“My tires have RFID tags in them. Yours probably do also”
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900Mhz RFID tags can be read from over 30ft away. Can't find a video but someone @ defcon was able to get a read from 250ft away using a yagi antenna & power way over the FCC limits.
Yes, I'm sure some special technology can be developed that can track and follow a single car as it travels down a road, and isolate the tags, but the police already use ANPR to identify amber alerts, stolen vehicles, unpaid fines, etc. ANPR systems cost under $200, and some (according to Wikipedia) will work even if the car is traveling at 120 MPH.
It makes no sense to attempt to use RFID for tracking cars.
Depends on the tag design. Using Q Values you can avoid the collisions to some extend. http://www.rfidsb.com/anticipating-your-starting-point-with-...
Not sure how much the spinning tires distort signals...etc. Def out of my scope of knowledge.
> It makes no sense to attempt to use RFID for tracking cars.
Agreed, grabbing license plates makes more sense.
Point is, one can still read those tags in 40 mph, by the side of the road or further away. All that is needed is creating the device to the task, instead of getting one pre-made from Alibaba. Yes, that'd be a hell of a device (digital post-processing of signal, directional antenna, powerful transmitter), still pretty much doable and not even hard to hide.
As they say at the thread. Pretty much everything has an rfid tag nowadays. Each tag alone is not enough to track a person, but one does not need many of them for an individual signature - 3, maybe 4. Maybe we should add portable high power microwave transmitters to our usual set of home supplies.
http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?269
The intended purpose is being able to track tires that are subject to safety recalls.
Suggestions of "smart IEDs" -- roadside bombs which wait for a specific RFID to be detected -- have floated around for years.
I'm probably on the lists already, so I'll just point out that turning an IED into an RFID-scanning "smart IED" seems to require only a somewhat competent electrical engineering undergrad, a laptop, and less than $10 worth in parts. The reason they aren't widely used is probably because there are better methods than playing with RFIDs.
I'm just actually surprised that nobody has fixed some explosive to a little drone and flown it into some political target and detonated it.
Or a bunch off these landing on cars or buildings and detonating.
Homeland Security and the NSA can detect satire, right?
[0] - https://www.fbo.gov/?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=ccc..., actual specification in [1]
[1] - https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=fb2ca11b7d9ca8c61e5ee6d8ae... (warning, .docx file)
Heck, why not just throw the bomb in a trash can, or hide it under a car in a parking lot, etc. It's not like bomb placement is the difficult part of terrorism.
High-level targets, say, top leadership of G8 nations, would likely be difficult. But attacking key field leadership, business executives, or heads of state of smaller nations is well within current capability.
A drone buzzed Angela Merkel a couple of years ago (video on YouTube), and a Russian leader more recently.
My sense is that a small directed weapon (effectively: gun) would be more effective, though an explosive charge and shrapnel could certainly be utilised.
The technological advantage the US and other advanced nations have in drone technology is quite likely to be short-lived. Especially if your interest is, say, 1-5km range, rather than 100-500km.
For instance, you might plant a roadside reader/logger, and have an observer away from the road watching. The observer notes the time whenever a military vehicle goes by.
After you've logged a few military vehicles, you retrieve the logs, match them up to the observer's time stamps, and now you've got a list of targets for your roadside RFID based bomb.
You might, say, attack a hardened, highly secured, professionally maintained electronic data system. Say the integrated business operations system of a large nationwide tyres-service company. Pull off the RFID and owner data.
Apply information as, where, and when desired.
And this is why, boys and girls, data are liability.
Some folks at UC Berkeley built an RFID reading device you could put by the side of a (one lane) road (like an on-ramp) and read the tires from it. From a traffic analysis standpoint it would be much more effective than those hoses they put across the road to measure cars going by.
At the point we reach Tools Offering Aggregated Surveillance Things (TOAST), you'll be able to figure out where a tire (and the car it was attached to) was 24/7
Why would that be much more effective? Do the hoses have significant count errors, or is it that the RFID system will let them tell what make/model of tire went by and so infer data such as vehicle type that they do not get from the hose system?
That provides a very valuable database for law enforcement, if you know a car was used during a robbery, poof you know where that car as been, so you are one up on the robbers. Even if the license plate was stolen or the car stolen, you have it from the point the plate was stolen to the present. The ALCU has been trying to get statements about how long this data is kept and how it is accessed.
Today you can recognize faces with machines better than you can with humans. A camera can take pictures and store the face data with no other personally identifiable information, and yet when you suspect someone of something you plug in their face data and "poof" you get all the cameras that have seen them and when. Recent laws about trying to protect this sort of abuse not withstanding. [3]
IMSI catchers and simply Wifi MAC address catchers for the purposes of advertising (or surveillance)[4] can provide GPS + Time + identifiable number logs.
Storage is cheap, 32 bit CPU chips are free, HD cameras are cheap, and software radios can build white-space mesh networks on demand. When you lay a grid of these passive technologies around town, it will become the most powerful tool humans have ever invented for keeping track of, or locating, other humans of interest.
The fun part is that private citzens can play too, anyone can put together a fleet of cameras recognizing faces and license plates with a Raspberry Pi 2. And if you have a HackRF One you can pick up GSM bands and WiFi bands to note the phones, tablets, laptops nearby. Call it $400/unit, $40,000 for 100 units (two at every intersection would cover an area of 7 square blocks. Not something you would do on a lark but certainly within reach of someone who could profit from the information.
[1] http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/Salina-police-using-licen...
[2] http://www.governing.com/news/state/sl-surveillance-cameras-...
[3] http://www.law360.com/articles/742169/shutterfly-can-t-shake...
And disconnecting a GPS lead isn't hard.
Scan all local Police cars. Install readers around Thugs HQ.
My reading is that Tirerack registers the DOT Tire Identification Numbers with the tire manufacturers. Not with "the government". It's the manufacturer who is liable for damages from defective tires. So it's the manufacturer who needs this information.
A barcode or an RFID tag? The only reason most of your products don't have an RFID tag is that barcodes are much cheaper, and the entire logistics chain - from manufacturing to retail - is already pretty well optimized around those. There is not much value to gain. About the only use for passive radio tags I've seen widely deployed is theft prevention, and half of the times the tags are removed at the counter and later reused.
(Source: I worked on a software that reads those barcodes and controls the manufacturing process.)
Barcode would absolutely allow you to differentiate between any two cell phones, or cars, or computers.
Compare that to the almost complete, 100% personalized location history you get when you manage to get your "flashlight" app installed on an android phone...
Edit the 125khz ones and 13Mhz ones look similar so not sure which.
// Safety Warning - Actually building an HERF gun can be extremely dangerous, and should only be attempted by people familiar with both high-voltage safety and radio safety. Seriously, RF burns can be really nasty. //
I guess if the state is out to get you that bad you could move to NZ :-)