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Congress Discusses Forced Chipping of Border Violaters ... This was heard this morning with congress people and judges discussing the border.
Latest things in the Mark of the Beast Venue:
The Fatherland Card implemented for Social Behavior in Venezeula, Complements of the Chinese
Australia inserting microchips into Money
China Microchipping Student Uniforms
Radio Frequency Identification technology, or RFID, is being used in a number of settings from grocery stores and other retail outlets, to keeping track of pets and cattle, to license plates and passports. But the RFID systems are a clear threat to privacy, and recent history has shown that over-reliance on any kind of computer technology can be a disaster when the computers replace common sense.
More recently, many people have become convinced that it won't be long until everyone is required to accept RFID tags embedded in their skin. When the chips are implanted, they will leave a mark, and without that mark, many people believe that it will be impossible to buy or sell anything.
Before that day arrives, RFID systems will be used in a number of supposedly beneficial applications so that we can see what a great tool it could be for fighting terrorism and illegal immigration and all sorts of other problems. But remember, cattle are branded for the benefit of the farmer, not the cows. And when government officials assure you that RFID tags can't be copied, cloned or read by unauthorized snoops, don't believe it.
While barcodes have historically been the primary means of tracking products, RFID systems are rapidly becoming the preferred technology for keeping tabs on people, pets, products, and even vehicles. One reason for this is because the read/write capability of an active RFID system enables the use of interactive applications. Also, the tags can be read from a distance and through a variety of substances such as snow, fog, ice, or paint, where barcodes have proved useless.*
A parallel technology involves the widespread use of license plate readers.
You may voluntarily forfeit your privacy by the use of a supermarket discount card, but you may not be aware of other technology working to identify who buys what, and where it all goes. Unlike barcodes, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) chips make it possible to identify someone or something at a considerable distance from the reader. That could be really convenient at the grocery store, or it could be a real problem if you don't like to be followed, probed and audited wherever you go.
Another way to sacrifice your privacy, inadvertently or not, is through the use of OnStar, which is like asking — no, paying — a benevolent Big Brother to follow you around in case you have a wreck or get lost in a strange city. That's all perfectly okay, but the integrity of the system depends on people doing the right thing all the time, which (obviously) isn't always the case. If Uncle Sam (the IRS, FBI, or CIA) wanted to follow you around, the OnStar system would be the handiest tool to use.
If you are interested in RFID issues, you may consider Toll Road RFID Tags and license plate scanners to be a threat to privacy, anonymity and individual liberty. Unfortunately, the courts have ruled that there can be no expectation of privacy or anonymity on the highway.
Is 'Biochipping' A Good Idea? [Jowan] Österlund's Biohax is already making progress on a small scale. It has "chipped" more than 4,000 people in Sweden as well as others across Europe. Though many biochip projects are focused on health uses like heart-rate or blood-sugar monitoring, Österlund is so far marketing his chips to people with no medical ailments. Applications range from making purchases to opening locks to passing through security barriers — anything, really, that we're already doing with chips on plastic cards.
Australia Inserting Nano-Chips in $50 & $100 Bills to Track Underground Economy & Coming Barter System. While the BitCoin people have hated me for not agreeing with them that a private currency could displace the currencies of all nations and BitCoin would be the new "reserve currency" killing the dollar, to me they are in serious need of help. They have ZERO comprehension of governmental power and ZERO understanding of what is going on behind the curtain. The IMF has come out and stated that each nation should issue their own cryptocurrency and these fools cheers claiming I am not with it and do not get this new age of technology. Sorry, but these people are really clueless if not perhaps undercover people with a mission to get people willing to surrender their final liberty — paper money.
Schools in China introduce 'smart uniforms' with GPS chips to track students' movements and stop napping. Schools in China have created uniforms with tracking chips to monitor students' whereabouts and stop them playing truant. The so-called "smart uniforms", which have been criticised on social media, record the time and date a student enters the school and a short video parents can see through a mobile app. Eleven schools in the southwest province of Guizhou have introduced the uniforms, developed by local tech firm Guizhou Guanyu Technology. Skiving off classes triggers an alarm to notify both teachers and parents of the student's absence and an automatic voice alarm is activated if a student leaves school without permission.
How many passwords can you remember? Get ready to remember more. Got too many passwords to remember? Just wait. It's going to get a lot worse. Average consumers five years from now may face double the demands for passwords, said Emmanuel Schalit, chief executive of Dashlane, a consumer password security company. Schalit and other experts predict that passwords will explode in further use before they eventually fade, replaced by new technology. Digital devices in homes are growing more numerous, but Schalit said the real driver behind the steady increase in the need for passwords are the sprawling number of accounts for consumers to obtain public services, interact on healthcare and education websites and deal with retailers.
