You can drive from Boston to Chicago without picking up a single ticket from a toll booth, or handing money to a single toll booth worker. You can do this because of E-ZPass, a small plastic brick mounted in most cars in the Northeast United States. The E-ZPass contains an RFID transponder linked to your checking account. Yes, it’s convenient, and yes, it is a way for the government to track your movements remotely without your knowledge.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jordan] is peering into that suspicious white box on his dashboard and adding notifications to his E-ZPass. He’s upgraded his E-ZPass with a little bit of circuitry to his to notify him when it is being scanned, whether it’s at a turnpike plaza or just driving three blocks through midtown Manhattan.

A notification system for the E-ZPass brick has been around for a few years now thanks to a talk by [Pukingmonkey] at DEF CON. Because of this simple circuit, we know the NYPD is collecting E-ZPass data of people driving around Manhattan. Why? Something something sovereign citizen or thereabouts.

[Jordan] is taking the E-ZPass notification system a bit farther than previous builds and adding a logging functionality with a small GPS module. Of course [Jordan]’s build will still have blinkey LEDs for notifying him when the E-ZPass is read, but by logging this data to an SD card, he’ll be able to play a road trip back on his computer and do a proper expense report. Security research while collecting expense data; it doesn’t get better than that.