QUESTIONS have been raised about why Government’s new Electronic Vehicle Registration (EVR) initiative, which calls for the installation of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags in cars and trucks as of next month, does not include motorcycles and mopeds. It is hoped the RFID tags will reduce the number of vehicles operating without a licence — estimated to be in the region of just under 6,000 — and translates into a loss of $11 million a year because Government is unable to enforce licensing requirements.

While the new system is being welcomed by many, Government’s decision not to tag the more than 22,000 motorcycles on Bermuda’s roads is being questioned by the Opposition, especially as the majority of traffic offenders are believed to be motorbike owners.

Opposition MP John Barritt said it made a “mockery” of the system and is calling on Government to review the system which goes into effect in a week.

“I understand the concerns that people have raised (and) we need to understand what it is we’re dealing with,” he said.

Mr. Barritt added that while the new system would be used to identify uninsured and unlicensed vehicles, it was important to see what other capabilities existed, and how the Government planned to ensure fines were paid.

“There needs to be a balance,” he said.

This concern was also raised by another Opposition MP, Trevor Moniz, who welcomed the new technology, but felt that unless the Government was able to enforce these new rules, it would all be “pointless”.

He said for years no one paid parking fines because there was no enforcement of this law, and questioned how Government planned to ensure offenders paid under the new system.

At present, traffic police manually enforce all vehicle inspections and issue fines, but under the new system, the RFID tags, embedded inside supposed tamper-resistant labels, will be placed inside the windscreen in all cars and trucks.

When a vehicle arrives at an intersection where a vehicle-detection system is placed, and no RFID tag is detected, the system will automatically take a picture of the car’s licence plate.

These numbers are run through a database and a court summons is automatically issued.

The Transport Control Department estimates it will take about a year to get the system operational and expects to utilise about 25,000 tags, since 22,000 of the island’s 47,000 vehicles are motorcycles, which will not be tagged.

At this point, it is still unclear as to whether motorcycles will be tagged in the future.

The company manufacturing both the tags and the detection system, Transcore, recommended these interrogators be placed at 20 separate intersections around the island, but Bermuda’s legislature only approved four reading points.

An independent IT expert working for TCD, David Burt, told the press: “We decided to start small and increase. Additional readers meant an additional deployment risk.”

However, TCD does plan to deploy tripod-mounted and hand-held interrogators to screen vehicles at random locations.

There is also the question of the electronic tags infringing on civil liberties, but Mr. Moniz said he did not buy the “Big Brother” argument and was not bothered by the fact that anyone would know where his car was parked, or where he was driving at any given time.

The “Big Brother” idea has also been discredited by TCD, which states on its web site that the system is “designed to verify information about the vehicle itself, not the driver”, and “is neither an efficient nor effective means for real-time tracking”.

It added: “In order to continuously track a motor vehicle would require readers every 15-20 feet along a roadway — a system that is simply not economically feasible.”

Online, certain flaws pointed out by cryptographers raise serious questions about the suitability of the current RFIDs.

This Mid-Ocean News reporter was able to find 482,000 online links on ways to disable the device, sometimes using technology no more sophisticated than a common cell phone or a piece of aluminium foil.

Renowned cryptographer Adi Shamir of Weizmann University in Israel claimed to have found a way to bypass the encryption scheme and obtain the self-destruct password.

“Everyone expects that there will soon be billions of these tags in circulation. We bought one of the major-brand RFID tags and tried to break into it by power analysis,” he reports.

He explains (online) that RFID tags have no battery or internal power source; they obtain the energy they need to operate by sucking it out of the radio signals they absorb. But in doing so, every computation of the RFID circuit modifies the radio environment.

Mr. Shamir and his co-workers used a simple directional antenna to monitor the power consumption of an RFID tag as they transmitted correct and incorrect passwords to the device slowly, one bit at a time.

“We could easily notice a power spike after the first bit that the chip didn’t like,” he said.

By starting over and modifying the offensive bit, the researchers were able to derive quickly the kill password for the tag.

“We believe that a cell phone has all the ingredients needed to detect these passwords and disable all the RFIDs in the area,” Mr. Shamir said.

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