
from the creates-new-market-for-UHF-jammers dept.
Egyptian Government Plans To Track The Movement Of 10 Million Vehicles With Low-Cost RFID Stickers:
Just under three years ago, Techdirt wrote about China's plan to install satnav tracking devices on vehicles in Xinjiang. That was just one of several early signs of the human rights abuses happening there. Today, people are finally waking up to the fact that the indigenous turkic-speaking Uyghur population is subject to some of the harshest oppression anywhere on the planet. Tracking huge numbers of vehicles might seem to be a typically over-the-top, money-no-object Chinese approach to total surveillance. Unfortunately, there are signs the idea is starting to spread, as this story in RFID Journal explains:
Egypt's Ministry of Interior (MOI) plans to identify millions of vehicles as they travel on the country's roads, using an RFID solution from Go+[1], with hardware and software provided by Kathrein Solutions[2] in cooperation with Wireless Dynamics[3]. The system, which will be implemented across approximately 10 million of the country's vehicles throughout the next five years, consists of passive UHF RFID stickers attached to each car's windshield, as well as tags on headlamps that respond to interrogation from readers installed above roadways, even at high speeds.
One justification for the move is to provide information on traffic flows. Another is to identify drivers who have been found guilty of traffic violations, and who should therefore not be on the roads. But plans to send all the data to a cloud-based data center will create a database that will eventually track every vehicle in the country. That will clearly be an invaluable resource for the country's police and security forces, which unfortunately seem to take China's approach to anyone who voices opposition to the authorities.
[...] As well as the negative impact on human rights in Egypt, there is another troubling aspect to this move. According to the RFID Journal article, the company providing the new system, Go+, is "in discussions with four other countries about the possibility of implementing this solution once the Egyptian system is fully deployed." [...]If the roll-out is successful, it could encourage other governments to adopt a similar approach, to the detriment of civil liberties in those countries.
[1] Go+
[2] Kathrein Solutions
[3] Wireless Dynamics
(Score: 2) by SparkyGSX on Friday December 06 2019, @10:23AM (1 child)
How is this different from license plate reading cameras? The data is the same, except the camera can also take pictures of the driver and front seat passenger, for automatic identification, or manual verification afterwards.
Obviously, such tracking is bad for privacy and civil liberties, but it's naive to think it doesn't already happen at varying scales with existing technology.
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MostCynical on Friday December 06 2019, @10:31AM
apparently, the Chinese have been doing this for years - long roads in the middle of nowhere, with speed humps every few miles, and every speed hump has cameras pointing at the passengers and at the number plates.
Maybe chipping the cars is easier when there aren't 300 million (or more) [scmp.com] vehicles on the road, but rather only 9.4 million [ahram.org.eg]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday December 06 2019, @10:33AM (2 children)
There are probably a lot of non-sinister applications here, as noted traffic flow analysis, that are probably beneficial when it comes to various infrastructure projects. That said "stickers" are not something I would associate with a long-term project, those things probably doesn't stick around forever and are probably prone to drop away (one way or another). So what kind of harsh penalty will be involved then?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday December 06 2019, @03:22PM
Sure, there's lots of non-sinister applications - but there's no way to get them without fully priming the system for the sinister applications. There's a reason it's the abusive authoritarian governments leading the charge here.
Power corrupts. Information asymmetry will inevitably be abused, and any successful politician is almost certainly already elbow deep in that pie. The only way to avoid the sinister applications is to avoid creating the infrastructure in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @03:22PM
Are they microwave safe?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by rob_on_earth on Friday December 06 2019, @10:33AM (1 child)
Maybe if the government added this to all there own vehicles and made the data 100% public they would soon see how great it was to have all that valuable data.
Of course, that is only if they honestly do want the data for legit reasons and not just to track everyone they do not like.
and on top of that, there is the individual corruption(see multiple cases of Police tracking exes and selling data to criminals) and the fact that today's honest(relative term) government will be replaced in the future with a different idea of honesty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06 2019, @01:15PM
Must be why they say ubiquitous tracking tech doesn’t disappear you, the corrupt criminal does.
Stop shooting the messenger.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Muad'Dave on Friday December 06 2019, @01:16PM
Remember those tire pressure sensors [wikipedia.org] in your tires as a result of the Ford Explorer rollover incidents [wikipedia.org]?
They transmit a unique code every so often, and many of them can be made to transmit their code on demand (interrogated) by an external signal. You can monitor them with very inexpensive hardware [rtl-sdr.com]. I've heard that the border patrol folks record these values every time you cross the border.
YOU. CAN. ALREADY. BE. TRACKED. [schneier.com]
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday December 06 2019, @01:55PM
I suspect all electronic devices can be identified now remotely with various rfid junk we could not easily find, especially now that they can read stickers passively.
a 2d thing could be anywhere. There might be certain circuitboards that just have them set to one or another frequency.
I can say two things for sure about being tagged like an animal, I don't like it.
And it sure didn't help them catch epstein or prevent his escape.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
decultification.org
https://archive.is/EHo3s [archive.is] (fresh off the presses)