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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.
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.
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.
Funny you mention gay sex and then go on to list the only ones that care about privacy are those doing something "illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous." Have you not been paying attention to Russia lately? Gay sex recently became illegal again. Just because society and politicians don't care NOW doesn't mean they will continue not caring.
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.
I'm still pissed I was labeled a troll when I mentioned that there was no privacy in the US.
Yea, I'm sure it was because you "mentioned" it; surely you weren't labeled a troll for gems such as:
So give up on the privacy whining.
Or
The only dumbasses who care about privacy are the ones doing something they know to be illegal
Or maybe even
I bet Castro was a privacy advocate.
Now GTF my lawn, you fucking troll you.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
If you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide. /oh-so-obvious-troll
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/
Its not the collection of the data, its the shady circumstances under which it is collected. All of this huge data collection happening outside the public's eye can be used for nefarious acts, not only by individuals, but by corporations and governments. What better way to control a population than through analytics?
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
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
NYC tried to pass london style congestion pricing a few years back but the state killed it. idea was to make people pay to drive in midtown manhattan
...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'
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.
Have you not been paying attention to Russia lately? Gay sex recently became illegal again.
No, it didn't. Talking about it, however, is a different story.
Have you not been paying attention?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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
BTW,
"BTW, does the bridge you live under have EZ-Pass?"
http://www.pbase.com/mikep/image/152069058
That is one of my newest neighbors. 3 of them WITHIN 1 block. You think I think I have privacy?
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
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 think I see why you were labeled a troll... you pack retrospective, editorial, controversial opinion and passing off opinion as fact into the same comment. If you broke this up into multiple comments, you'd probably find that the passing off opinion as fact was the only bit that got modded troll.
Basically, I'm sure when you mentioned that there was no privacy in the US, someone else mentioned that you can have no expectation of privacy in the US (different than saying there's no privacy), and got modded Informative.
The US is big. People came to the US from other countries because there was room to have privacy and freedom of expression -- through obscurity. If you burn flags in the middle of a forest and there's nobody there to see you do it, does anyone care? BUT, if you burn flags in the town square and shout "down with the government!" even if it's not illegal, you can rest assured that your name and face have been noted and will be remembered during the next uprising.
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 agree. Everyone else who cares about privacy are aware of how private information can be taken advantage of by others. Only the dumbasses, as you state, care about it because they have something socially unacceptable to hide. Privacy, of course, is not anthropomorphic, and doesn't care whether you're a dumbass or not.
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.
I built a dipole sniper rifle once that could fry electronics from 500 meters. No boom, no bullet. Just one glorious column of invisible EMP death reaching out to skullfuck your television into the grave.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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."
You would think a lot of Republican Senators would be up in arms over this. :)
Every time one of them gets caught with a "rent boy" it warms my heart. Can someone tell me why it is almost always the "Family first" ones that get caught with a male prostitute?
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
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.
Funny you mention gay sex and then go on to list the only ones that care about privacy are those doing something "illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous." Have you not been paying attention to Russia lately? Gay sex recently became illegal again. Just because society and politicians don't care NOW doesn't mean they will continue not caring.
This just made me remember something else; the adage that in an established society, it is impossible to live for a week without committing at least one illegal act*.
*"Illegal act' being something that COULD be deemed illegal by a court of law, depending on interpretation.
As such, everyone has something to hide, because everyone is breaking the law. But that's not really a useful argument to drag into the discussion anyway; just thought I'd point it out while I was thinking of it.
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.
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.
yep
every day the drones will make a list of the peons driving on 34th street in rush hour and the mass arrests are coming next month
and i'm totally for some kind of congestion pricing in manhattan and i own a car. my wife and i pay for the train. lots of people drive in over free bridges that aren't tolled and paid for by my taxes. there is no reason why there shouldn't be some kind of toll on all the bridges. traffic around these bridges is so bad it takes an hour to drive a mile. charging people for using these resources should be priority #1 instead of relying on taxes from people who don't drive into manhattan
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!
Oh, I think I see. So apple trees vote R and people vote D, is that it?
My rule #46:
The number of skeletons in [most famous person]'s closet is usually directly proportional to how sanctimonious or pious they act in public.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Just like it warms my Heart when Obama appoints someone he once demonized to some post or another.
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/09/obama-appoints-former-bain-capital-exec-to-top-post-2762156.html
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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").
Good rule.
Just to be clear, I don't want this trend to stop. It provides me with immense entertainment.
I do think they should be forced to be on a float in the local gay pride parade, with a large banner over their heads explaining their affiliations, and what they were caught doing.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
taxes pay for the trains as well, but its not enough to cover the cost of the system
no reason not to have use fees on the bridges for people that use them. and there is a maintenance cost on them every year. not like you build it and its free to maintain
Seriously, I would have been surprised if it would have been otherwise, but suit yourself in your capitalist police state across the atlantic.
The only dumbasses who care about privacy are the ones doing something they know to be illegal, immoral or otherwise dangerous.
Ah! That would be why politicians get so upset when they are tracked.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
Furthermore, you apparently are not familiar with evidence based economics/policy. The possible potential for these are astounding, however in the wrong hands this type of analytics is dangerous. It is population control, pure and simple. The issue with using this information doesn't stem from some innate fear of technology, but of the powers that be. How am I supposed to trust a government to act in the best interest of its people when they do all of this analysis behind closed doors?
My example is this: this data collected is supposed to be used to improve traffic conditions. That is what we are told it is doing. This data could be used to target specific people ie terrorists, criminals, gun owners, foreigners, protesters, Jews, or African Americans. The point being we have no say in how the data is used, so what was once designed to help us can be used against us and with the government we have in place today, I don't see that as much of a stretch.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
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.
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.
Privacy is a human right, as declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States signed. However it seems you are all to ready to give up your privacy. What you do with your rights is your business, but you don't decide what other people get to do with theirs. And the downside of privacy can be summed up in the following quote from one of France's more famous tyrants:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." --Richelieu
See the problem with having no privacy, and being able to cheaply record everything you say and do for all time, EVERYTHING YOU DO AND SAY CAN AND WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU. It's just a matter of someone making that decision - if you voted for the "wrong" party. If you're the "wrong" religion. If you do something that goes against the party line. If you say the "wrong" thing. At some point in the future. Now, how do you defend yourself from the future? How do you deny every little off color joke, every line of sarcasm, every politically incorrect thing you have ever said? Giving someone your private life puts you firmly in their control.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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
The number of skeletons in [most famous person]'s closet is usually directly proportional to how sanctimonious or pious they act in public.
Or:
"The more the preacher preached, the faster we counted the silverware"
That would be a reasonable action if we had reason to believe that the information being given was complete and correct. However, history teaches us that we should not take that as a given.
In NH the speed limit through the tolls is 25mph. In PA that have what they call "Open road tolling" where you can go 65mph. So i assume just depends on the sensor.
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
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.
Yup, the streak continues.
Better to be a logical jerk than an emotional idiot.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I used to live in NYC. When you're shipped an EZ-Pass it actually does come with an RFID blocking bag and since it's attached to the windshield with velcro it's not really a problem to block the signal. Many rental car companies use an RFID blocking box on the windshield that you have to slide open to use the EZ-Pass (which they charge you 10x the toll for the convenience).
Down here in Atlanta (where I live now) they have a similar system called the Peach Pass however it's a sticker you put on your windshield that you can't block and can't remove without destroying it. I'd say New Yorkers have the better deal.