The Editor says... As digital transactions become more ubiquitous and less anonymous, and data breaches become more likely to affect more users, and cash is accepted in fewer places, the pressure will build to adopt some sort of digital verification, most likely in the form of a National ID number, carried on an RFID chip in your hand or your forehead. The convenience will only be temporary. The repercussions will last literally forever, according to Revelation, the last book in the Bible:
Wisconsin Tech Company Three Square Market Known for Microchipping Employees Rolling Out Global Tracking Chip. Last year we reported to you about the tech company in Wisconsin, Three Square Market, that created a human implantable microchip to control devices we interact with everyday. The story created a huge end times 'buzz' felt around the world as Bible believers immediatly made the connection between this and the prophesied Mark of the Beast the Bible tells us about.
In Sweden, cash is almost extinct as people implant microchips into their hands to pay for purchases. More than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips in their hands, allowing them to pay for rail travel and food, or enter keyless offices, with a wave. Just a few years ago, there were a couple of hundred of people in Sweden using human implantable microchips. The a thousand, then a few thousand, and now Sweden leads the world in microchip purchases. Cash in Sweden now accounts for only 1% of all transactions, and a full 50% of all Swedish banks will not accept cash deposits.
Credit Card Chips Fail to Halt Fraud, Survey Says. New chip-enabled credit cards, which were rolled out to U.S. consumers starting in 2015, were supposed to put an end to rampant credit card fraud. So much for that. A new report from the research firm Gemini Advisory has found that, of more than 60 million cases of credit card theft in the last 12 months, a whopping 93% of the stolen cards had the new chip technology. This represents a major setback for the technology, known as the EMV standard, which is named after the companies (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) that created it.
Are you ready for a chip implant? You walk into a grocery store and pick up eggs. No smartphone? No problem. You swipe your hand across a reader, and the amount is deducted from your bank account. If that sounds far-fetched, you obviously haven't been to Sweden recently, where thousands of people have reportedly had chips implanted in their bodies. A company called Biohax has already "installed" around 4,000 chips in customers, inserted just below the thumb.
This firm already microchips employees. Could your ailing relative be next? The technology company Three Square Market made headlines last year for implanting microchips in the arms of nearly 100 employees, allowing them to open doors, log on to their computers and purchase snacks from company vending machines with a simple swipe of their arm. The chips were initially little more than an innovative novelty, but now the Wisconsin-based company — which designs software for vending machines — has a more ambitious plan, according to chief executive Todd Westby. During an appearance on CNBC, Westby said his company is working on a more sophisticated microchip that is powered by human body heat and includes GPS tracking capabilities and voice activation. Microchips with GPS tracking may strike some as the first step toward handing our autonomy over to Skynet-like government overlords, and Three Square Market officials acknowledge that the chips will offer a convenient way to track people — especially those suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia.
Lawmaker Proposes Implanting Microchips in People to Track Non-Violent Offenders Like "Pets". This Tuesday [8/7/2018], Toledo City Councilman Rob Ludeman suggested that criminals be implanted with microchips so they can be tracked by police and the courts. Ludeman also made comments essentially describing people charged with crimes as animals. The councilman said, "this can't be inhumane because we do it to our pets." Ludeman suggested that implantable microchips should be used instead of ankle bracelets for people doing time on house arrest because ankle bracelets don't work on the cop shows that he watches.
A Wisconsin company will let employees use microchip implants to buy snacks and open doors. A Wisconsin company called Three Square Market is going to offer employees implantable chips to open doors, buy snacks, log in to computers, and use office equipment like copy machines. Participating employees will have the chips, which use near field communication (NFC) technology, implanted between their thumb and forefinger. It's an extension of the long-running implantable RFID chip business, based on a partnership with Swedish company Biohax International. The vending kiosk company, also known as 32M, will "chip" employees at a party on August 1st. Around 50 people are supposedly getting the optional implants.
Wisconsin Company To Implant Microchips In Employees. A Wisconsin company is about to become the first in the U.S. to offer microchip implants to its employees. Yes, you read that right. Microchip implants. "It's the next thing that's inevitably going to happen, and we want to be a part of it," Three Square Market Chief Executive Officer Todd Westby said. The company designs software for break room markets that are commonly found in office complexes. Just as people are able to purchase items at the market using phones, Westby wants to do the sam thing using a microchip implanted inside a person's hand.
Chip del Repuve Obligatorio en Mexico. El Repuve (Registro Público Vehicular) es un proyecto a nivel nacional, que consiste en el Registro Público de Veh'culos previo cumplimiento de un proceso de validación de información, además de ser un instrumento de información del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública. Para todos los autos nuevos de agencia, ya salen con el registro en la base de datos, ademús de tener pegada la calcoman'a del Chip del REPUVE que es un engomado o calcoman'a, que tiene un código de barras que puede ser escaneado con un aparato de manera inmediata y saber el estatus legal en que se encuentra el automóvil. También mostrara la información del NIV.
Translation by Google: The REPUVE (Public Vehicle Registry) is a project at the national level, which consists of the Public Registry of Vehicles following compliance with a process of validation of information, in addition to being an information tool of the National Public Security System. For all new agency cars, they already come with the registration in the database, in addition to having pasted the chip sticker REPUVE which is a sticker or decal, which has a bar code that can be scanned with a device immediately and know the legal status of the car. Also it will show the information of the NIV.
