Highway Bluetooth detectors are spying on motorists and pedestrians

MassPrivateI

DHS and the Dept., of Transportation are using ‘Bluetooth detectors‘ to spy on motorists and pedestrians.

Beginning in late 2007 the University of Maryland, with support from the Maryland SHA, developed an anonymous probe technique to monitor the travel time on highways and arterials based on signals available from the point‐to‐point networking protocol commonly referred to as Bluetooth.

If you guessed DHS, is involved in Bluetooth spying, give your self a gold star. Click here, here &here to find out more.

According to Gainesville.com. motorists probably have no idea the government (DHS) is secretly reading information on their cell phones, tablets, headphones.

The Florida Department of Transportation and city of Gainesville are two of many government entities nationwide now using roadside transponders to read the identification number of any activated Bluetooth device as it passes.

Government agencies like DHS and the DEA use Bluetooth detectors to gather Bluetooth data from aWireless Sensor Network. For more information about DEA spying, read ‘The DEA has created a massive national license plate reader spying program‘.

“The whole country is doing this,” Paul Misticawi, vice president of public sector sales for traffic data software company.

Bluetooth detectors will soon be able to identify everyone

According to Michael Robertson, “sensors that re-identify vehicles specifically. Some examples given are “electronic toll tag transponders, cell-phone tracking, license plate reading, Bluetooth sniffing, magnetic signatures, (and) video tracking.”

By combining a license plate or a phone number with a Bluetooth serial number, it’s possible to track citizens via their phone. Mr. Robertson said.

The DOT admits Bluetooth detectors can be used to identify anyone…

If an electronic device were seized by police as evidence, the MAC address could be determined and matched against Bluetooth detection records.

Similarly, users who download and use certain mobile device applications may make personal information, including their MAC addresses, known to the apps’ publishers, who could then potentially mine, share or sell this information.

Jeff Hayes, Alachua County’s transportation planning manager, said the system is smart enough that if two people with Bluetooth devices are traveling in the same car, they will be recorded together at the first transponder. But if both devices cross the path of a transponder down the road again in the same car, the system figures out they belong to passengers traveling together, and will cancel out one of the ID numbers.

Bluetooth detectors can detect a vehicle’s speed and location

They can detect a vehicles location, speed and altitude (according to page 25 of the Meshlium datasheet) Bluetooth detectors also use a GPS-3G/GPRS realtime tracker.

According to a Delaware DOT Bluetooth brochure, most phones stay discoverable and vehicles with hands-free systems tend to always be discoverable!

How Bluetooth detectors work

According to the DOT, Bluetooth detection systems work by actively searching for in-range Bluetooth devices and capturing the unique media access control (MAC) address of each device. For a Bluetooth detection system to read the MAC address of a device, the device must be turned on and be in “discoverable” mode (i.e., broadcasting its MAC address). Because each device has a unique and permanent MAC address, Bluetooth detection systems can determine vehicle travel times and speeds by calculating the time it takes for vehicles containing Bluetooth devices to travel between two or more Bluetooth sensors that are a known distance apart.

Bluetooth detectors are secretly spying on motorists in National Parks

To mitigate the deterioration of mobility and safety an innovative traffic data detection system is needed to provide drivers with real-time travel speeds and travel time information. The system must be visually unobtrusive (hidden) with minimal impact on viewsheds and disturbance of historical and cultural landscapes. IAI and its collaborator, Sabra, Wang and Associates will develop an innovative, low profile, low cost, low power, and light weight microwave radar with WiFi/Bluetooth sensors for vehicle detection and travel time monitoring.

In other words, the gov’t., is secretly spying on every vehicle visiting our National Parks.

To find out more about gov’t spying, read last week’s story ‘Big Brother wants to create 17.5 million spying motorists.’

In-pavement magnetic detectors can identify individual vehicles

image credit: precisiontrafficsafety

According to the DOT, arrays of magnetometers are installed in pavement at detection locations which can identify and match vehicles based on each vehicle’s unique magnetic signature. In-Pavement magnetic detectors, have close to 100 percent detection rate.

