Tanker Truck Shut Down Via Satellite

unassimilatible writes "Satellite Security Systems, in cooperation with the California Highway Patrol and InterState Oil Company, demonstrated the first wireless remote shutdown of a fully loaded, moving gas tanker truck. Described as "a viable solution to the challenge of controlling rogue hazardous waste vehicles that could pose a threat to homeland security," satellite communications were used to disable the truck in seconds, 530 miles from the demonstration site. But that's not all. California Assembly Bill (AB) 575 (PDF link) would require truck disabling devices, global positioning or other 'location reporting systems' on all hazardous material haulers. With all of the police pursuits in California, can mandatory GPS and disabling devices in all vehicles be far away?"

Hazardous Waste is a far cry from everyone

[Ececheira]

Trucks that get Hazmat certification already are very highly regulated, far more so than normal trucks and passenger cars.

Requiring them to have onboard GPS with remote deactivation makes sense here, and I don't think that just because hazmat tucks have it that it will be forced upon everyone. Commercial traffic, especially hazmat, has far less 4th amendment protections than your average joe.

Re:Power Steering

[Alioth]

It's perfectly possible to "shut down" a vehicle without stopping the engine. Simply have the "shut down" system set the engine power to idle and automatically apply the brakes. An idling engine still produces power for the accessories (power steering pump).

Also, a truck braking system is a lot different to your car. I often drive a fairly small truck (only 7.5 tonnes) but the braking system is radically different from that of your car. They are AIR BRAKES. Air brakes will fail safe - loss of pressure in the resevoir will cause the brakes to apply, unlike car brakes which "fail unsafe" where loss of vacuum to the servo will make braking considerably harder (OK, they don't stop working completely, but an elderly woman in a Buick wouldn't be able to apply enough foot pressure for an emergency brake application if her engine quit. If she has manual transmission though, the engine being driven by the wheels will still provide enough vacuum). Unlike your car's servo assisted brakes, which are hydraulic brakes assisted by vacuum off the engine manifold, air brakes will provide many braking applications before needing the resevoirs charging, and if the resevoir pressure gets too low, the brakes automatically apply anyway.

Um, how is this the first?

[Llewrend]

I'm the sysadmin at a trucking company and we've had kill switches on engines as well as gps tracking for a long time. Most major carriers do, if not for hazmat, for pharmacuticals and baby formula. In fact, we have flowthrough to our EDI system so that our customers can track thier own loads if they want to and stop calling us about it. Anyone ever heard of AIRIQ?

Re:So much for homeland security

[velo_mike]

Actually if you want to look it up, most of the erosion of rights like this started with the clinton administration. Bush is merely has been keeping the status quo

Now I'm not debating the erosion of rights under clinton, but let's not pretend that he started the ball rolling.

Remember Regan's "war on some drugs" which has given us asset forfeiture , drug tests, mandatory minimum's and long jail substances for users (violating the 4th ammendment). Remember also that Ed Meese, Regan's attorney general,tried valiantly to outlaw pornography and other "filth".

Re:So much for homeland security

[Llewrend]

Actually, in practice the safest way to stop a truck is not to cut off it's engine while its running but to make it unable to restart once it sotps. We do this from time to time but not often as its best not let the driver know that we can kill his engine (generally we'll shut off his fuel card instead).

Also, we use GPS on our tractors and our trailers and the unit in the tractor is mounted behind the glovebox, antenna and all, there's nothing external to 'see' so unless you knew what you were looking for you wouldn't know it was there. The only external pieces is a little red LED that will blink if some one here wants the driver to call in.

Re:I don't really think it bad

[SirLanse]

New cars have "Black Box" recorders for the industry to examine for airbag data.
Courts are now using this in crash cases.

Modern Marvels show

[ripcrd]

I think it was modern marvels a couple of months ago that had an hour long show about Haz-Mat Transportation. I used to be in the shipping business and had to deal with Haz-Mats so I was interested. They road along with a trucker that had all the Haz-Mat certs and endorsements and showed the GPS tracking, tracking station, remote guage reading, remote kill, etc. They talked to Chem-Trec that pretty much was the first to track Haz-Mats end-to-end, pick-up to delivery. They talked about the placarding system and how that started.

They started placarding trains carrying dynamite and separating the explosives from the passenger cars. (Salesmen were going on trains with a satchel full of TNT which was their product demo kit.) After several trains blew up in transit, they decided to put explosives only in separate freight cars. When they used the first placards on trains some good 'ol boys in the countryside would shoot at the placards for target practice. Just like they do with stop signs. Several more trains blew up. Big surprise.

Then the show talked about special handling and transportation containers for stuff like nuclear waste. No Homer Simpson here, they are REAL careful with this stuff. They made a container that was so tough that they broadsided it with a train engine at 90 miles and hour and it just put a little ding on the outside and no cracks.

It was a really cool show if you are interested in this stuff, but as others have stated, this is hardly new technology. It's easily several years old.

Must keep terrorists from learning electronics!

[Xeger]

People have been slapping LoJack and other vehicle recovery systems onto their cars for years, yet cars still get stolen. If your car is valuable enough, high-tech thieves will always be able to disable any alarm or tracking system you have installed. They can drive the car into a shielded garage (or simply deep into an underground garage) and work on it at their leisure, without being tracked.

The principle at work here is identical to the principle that drives software piracy. If someone gets hold of your protected object and has free reign to do anything he wants to its guts, then any protection you can built into the object is surmountable given a sufficiently determined cracker/thief with the right tools.