E Plates or Smart Tags
Moving beyond license plate readers
License plate readers (LPRs) have been hailed as a revolutionary homeland security and data based policing tool. LPRs allow for authorities to locate a vehicle passing through a fixed position or alert enforcement officers of an issue with a vehicle or the registered owner. These can range from driver’s license and registration suspensions to stolen vehicle and criminal warrant notifications. These can also help identify “Silver Alerts” for elderly drivers who have the early onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s who become disoriented and lost.
In terms of homeland security, LPRs have the ability to notify law enforcement of Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) alerts or other security threat groups (STG) such as trans-national criminal organizations and criminal street gangs. The data collected and stored by LPRs can also be used in investigations to identify travel patterns or correlations with other suspects. These are all positive attributes of LPRs, however their technical limitations can further be enhanced with the adoption of “e plates” or “smart tags”.
E plates or smart tags are license plates that are embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. RFID technology has been in existence since its use in identifying allied aircraft and therefore significantly predates LPR’s optical character recognition technology. RFID technology is already widely used in the transportation field in the form of automated toll collection tags known as EZ Pass in the heavily traveled Northeast interstate system.
The same technology that allows drivers to zoom through toll booths at highway speeds can be adapted for the same purposes that LPR’s are currently used for. However, the advantage RFID enabled tags have is that they do not need to have line of site with the tag they are trying to read. This would allow and officer to be notified of an alert for a car several lengths in front or behind them. Parallel parked vehicles would no longer be obscured from having their information recorded. People who take active countermeasures to obscure their license plates’ characters would also not be immune from having their information captured by automated enforcement technologies such as red light and speed cameras. Stolen cars could be identified regardless if the tags were switched or taken off.
However, the improvement in monitoring electronic tags is not without its detractors. Privacy advocates are already at odds with LPR’s and the data that they collect which ultimately is stored in law enforcement databases. Questions as to who has access to the information and limiting the retention time it is stored are being addressed in state legislatures across the country. Although countermeasures can be engineered into the smart tags they, like any other electronic device that stores sensitive information are vulnerable to hacking, creating further concerns.
Big data is already a part of our everyday lives. The benefits of mobile data devices, RFID tags, and other smart technologies appear to have the support of the great majority of people and seem to outweigh the inherent risks and potential for abuse.
The application of this technology is already being used in other countries such as Great Britain and South Africa. Connecticut has already introducing legislation to issue e plates on cars registered in the state. The benefits and possibilities are considerable and can greatly improve upon the technological advances that LPR’s already afford the law enforcement and intelligence communities. Expansion of this technology in the United States is an evolution for a safer and more secure nation.