Bluetooth detectors spy on pedestrians

image credit Libelium

According to Meshilium, the idea is to be able to measure (spy on) the amount of people and cars which are present in a certain point at a specific time, allowing the study of the evolution of the traffic congestion of pedestrians and vehicles.

Users have to do nothing to be detected as the WiFi and Bluetooth radios integrated in their Smartphones periodically send a “hello!” message telling about their presence.

The information read from each user contains:

Bluetooth detectors spy on entire streets and floors of shopping malls

Applications related to shopping and street activities:

How to identify Bluetooth Sensors

8 thoughts on “Highway Bluetooth detectors are spying on motorists and pedestrians

    1. While Bluetooth capability can be turned off on a phone, who knows if that really solves the issue. For true privacy, any electronic devices with wireless capability should be left at home whenever possible.

      If you must travel with a cell phone, you can turn it off and keep it inside a conductor-lined “Faraday bag” (available at places like Amazon, though I hate to shop there) when you’re not using it. It won’t be able to send or receive signals while in the bag. Test it to be sure, of course, by trying to call the shielded phone (while it’s still powered on, obviously) from a different phone.

      Wrapping devices in aluminum foil can work the same way, but the thickness of foil required can be more than one might expect. Be sure to leave no gaps, and again, test it out.

      Cars that have Bluetooth capability should also allow you to deactivate it, but as with phones, who knows if there isn’t some secret way it can still be turned on. This is the sort of thing that we’d hope security researchers would discover and report at one of their conferences. If you really wanted to, you could find and disable the Bluetooth antenna.

  1. I’m glad I don’t have a cell phone, I’m sure as hell not getting one, and I’ll never own a new car for the same reasons. All of the electronic gadgetry they’re selling these days has spying devices built-in (the “internet of things”, as they call it).

    Your cell phone is your own personal spy, tracking movements, and giving them the ability to hear any conversation in your immediate area. By eliminating pay phones, they’ve made cell phones necessary to own for some people. A tiny piece of electronic tyranny right in your pocket.

    Your best defense is to boycott all of these gadgets. Get used to living a low-tech life, because you’re going to be dirt-poor soon enough, anyway. If people stopped buying them, they’d stop making them, but I don’t really expect that to happen. Americans are eager to own the latest gadgets whether they need them or not, just for the joy of being the first kid on the block to own the newest cool toy, or to avoid being the only one who doesn’t have one. They’ll sell their freedom for a trinket, because they don’t appreciate the importance of our constitutional rights, and they probably won’t until they see the unfolding tyranny reveal it’s complete, brutal, potential.

  2. Look for these to be used to monitor your speed and some day have speeding tickets sent to you in the mail. The powers that think they be will then issue tickets for going even one mile per hour over the posted (or not posted) limits.

    1. The problem would be who was driving the vehicle at the time of the alleged speeding? Sure some cities are already issuing tickets for speeding to the registered owner(more bs) of the vehicle not the driver your friend, cousin, uncle, aunt, daughter, wife, son so guess what dad you are on the hook for the actions of someone else. Don’t pay and your registration can and will be suspended allowing them to generate more revenue from any of the above listed drivers including you dad. Yeah try and fight it but it is just revenue generation and they are going to get the money sooner rather than later.

    2. I knew a fella who got a speeding ticket on the PA turnpike about 8yrs ago in the mail. Calculated distance/mph between booths was used.

      1. I have heard of the same thing being used via the nys thruway but this is why you stop at the rest area to kill the time curve and take a leak. Then proceed as normal but take into account that they are using double reading strips in the ground to read speed as you pass over these and send troopers out to the location.
        I have had nj state troopers pull out into traffic swaying left to right across all lanes in order to slow us all down one morning because we were all in the 90mph range which had triggered the double speed readers in the ground numerous times from all the cars.

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