MLJ Part 3

John had done some research for the Monday lunch time walk.

As they strolled the sidewalks through the buildings, John described the basics of the California FastTrak system.

"Here's the deal.  The FastTrak box is a transponder that is operating in the 900 megahertz band.  There is a battery in the original models -- I didn't think they had one -- the new ones are wired to the car's power."

"900 megahertz ought to sound familiar as it's used for cordless phones.  The speed traps do a couple of things.  They send a pulse to the transponder and read the reply.  The transponders send an account number and the speed of the car.  The speed trap then sends that information and the value of the speed limit to a database.  Software is there looking for violations and recording location and time information along with the account number."

"The account number is connected to a human and if there is a violation, you get a notice and a fine.  If it's a bridge toll, then it just pulls money from your account and if needed will pull money from the credit card attached to the account."

"Now, the amusing part of this is that we can easily tap broadcasts in the 900 megahertz range.  That hardware has been around for a long time.  It's a frequency dedicated to local communications and standard HAM gear can tune to it."

"What's the next step"" ask Mark.

"We have to do a couple of things.  We need some kind of portable recorder to read some messages.  The transponder reader passes the data off to another network which provides the connection to the database."

"What are we going to do to the system?" asked Luke.  They were looping around Lake Houseman, just off the main cafeteria.  It was really a flood control pond.  Pond being a generous term.  But it provided reeds and some birds and it was rumored to contain a few of the red legged frogs, which were high up the list of endangered Californian species.  The walkers would see them dead on the path on occasion, victims of the hot California sun.

"That's the million dollar question.  If we can get into the system we can do normal database things, like deleting items and searching, etc.  But we can't just erase our speeding tickets.  There should be log files that would record deletions and that would lead back to us.  And there have to be backups.  So they could restore the database if we just destroyed it. No, if we want to make the system obsolete we need a different approach."

Lunch was over as they returned to building 350.  They grabbed afternoon beverages from the snack bar and got back to work.