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Railroads finding hidden freight car trackers
It seems to me that a logical step would be to ask the makers of the AEI readers to only sell their devices to an actual railroad company and not just anybody who walks in off the street with enough money to buy them.
The arrogance of some who think they are above the law and have a right to obtain information even if trespassing on private property without their permission truely offends me. Hope the railroads go after them hard and heavy.
What’s the difference between this and a guy with pad of paper and a pencil? Or a guy with a video camera? Or video a camera aimed at the train with character recognition on the back end?
You still don’t have shipper, receiver or commodity, so what’s the big deal?
A different tactic employed in counter intelligence would perhaps be more effective.
Say nothing. Feed your adversary’s intelligence source false data. Let your adversary run with false data and be discredited.
What a strange story! Congrats to Trains for doing some good journalism; i’m excited to see how this all unfolds.
I’m torn about the implications of this. The company definitely shouldn’t be trespassing to do this, but as long as their devices are truly passive and they are conducting their activities on private property, i’m not sure the railroads can or should have any say in this. Still, the invasive nature of this approach makes it understandable that the railroads would take a defensive posture.
Either way I think the railroads should to do much more than simply insinuate that this is a security risk. They either need to prove that’s the case or just admit that this is an inconvenience to their existing business practices.
I’m not sure if they can get much useful information this way; as others have pointed out all that they’re going to get is that a certain car passed a certain point. I’m not sure that they can even tell which way the car is going, so how would they differentiate between loads and empties on bulk moves like coal and oil?
This is a strange story. It doesn’t seem like the company is trespassing on railroad property since the story says the device was located “near” the Conrail right of way and the company had some kind of agreement with a property owner to connect with a power source. As another poster said, just knowing the car numbers wouldn’t provide the the content of the car or where it was headed. I 'm very interested as to how this will turn out.
Common sense tells me that in this day and age of computers, just being able to track a railcar and its location will tell anyone, who has the initiative, where the car is headed, time and place it was loaded, or if it’s empty. If you’re a thief, it would enable you to be able to locate cargo worth stealing. Or something worse. Consider that DOD also ships munitions by rail.
Trespassing? Come on. The industry encourages it.
You need an FCC license to use the radio frequency and power these readers emit. At the very least if they do not posses one for each location they are violating a Federal law. I am a retired RR Comm. Engineer.
Dennis Sproul
AEI readers are used by many companies other than railroads. Shippers use them to read pertinent information on cars prior to loading, so the idea of controlling access to them would be rather tough. There are even hand-held versions available. I think its very suspicious that they are painted or molded in a color that makes them blend in. This leads me to believe that ClipperData knows they shouldn’t be placing these. Usually an AEI reader must be within 8 feet of the equipment tag, so there really is no way to install these without trespassing…
If you crank them up to full power and don’t care about cross reads from adjacent tracks they will work 20-25 feet away.
Dennis Sproul
FWIW. There is a law on the books about interception of coded radio signals(ie data transmission). I don’t know how this would apply to simply sending out a signal and waiting for replies. In the case of the “lease” it sounds like like they sought and received permission from the property owner. I am kind of surprised that the company did not have a confidentiality clause in the lease.
Also did they paint or specify the subdued colour or was it just random chance.
Do I think it’s a good idea or not. Not sure. If the railroads were a little more open about their data might not be an issue. IE where’s my cargo?
As I read the article, the lease with the homeowner whose property in near the RR right-of-way, was for the use of electricity, not placement of the reader. The photo clearly shows a wire coming from above the reader.
Mr. Sproul I would think the FCC license would only be needed if they emit RF and from what I’ve read here they only receive.
Mr. Coburn, I have licensed and installed / maintained these for my RR. They are transmitters in the 900 Mhz band. They work by sending a signal that returns modulated with the digital code of the tag on the equipment.
Dennis
Many informed comments, many legal issues, a lotta haha. Just think of VW transposed to the ROW. Now the collective paranoia factor gets a boost.
It’d be an interesting legal challenge I think. I’m sure the railroads will argue it’s proprietary data, but it’s not a lot different than having your toll tag read by anyone who wants to read it (and if you think it’s just the tollgates reading them, guess again). Clipper I would expect to argue that the car identifier returned by the AEI scan has been released into the public view. It’s not encrypted. And it could be obtained through machine vision techniques installed on private property close to trackside as well.
It was pointed out that you can’t do much in terms of gleaning proprietary railroad operating strategies with equipment ids only. But “not much” doesn’t mean zero in the world of big data. Get enough strategically located readers and you can get theoretically car cycle times and route segments those cars travel on. Also whether line segments are approaching capacity. Etc. Etc. You’d need more than a couple dozen readers though.
I agree the camo coloring indicates that they realize it’s marginal, and they wanted to keep it stealth for as long as possible.
“The one in Wyoming reportedly interfered with BNSF Railway track equipment.”
This is where the RR’s may have a good case against ClipperData - as Paula said, these units need to transmit in order to interrogate the AEI tags, which is going beyond using a pen and pad to record the passing of the cars.