Jen Wicked

This is a web comic that I've pimped before. She has a nicely acerbic view of the world that I quite like. Today's was pretty good, so I thought a little re-pimping might be good.

http://crap.jinwicked.com/

RFID License Plates!

Wired has a good story on a project in England to add RFID tags to vehicle license plates. The American government is watching closely and is quite interested.

RFID tags come, broadly-speaking, in two flavors: active and passive. There are also powered and unpowered models. An active tag broadcasts its identifying code all the time, a passive only when it is hit with a "query" signal. Powered has a battery, so active tags must be powered. Unpowered are pretty cool, they are the norm for passive tags. When they're hit with the query signal, they absorb some of that power to transmit their answer. Obviously the non-powered passive tags have a very limited range.

An example of RFID tags is automated toll booth collection, you install their little transmitter in your car and cruise through unattended toll booths. I believe these are normally powered chips, I don't know if they're active or passive. Or the cards you hold against a plate to open a secured door, those are passive unpowered. There have been amazing advances in battery technology, but it still isn't practical to put one in a credit card. Physical dimensions ignored, you'd be replacing your cards on a regular basis as the batteries fail. Passive unpowered is a much better technology for things like secured doors. I would imagine the Mobil AutoPass is also a passive unpowered.


Toll booth collection data is collected and specifically applied to your account. They know your vehicle passed through Tollgate X at Time Y. They don't know who was driving, they don't care. They get their billing information and they're happy. At one time some toll pikes were calculating speeds based on tickets, they still may be. The concept was that if you went from Tollbooth X to Tollbooth Y in less than 5 minutes, you were averaging over 70 MPH. I think they might have tried to ticket/fine on that basis but haven't heard anything along those lines of late.


Well, now we're going to see license plates with this technology. So cars, they wouldn't have to be police cars, would be able to drive the streets and look up whether vehicles it sensed were stolen, didn't have insurance, if the registered owner had outstanding tickets, etc. They could set up pavement sensors around central government corridors and see how often you're cruising around the area and might take notice if you don't work there. The British system uses a battery, so it would seem likely that it is active. Which means that anyone with a scanner can read the information within perhaps a hundred feet or so of your car.


The one good thing about this system is that the plates are tremendously more expensive than conventional stamped plates, so adoption, if ever, will be very slow. Ignoring the initial deployment costs, you then have to ask about maintenance costs: what happens when the battery fails? Do they have to replace the entire plate, thus duplicating deploymet costs? Does it have to be serviced by a Department of Transportation tech? Is there an alert system to tell the driver if the battery has failed, and is the driver responsible if the plate stops working?


Myself, I'm curious as to how many days from issue it will take for people to figure out how to kill these transmitters without leaving a trace. If they are active transmitters, it will be zero challenge to determine what frequency these things work at, and that will tell you a lot about what kind of transmitter is in the plate.


I imagine that George Orwell is in an afterlife somewhere shaking his finger at us.