Friday, September 13, 2013

Big brother is watching

From Forbes:

After spotting a police car with two huge boxes on its trunk — that turned out to be license-plate-reading cameras — a man in New Jersey became obsessed with the loss of privacy for vehicles on American roads. (He’s not the only one.) The man, who goes by the Internet handle “Puking Monkey,” did an analysis of the many ways his car could be tracked and stumbled upon something rather interesting: his E-ZPass, which he obtained for the purpose of paying tolls, was being used to track his car in unexpected places, far away from any toll booths.

Puking Monkey is an electronics tinkerer, so he hacked his RFID-enabled E-ZPass to set off a light and a “moo cow” every time it was being read. Then he drove around New York. His tag got milked multiple times on the short drive from Times Square to Madison Square Garden in mid-town Manhattan…

… and also on his way out of New York through Lincoln Tunnel, again in a place with no toll plaza.

At Defcon, where he presented his findings, Puking Monkey said he found the reading of the E-ZPass outside of where he thought it would be read when he put it in his car “intrusive and unsettling,” quoting from Sen. Chuck Schumer’s remarks about retailers tracking people who come into their stores using their cell phones.

This isn’t a part of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, the millions-dollar project emulating London’s Ring of Steel with extreme surveillance. 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.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once non-tollbooth E-Z Pass data collection points are acknowledged, the data will be routinely requested and subpoened for prosecutions, defense alibis, etc. as they are now for the tollbooth data.

Anonymous said...

All convenience comes with a price these days.

Anonymous said...

Spooky Nation!

Anonymous said...

"The city uses the data from the readers to provide real-time traffic information,.."

Let's see what data they are collecting.

Does it only contain location and velocity? Or does it contain something to identify an individual car. If the former then pretty harmless. There is no justification for the latter unless it's just snooping.

Anonymous said...

its gonna get a lot worse... is anybody really needs peace and harmony, is plenty of space at the North Pole. taxes are really cheap that too.

Anonymous said...

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING...

Y O U ! ! !

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
its gonna get a lot worse... is anybody really needs peace and harmony, is plenty of space at the North Pole. taxes are really cheap that too.
...........................................................

Grammar much?

Anonymous said...

Does it only contain location and velocity? Or does it contain something to identify an individual car. If the former then pretty harmless. There is no justification for the latter unless it's just snooping.

Did you bother reading the actual article? Crappy has left out a significant portion - the portion that explains what info is gathered...

“The tag ID is scrambled to make it anonymous. The scrambled ID is held in dynamic memory for several minutes to compare with other sightings from other readers strategically placed for the purpose of measuring travel times which are then averaged to develop an understanding of traffic conditions,” says TransCore spokesperson Barbara Catlin by email. “Travel times are used to estimate average speeds for general traveler information and performance metrics. Tag sightings (reads) age off the system after several minutes or after they are paired and are not stored because they are of no value. Hence the system cannot identify the tag user and does not keep any record of the tag sightings.”

Anonymous said...

Yes I believe the people who collected the data without my knowledge and consent.

Anonymous said...

Technology and freedom cannot coexist, one must be given up for the other to flourish.

Anonymous said...

These new cameras on the police cars (and hidden roadside things) have the optic resolution of spy drones. They record your face as well as passengers in the car, registration and inspection stickers.
Big brother is going to soon have the capability to link everything up.
The next phase is to get all the civilian cellphones on 4G networks. The former 3G (originally meant for civilian use) will allow these cameras to be placed anywhere and talk to each other in real time, track your location via that new 4G phone being tricked on you (once everything linked up)

If you owe money or didn't buy your $16,0000 a year affordable obamacare expect to be pulled over and your car taken
Its all about milking more $$$ from the public.

Anonymous said...

This crap is all being put in place to enforce some nasty upcoming taxes and insurance mandates the middle class will not be able to afford or refuse to pay.
You bet track you down like a hunted deer for any reason they want.
It appears come 2016 you will need to earn 100-200K a year just to keep a small private house, current bank account and decent car.
I think the plan is for "enforcing" some upcoming new taxes & mandates to "break" the middle class into "sharing" including that unused room or basement.
Ridgewood, Glendale, Maspeth MV and Archie Bunker" get ready to assume the jackknife position !!