the lanes on Route 1, Route 309, I-95, etc. look a heck of a lot like the EZ-Pass sensors at the toll booths. That would be the easiest way to populate the message boards with the approximate travel times.
How are you going to stop THIS ?
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/07/19/19548772-license-plate-data-not-just-for-cops-private-companies-are-tracking-your-car?lite
It's unauthorized access to my computing device.
In Houston, Tx, the city was tracking the RFID tags and using sensors all over the highways to generate real time traffic data, and openly said they were doing it. Of course there were privacy concerns, but they assured the citizens that it was strictly anonymous.
They went a step further and now use Post Oak's sensors to detect Bluetooth devices, using the repeated detection of MAC addresses to estimate traffic flow and speed.
http://traffic.houstontranstar.org/bluetooth/transtar_bluetooth.html
That would be an invasion of the cops privacy and they would harass you over it, possibly even have to "defend" themselves vigorously when you "resisted" arrest. You can't contest their version of the story in a coma in ICU.
This makes me sad. I always thought I was just being paranoid when I imagined local governments misusing EZ-Pass for widespread tracking.
It's harder, though, to convert an image of a license plate into useful data than to just grab the EZ-pass pre-formatted data.
...the EZ Pass is issued with a plastic bag that = a faraday cage.
At least it used to be when I got mine....
It's a voluntary service anyway.
Why doesn't he map the parts that it beeps at and make that information available?
Playing with that information is a better use of everyone's time!
In Philadelphia they have RFID scanners on trash trucks. It could be there to track recycling. The mayor here has no regard for the citizens privacy or fiscal responsibility. His answer to everything is more taxing, punishment, and intrusion.
They went around tearing everyones trash open, photographing it and sending fines to everyone for not recycling non-food stained cardboard and cans and plastic, etc. He wanted to charge everyone $25 for every trash removal too, but he didn't get that. I think the mass trash inspections was his answer.
They tried to get everyone to sign up for recycling tracking. There may be RFID tags in the stickers they give you when you sign up.. and could get discounts or something if you recycle correctly. There are very few of these stickers on recycling bins though.
I've come to expect these things to be abused. Walmart has RFID tags on some items. The library has a few on some items. They could scan the trash and everyone's homes.
Also, the library seems to be giving info to google. Not sure how extensive that is, but I think it's wrong.
Cars for a long time have had VIN numbers everywhere, especially on the windows. But there is always one facing up that can most likely be read via satellite.
It's common knowledge here in the San Francisco bay area, that the google maps traffic progress data is largely based on pickups of people's ezpass information along the highway at various points. This allows them to estimate flow by seeing how long it takes for cars to go from given points along the highway, which lets them determine if the highway is operating at reduced speeds.
Many people do not keep their ezpass available. Some do. Generally people seem happy that some tracking occurs to provide the public with a useful service.
Maybe that's the key difference. If NYC was providing realtime data to the public as a result, the public opinion would probably be different.
-josh
So, how is this different to using automatic license plate readers (or ANPR, for non-US-English) to monitor traffic flows? That's been done for years, and doesn't even require the vehicle to contain anything but the legally required plate (though they work a lot better if the state mandates front plates as well as rear, as is the case in most of the world).
Google Maps tracks it's users movements to work out where the congested roads are.
Big industry secret: vehicle-mounted RFID toll tags just do not work. The industry still relies on reading license plates, and they need that capability anyway for the no tag drivers. They still want you to buy a tag for accounting reasons and to commit you. Of course you are not supposed to know this. The secret has been kept remarkably well. All existing systems will be replaced as soon as the 5.9GHz ITS technology becomes available.
wouldn't want "them" knowing what your EZ-Pass thinks...
I did an undergraduate honors paper about reading E-ZPass somewhere besides a toll plaza. Not only were we able to do it easily, we also looked into (but did not follow through) creating fake tags using scanned IDs from other cars.
We were even able to purchase E-ZPass lane equipment from XXXXX (redacted - the lawyers don't want me to say). They did not ask for any verification about what we were going to do with it - if we could come up with the money, they would send it to us.