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Bhang
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Posts: 641
Location: Classified |
RFID Spying
 Wed Mar 03, 2004 2:58 pm
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Hand in hand with Mech's post on RFID in $20 bills I dug up a wire on just how far this technology will go.
Radio Frequency Identification Spying
Lawmakers in several states this week are preparing rules to prevent Wal-Mart and other companies from using radio-frequency identification tags to spy on their customers.
In statehouses in Utah and California, and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, legislators and regulators discussed how retailers and government spies might use the data gathered from RFID tags to monitor consumers.
Utah's House of Representatives passed the first-ever RFID privacy bill this week, 47-23. Utah state Rep. David Hogue said that without laws to ensure consumer privacy, retailers will be tempted to match the data gathered by RFID readers with consumers' personal information.
"The RFID industry will carry the technology as far as they can," said Hogue, sponsor of the Radio Frequency Identification Right to Know Act. "Marketing people especially are going to love this kind of stuff."
Utah's Right to Know Act is based on federal legislation drafted by the consumer privacy group Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN. It requires all goods bearing functioning RFID tags in stores to be labeled as such. The bill will take effect May 5, 2005, if it is approved by the Utah state Senate and Utah Gov. Olene S. Walker.
California state Sen. Debra Bowen also introduced a bill intended to keep the data from RFID tags separate from consumers' personal information.
And officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston this week met with consumer advocates to learn how the information gathered from RFID tags might be used to monitor shoppers' movements and buying behavior.
By matching an RFID tag's unique electronic product code to a customer's loyalty card or credit card, a retailer could track a shopper's movements, and tailor its marketing pitches to whatever the customer is wearing or to the items in his or her cart.
CASPIAN director Katherine Albrecht also warned officials at the Federal Reserve that spies may want to track citizens with ubiquitous RFID readers embedded in public spaces. The readers could recognize tags that have been hidden inside shoes and other garments by manufacturers, she said.
Some lawmakers now say that RFID tags in retail items may further erode consumers' privacy. "There is clearly an upside for the industry," said Massachusetts state Sen. Jarrett Barrios, "but underlying that is a burden borne by the consumers. It's unnerving to me that the companies have no incentive to protect consumer privacy."
Barrios, who sponsored an aggressive antispam bill that passed the Massachusetts Senate last year, said he is concerned by any technology that threatens consumers' privacy. "And if the past is any indication," he said, "it will again (in the case of RFID tags) be up to legislators to protect consumers' personal information."
Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and Gillette want to use RFID tags to track every bottle of shampoo or packet of razor blades from the factory floor to the store shelf. RFID readers on so-called smart shelves in Wal-Mart will tally the shelves' contents continually, and make more-precise requests for inventory from the retailer's suppliers.
Retailers will have fewer empty shelves, and suppliers will eliminate wasteful overproduction of their goods, say proponents of RFID.
But shoppers are wary of RFID tags since Wal-Mart was caught secretly experimenting with the tags in its stores in Brockton, Massachusetts, and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, last year. "Some companies naively thought that privacy would not be an issue for consumers," said Mark Roberti, editor of RFID Journal, an RFID trade publication.
None of the retail tests of RFID tags invaded the privacy of shoppers in the Wal-Mart stores, Roberti said. He also said that RFID chips in building security passes and toll-booth tags have never been used to invade a citizen's privacy.
EPCglobal, which sets the technology standards for RFID tags in retail and in the supply chain, is promoting its own privacy policy and appointing a full-time policy executive to oversee privacy issues.
But privacy advocates do not trust retailers and suppliers to police themselves.
RFID technology is a surveillance tool that clearly can be misused, said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union. "To protect consumers, we need laws, not unenforceable policies," he said.
- Mark Baard
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Third eye vision. |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Wed Mar 03, 2004 7:07 pm
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Guess who's behind it all?
YOU WILL BE SCANNED, IMPLANTED, IDENTIFIED AND RECORDED EVERYWHERE....EVEN IN YOUR OWN HOME
Study: Homeland Security to Spur Biometrics Growth
DC Internet 12/20/02: Ryan Naraine
Original Link: http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/1559671
A technology research think-thank believes increased government spending by the newly-formed Department of Homeland Security will push growth in the biometric sector in the second half of 2003.
Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based research firm Allied Business Intelligence (ABI) said the use of biometrics -- authentication technology that uses biological characteristics -- by government agencies like the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) will lend credibility to the burgeoning industry.
The INS plans to spend big to integrate biometrics into its systems to monitor U.S. borders, technology that will include fingerprint scanning, face-recognition and other biological characteristics to identify felons within a database.
This increased dependence on the technology to enhance U.S. homeland security operations is expected to serve as the "catalyst" for the biometric industry, according to the study.
"The U.S. government remains the largest potential buyer of biometric technology...Deployments of biometric technology can occur earlier in 2003, depending on how quickly biometric vendors can integrate biometric technology into legacy security systems," said John Chang, the ABI analyst who wrote the report.
The ABI study found that government agencies garnered 15 percent of the total biometric industry revenue for 2002 and the sector is expected to generate $153 million in total revenue by the end of 2003.
Between 2000 and 2007, ABI is projecting total biometric revenue will grow almost 50 percent, ABI said.
Biometrics is generally used to describe the study of measurable biological characteristics. In computer security, biometrics refers to authentication techniques that rely on measurable physical characteristics that can be automatically checked. Examples include computer analysis of fingerprints or speech.
Industry watchers believe biometrics will play a major role in the computers, especially in the areas of e-commerce authentication. |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Wed Mar 03, 2004 7:09 pm
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Need further proof as to WHO is behind it?
**
02/23/04; Vol. 23 No. 4
Tag, you’re it: Defense pushes RFID to vendors
http://gcn.com/23_4/tech-report/24972-1.html
By William Jackson
GCN Staff
By January 2005, the 23,000 vendors selling goods to the Defense Department must begin to put radio-frequency identification tags on the smallest practical unit of packaging.
DOD wants to do more accurate tracking of the 4.6 million items needed by military personnel and systems at home and in the field. The undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics set the deadline last fall, but just what it will require of suppliers still is being worked out.
“Our policy is evolving,” said Ed Coyle, chief of the DOD Logistics Automatic Identification Technology Office. “Our goal is eventually to get to the individual item level. We don’t expect to be there in January 2005.”
The policy will have significant impact in the private sector. Advances in passive RFID tags have made their use practical for individual items—a revolution in inventory and supply systems.
DOD is collaborating with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which will require its top 100 suppliers to use passive RFID on pallets and cases by January 2005.
“It is not just in DOD’s and Wal-Mart’s interests but for the wider community as well,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark said. The economy “will benefit from the lessons learned and from lower-cost tags and readers under common standards,” she said.
RFID so far has been used primarily in industry-specific applications, said Scott Medford, vice president of global business development for Intermec Technologies Corp. of Richardson, Texas.
Moving RFID into the supply chain “takes the market from hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to billions,” Medford said.
Privacy concerns
Privacy advocates, however, argue that wide use of the tiny tags on consumer goods could expose everyone to electronic tracking.
“We have to be cautious,” Coyle said. “Implementation of RFID is a watershed event with the potential to reach into our lives in every way.”
DOD for the last decade has been using active RFID tags, which carry their own power supply, for internal distribution. They came into use after much of the materiel destined for troops during the first Gulf War stalled at depots and never reached the field.
The abandoned supplies “looked like the Korean War and like pictures I’ve seen of Havana during the Spanish-American War,” Coyle said.
By placing the tags on shipping containers and large pallets, the Defense Logistics Agency began tracking goods shipped through its facilities and locating the goods at the destination. It became a leader in the use of RFID to track inventory.
“We are much better than we were but not as good as we should be,” Coyle said.
Pushing the system back to the original supplier and down to the individual item has had to wait for the technology to mature. DOD’s active tags from Savi Technology Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., are reusable and can be read from about 300 feet. But they require their own batteries and cost about $100 each, so use is limited to large items such as shipping containers.
