I had a short email exchange with the editor, though with the lack of journalistic integrity I seriously hesitate to treat it as a news organization.

First off, I don’t consider myself a security researcher. It’s an interesting field, but I haven’t the time to pursue it. I did, however, want to give the author the benefit of the doubt; give him an opportunity to see the light. The editor’s responses were scathing, and usually meant to belittle me or Nate (why me, though, I’m still unsure. I didn’t do the research, I was simply letting him know Nate isn’t a nobody).

I linked him to the blog entry, and I’m fairly certain he didn’t read it. He feels the privacy concerns are unfounded, since if the govt wanted to spy on you they’d use cameras and OCR software to snap pictures of your license plate and record your movements that way. Nevermind that OCR software isn’t reliable, people don’t always have a license plate visible from the location the picture is snapped from, license plates can be swapped out, or covered with dirt/debris that may cause the OCR software to fail, is more expensive than RFID technology to implement, etc etc.

My opinion is he’s a tool. A real journalist would bother to examine the facts.

I’m hoping some good will come out of all this and some longstanding privacy issues will be addressed, along with the particular implementation issues I will present.

Now I’m not a journalist, but that sample of prose from the article makes the writer look like someone tasked with containing the damage, and doing a piss poor job of it.

“(Root Labs doesn’t have an operational website which for a technology company hardly inspires confidence.)”

Funny that; for the heck of it, I put Nate Lawson into that search engine thingy, which directed me to http://www.root.org/~nate/, where again, the very first link directed me to http://www.rootlabs.com/.

C’mon, I’ve witnessed the deterioration of journalistic standards for a few years now, but that kind of drivel has reached an altogether new level of pathetic. The writer must know that: he didn’t even sign it.

Gosh, I hope this doesn’t rile you as much as it does me =)

Keep up the excellent work, Nate. Looking forward to your talk.