ENIGMA 2000 Newsletter - Issue 4

May 2001
Articles, newsreports and Items of interest : e2k_news@hotmail.com

ENIGMA 2000 article

An excellent article from 'C' that will provoke thoughts about your immediate surroundings. [Those who have been to my house now know why I have ferrites on allmy telephone cables]!

Who is watching you ?

There is no hiding place! Staying in? Your landline can be activated even with the receiver on the hook and used to record conversations in the room. Go to the bathroom and run the taps (like an old black & white spy film), have all secret conversations in the bathroom. Going out? That Mobile phone can pinpoint you to within about 7 Metres, indeed the next stage in mobile advertising will send text to your phone while you are outside a particular store to tell you about their special offers, and don't forget all those security cameras in the high streets, stores, petrol stations and even lifts!

The G8 group of countries are looking to introduce a mandatory system for all telecommunication providers to maintain records on the data of every phone call (land & mobile), every e-mail sent and received and every web site visited - for 7 years! The STASI would be proud of us!

Going for a drive, surely that must be safe? No, enter a rather innocent looking system with potential sting in the tail (or should I say number plate). Although everything I have so far described may be used against criminals, intelligence agents and subversive's it can also be used against YOU.

We are going to take a quick look at one of those systems which has slowly crept across Britain, rather like RIMnet the Radiation Information Monitoring System (remember how we were told these were weather stations), well now comes Trafficmaster, a system used to monitor the flow of traffic across Britain.

Let me say at the outset that Trafficmaster is a reputable company with lots of open information about its operations, indeed it does have a nice Web Site! But, just what is it capable of? The system is land based, the most obvious signs of its operation are the "cobalt blue" painted roadside monitors, and associated two aerials, these consist of two 'camera like' infra-red eyes which point towards and away from the traffic flow, single 'eyes' are also positioned on motorway bridges.

Trafficmaster covers 8,000 miles of motorway and trunk roads across Britain and is expanding into Scotland and Wales, it is also expanding rapidly in Germany and has ambitions on France, Italy and the United States. In Britain 7,000 (yes) roadside/motorway bridge units gather information, these are placed approximately 2 miles apart, these detect when traffic slows below 30 mph. This data is sent via the Voda groups PacNet network to the Trafficmaster National Data Centre at Milton Keynes.

The processed information is then sent back to the roadside units which re-transmit the data to subscriber vehicles on a frequency of 153.2750 MHz (FSK). Information can also be sent via mobile phones. Subscribers display the information on a screen which offers three levels of zoom, this allows the traveller to see when traffic problems occur when one of the grid cells on the screen flashes. In a nutshell you can then try to avoid the problem of jams or slow moving traffic. More detailed numbered pages are sent to show news of delays etc.

So far so good, so how does it gather the information and what could be done with it? The company has developed its own unique system for monitoring the journey times of cars across Britain. The patented system, called Passive Target Flow Measurement (PTFM), the roadside monitors capture the electronic pattern of number plates of passing vehicles. The computer on site converts this to a "tag" and every four minutes a transmission is made sending the "tags" and the time that each vehicle passed the site, to the central computer in Milton Keynes. By matching the sighting's (I like that phrase) of vehicle "tags" across the network, the computer quickly averages the journey time between each link across the country. The system operates 24 hours a day.

Why is this of any great interest to us? It all sounds pretty innocent, doesn't it? There are conflicting reports of as to how much of a number plate is "read" to be time stamped into a "tag" varying from 4 to 6 central digits. Can the system cope with the new "ABC 12 DE" type plates due to come in to force in 2001? What about short "vanity plates"? (I did read that the letter/number size is to be increased slightly on new style plates, I also read that this system does not like the Euro symbol very much - the blue disc with stars which prefixes some plates).

Is there a one to one mapping between a number plate and the "tag"? The company claims that the number plate cannot be converted back from the "tag" but they have not yet published what cryptographic algorithm if any is used to achieve this. Although some idea of the system of "tags" can be gleaned from their patent.

Are these "tags" easily converted into real number plates simply by cross referencing with a few existing police Number Plate Recognition systems. e.g. City of London (Ring of Steel), channel Ports, M25 variable speed limit zone etc. or with visual observations?

How secure is the central database in Milton Keynes? Can these radio communications links be tapped centrally ? Can the Trafficmaster 'eyes' be put into "engineering test mode" and be made to transmit full number plate details.

What safeguards are there that the company will not divulge the movement patterns of its "tags" to the police etc? Will it sell this information to commercial organisations?

Trafficmaster is not registered with the Data Protection Registrar.

It seems almost inconceivable in this electronic age that the likes of MI5 & GCHQ would not be interested in having a window to this system, its ability to operate as a surveillance system seems just too good to be true. It cannot only track the 100,000 or so Trafficmaster customers but also the other 25 million road users, it could act as a safeguard to protect VIP's, military, police and high value freight as well as tracking the enemies of the State, terrorists, criminals and intelligence agents? It could even be used to track YOU.