With the advent of passive tags that cost a dollar or less and use power generated by the reader’s RF signal, “the applications can get broader,” Coyle said.
The amount of data a passive tag stores—about 2K—is smaller than on an active tag. Its range also is shorter. It can be read from about 20 feet by a stationary reader and from five or six feet by a handheld device.
Two types of tags
“We think the time is right to move out,” Coyle said. “Our senior leadership has said, ‘You will do this.’ ”
DOD policy calls for continued use of the existing active tags while adding passive ones. The readers will integrate with the military’s existing tracking systems, and RFID events will be transactions of record.
The cheaper passive tags will go wherever they make sense, Coyle said: “We’re not going to put a 40-cent tag on a 25-cent package of gum. But a $1 tag on a pallet of meals-ready-to-eat makes sense.”
DOD held its first one-day vendor conference on RFID last year. Pilots using passive tags launched last month, and a second vendor summit will take place this month. A final policy incorporating the results of pilots, and the vendor summit is due by July.
The military’s expenses for implementing RFID will become part of the normal cost of transportation and logistics, funded through routine operations or working capital funds. DOD will provide the necessary equipment for vendors to meet its requirements.
Among the issues still to be worked out is the tags’ technical specification and the data they will carry. EPCglobal Inc. of Lawrenceville, N.J., is developing uniform Electronic Product Code standards for them.
“We need to get to one globally accepted standard protocol for reader-to-tag communications,” Wal-Mart’s Clark said. The company plans to buy readers that are software-upgradeable as standards develop.
DOD wants to take advantage of Wal-Mart’s experience with passive RFID, because “a lesson learned is a lesson learned,” Coyle said. Each organization can benefit from the other’s experience, and technology suppliers can benefit from both.
“I have a Wal-Mart person on our working group as a co-chair,” Coyle said. “The last thing we want is to establish separate patterns. There are more places where we are similar than where we are different.” |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Wed Mar 03, 2004 7:12 pm
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How RFID's Work.
How RFID works to keep identities straight
An RFID tag stores identifying data about the object to which it’s attached and responds to queries from a tag reader.
* Active tag: Has own power supply and long range; responds to a very-low-level radio-frequency signal from reader
* Passive tag: Has no power supply and shorter range; reflects RF energy from reader
* Semipassive tag: Communicates passively with reader but has internal power source to record environmental conditions
Reader: Can be fixed or mobile; queries tag and transmits response and location to a back-end logistics system.
http://www.nocards.org/
http://www.epic.org
http://www.spychips.com
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Mech on 03-03-2004] |
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Bhang
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Posts: 641
Location: Classified |
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Thu Mar 04, 2004 11:18 am
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Wal-Mart and the Devil are in cahoots!
When I make my millions I'll be buying A LOT of aluminum foil.
Hey Mech, have you ever considered writting a "New World Order Survival Guide"? I'm sure we all need it and it would sell like crazy.
I think these people might as well just clone a dude that walks around with us and keeps a diary of every move we take.
'Friday, May 24 0314: Mech wakes up and goes to bathroom. Mech takes big stinky poo. Mech falls back to sleep - snoring'
At least there is no need to be paranoid with that system and you would have a personal scribe to jot down everthing you ever did in your life. I mean it is just too crazy with all the secrecy. If your gonna make a New Order then just announce it in plain language so we can either be all for it or all aginst it. Then we can draw that line in the sand.
As far as RFID, I do not like it and it really creeps me out.
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Bhang on 03-04-2004] |
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Mech
Joined: 06 Jun 2001
Posts: 8237
Location: THE 4th REICH USA |
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Thu Mar 04, 2004 6:43 pm
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Lol! You're funny my man.
Have you ever considered writting a "New World Order Survival Guide"? I'm sure we all need it and it would sell like crazy.
Hmmm...
I probably would give it away for free.
Very good idea.
I have a lot of resources for something like that.
Bhang: "I think these people might as well just clone a dude that walks around with us and keeps a diary of every move we take."
They already are researching that. Type in LIFELOG into a search engine.
[Edited 2 times, lastly by Mech on 03-04-2004] |
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