ez pass – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Government Agencies Love Expanding E-ZPass Coverage; Handling Data Responsibly, Not So Much

from the no-roadblocks-for-mission-creep dept

Traffic management may be the goal, but watch out for the mission creep. New York’s E-ZPass system started out as an efficient way to keep traffic on toll roads running without interruption, but has expanded its coverage to areas where no tolls apply. A couple of years ago, a New York driver rigged up his E-ZPass transponder to light up every time it detected an E-ZPass signal. It lit up a lot.

E-ZPass swears the information collected by its system away from toll roads is only harvested “in aggregate” and “anonymized,” and solely for the purpose of delivering data on traffic patterns. All well and good, but it’s still the same technology it uses on actual toll roads, where vehicles are tracked individually and specifically. This information is turned over in response to court orders (both civil and criminal) as well as to a variety of government agencies, including the New York City’s tax collectors and the Department of Homeland Security. It wouldn’t take much to flip a switch and have E-ZPass track drivers all the way through the city, far from any toll roads.

New York’s ACLU is concerned about this potential for abuse, as well as the system’s use in general. It requested documents related to E-ZPass from a handful of New York government agencies and, somewhat surprisingly, received quite a bit of information in response. But among all the documents it secured, information pertaining to privacy policies and disposal of generated data was definitely in the minority.

The New York State Department of Transportation and the New York State Thruway Authority, for example, produced privacy policies that are vague and barebones. Those agencies report that the E-ZPass readers they use at non-toll locations work differently from those at toll locations. Part of a system called TRANSMIT, the readers electronically scramble identifying information about EZ-Pass accounts, assign an anonymous ID to each vehicle that passes through the system and dump the anonymous IDs every few hours…

The New York City Department of Transportation, more troublingly, appears to have never considered the impact of its study on New Yorkers’ privacy rights. In response to the NYCLU’s FOIL (request number 6), the city Department of Transportation responded that it has no policies or training materials on storage, retention, destruction and use of information generated by or collected from E-ZPass readers.

The NY DOT’s response said this specifically:

…[no] responsive documents were found with respect to items 4, 6, 7, and 8 of your request.

These are the items the DOT claims it has no responsive documents for.

4. Documents, including but not limited to privacy policies and marketing materials, that describe the types of data that can be collected by E-ZPass Readers, when it will be collected, and how it will be used.

6. Policies and training materials describing the storage, retention, destruction, and use of information generated by or collected from E-ZPass Readers.

7. Policies and training materials describing when and how NYCDOT shares information and/or data gathered from E-ZPass Readers with other entities, including but not limited to the New York City Police Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

8. All documents, redacted as necessary and permitted under law, describing or containing law enforcement requests to NYCDOT for information gathered from E-ZPass Readers in New York City since January 1, 2012, including the response to the requests.

Not exactly comforting, considering there’s been no effort on the part of any of the involved agencies to inform the public that E-ZPass is scanning their devices in areas far removed from toll roads. While E-ZPass may only harvest aggregate, anonymous data currently, that could change at any time and its silence on its expanded coverage area doesn’t exactly give hope that it will be forthcoming should an outside agency (like the surveillance-happy NYPD or the DHS) start requiring it to track drivers throughout New York City.

What is collected about each specific vehicle from scanners on toll roads isn’t being handled responsibly either. While the policies make it pretty clear that this data won’t be handed out to everyone who comes asking (like commercial third parties), it is certainly willing to provide info when hit with a subpoena from a government agency. As we’ve seen in the past, government entities who have direct access to E-ZPass data have abused it for political reasons. The harvesting of data is the necessary byproduct of assessing toll fees, but running the system for years with nothing in the way of disposal policies only increases the potential for abuse.

Finally, no Freedom of Information story is complete without some sort of ridiculous redaction being pointed out. The NY Thruway Authority returned this 9-panel abstract art piece to the NYCLU under the tile “ITS Manual.” (“ITS” presumably stands for “Intelligent Transportation Shaping,” and copies of other ITS manuals can be found scattered around the internet — wholly unredacted.)

Filed Under: ez pass, surveillance, tracking

Security? What Security? Automatic Toll Systems And Passports Found Easily Hackable

from the security-as-an-afterthought dept

At this point it shouldn’t be a surprise that various systems that shouldn’t be are quite easily hacked, but that doesn’t make it any less disturbing. Over at this years Black Hat event there was a demonstration of just how easy it is to hack the automatic toll devices used at most bridges and toll roads throughout the country. The stunning part is that it appears that the folks who created these transponders did almost nothing to keep them secure. They’re constantly broadcasting and they include no encryption. And this is a device that often connects directly to a registered credit card. Sense a potential problem? The researchers who showed this pointed out that it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to clone your transponder and make you start paying for their tolls. Alternatively, it could be used to create an alibi for someone planning to commit a crime — since police have used toll crossing data to establish where someone is.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, an investigation has found that the chips in the supposedly “fakeproof” e-passports are easily cloned, manipulated and passed through the checking machine — which is especially worrisome given that 3,000 blank e-passports were stolen just last week. Of course, people have talked about the possibility of such hacks for years — even before they were put in place — to show how silly it was to think they were secure. And, of course, the best response comes from the UK gov’t. After being presented with the fact that the chips can be changed or modified, the statement from the government was: “No one has yet been able to demonstrate that they are able to modify, change or alter data within the chip. If any data were to be changed, modified or altered it would be immediately obvious to the electronic reader.” If you keep saying it, maybe you can pretend it’s true.

In both cases, though, the striking thing is that these aren’t “surprise” vulnerabilities. They should have been somewhat obvious to those who crafted these systems in the first place. Both are now working on “patches” to deal with the problems, but it’s pretty difficult to completely patch a system that’s so widespread — and either way it will take some time. So why weren’t these systems designed with better security in the first place?

Filed Under: automatic toll, e-passports, ez pass, fastpass, hacking, passports, security