Remington ELSAG wins GAO contract

Remington: it’s not just for guns anymore. Readers may already have heard that the country’s oldest firearms manufacturer teamed up in 2004 with ELSAG to market license plate scanning technology in North America. The arrangement is now starting to bear fruit. Remington ELSAG this week announced that it had won a contract with the General Services Administration (GSA) to provide the federal government with its RELES Mobile Plate Hunter 900 and Fixed Plate Hunter 900 through 2010. As with all such technology, the Remington ELSAG technology is attached to police vehicles and automatically identifies suspect vehicles or captures data, including GPS location, for later analysis. Remington ELSAG’s license plate readers are currently deployed by over 200 U.S. state, local, and federal agencies, and although little is known about which agencies will be using the system, a hint is provided in the company’s press release: “The RELES LPR systems can read plates from all U.S. states and most foreign countries, including Arabic characters.”