The Editor says... The MX_XM logo is obviously a dipole antenna for the RFID chip — without which the chip will not work. The article above was brought to my attention by a reader in Mexico, who reports a rapidly increasing number of tag readers on the highways. This is a system that can locate a car quickly, if the car is on one of those highways; and at the very least, the system can report the last known location of a specific car. This would make "Amber Alerts" obsolete. It would also make it impossible for someone to move freely from place to place without being followed by the government. That's an idea most Americans would oppose — I hope.
They Thought She Was Crazy: Doctor Extracts RFID Chip From Sex Trafficking Victim. The patient in question was a 28-year-old woman who claimed that she had a GPS tracking device planted in her body. Normally a patient like that would be regarded as crazy, but this woman appeared totally sane, and she had an incision mark on her side. So the doctor decided to check her out anyway. The medical staff at the hospital were stunned when they finally gave her an x-ray. "Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice. But it's there. It's unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that's saying something." It turns out that it wasn't a GPS device, but an RFID chip.
Delta Airlines to Use RFID Microchips an All Luggage: Unveils $50 Million Dollar Tracking System. Now that everyone has gotten used to having a smart device attached to them at all times, it is the perfect time to begin tagging everything we touch with RFID microchips. Once people accept that, the tagging and chipping of humans will be next.
NFL likely to insert data chips into game balls in preseason, Thursdays. The NFL is finalizing plans to insert custom-made data chips into the game balls used in the 2016 preseason and Thursday night regular-season games, a league source said Sunday night. The data would be used for research that could spark significant changes in officiating, kicking and other areas as soon as the 2017 season. The Toronto Sun reported earlier Sunday that the league would use chips in K-balls to help determine the potential impact of narrowing the goalposts sometime in the future.
FDA & VeriChip try to Spin Spy Chip Scandal. After a recent investigation by the Associated Press uncovered the fact that substantial evidence exists, linking FDA-approved, human-implantable spychips, manufactured by VeriChip Corporation, with cancers found in numerous lab animals and at least one pet dog, both the FDA and VeriChip have been in full spin mode, trying to avoid a full-scale investigation that has the potential to bring down not only VeriChip, but quite possibly former Health and Human Services Secretary, Tommy Thompson. It's important to note that Thompson, who was Secretary of the department that oversaw the FDA, at the time that VeriChip received its FDA approval for their spychip, resigned that post just two weeks after that approval and within five months, held a very lucrative position on the board of directors of both VeriChip and its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions.
Chip cards? Most small business owners unaware of upcoming credit card transaction changes. A majority of small-businesses owners are unaware of an impending shift that could leave them liable for fraud committed with a new generation of chip-imbedded credit cards.
All American Credit Cards Will Disappear in 2015 and be Replaced with RFID Chip Technology. The new EMV credit card system in the U.S. is set to be rolled out by October, 2015. Also going away is the ability to sign for your purchases, that will no longer be necessary. Instead, you will enter a PIN to verify that you are the holder of the card. Removing the human element is one more step in the march towards the Mark Of The Beast system that will be in place during the Tribulation under the Antichrist. Obviously, all this is leading to a microchip being placed inside every human being, which would be the only way to guarantee that your card will not be lost or stolen.
PayPal wants to implant passwords in your stomach and your brain. PayPal is working on a new generation of embeddable, injectable and ingestible devices that could replace passwords as a means of identification. Jonathan LeBlanc, PayPal's global head of developer evangelism, claims that these devices could include brain implants, wafer-thin silicon chips that can be embedded into the skin, and ingestible devices with batteries that are powered by stomach acid. These devices would allow "natural body identification," by monitoring internal body functions like heartbeat, glucose levels and vein recognition, Mr LeBlanc told the Wall Street Journal.
Chip and Quill: How EMV Will Increase Card Fraud in the U.S. First, while the U.S. accounts for 25 percent of global card volume, it attracts 50 percent of all card fraud — because we still rely on magnetic stripes and signatures in cursive to secure and verify card transactions. Fun fact #1: Cursive was invented to prevent lifting your quill from the page and blotting ink all over your scroll. I'm not kidding. In response to better pen and ink technologies developed decades ago (not to mention word processing), schools are finally phasing out instruction in cursive writing. Fun fact #2: In a very recent non-scientific study conducted only by me, I concluded that humans are incapable of reproducing signatures on point-of-sale (POS) terminals that don't draw their sobriety into question — not that it matters since no one's checking them anyway. And since no one's checking them, signatures are not a reliable source of identification, and they are completely useless in preventing lost-and-stolen card fraud.
Editor's note: EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, a global standard for inter-operation of integrated circuit cards (IC cards or "chip cards") and IC card capable point of sale (POS) terminals and automated teller machines (ATMs), for authenticating credit and debit card transactions.
Man embeds computer chips in hands to store Bitcoin. A Dutch entrepreneur has had two wireless computer chips implanted under the skin in his hands to allow him to store digital currencies like Bitcoin inside his body. Martijn Wismeijer is the founder of Mr Bitcoin, a company which installs and operates crypto-currency cash machines in and around his native Amsterdam and across Europe. This month he chose to undergo a painful procedure to embed NFC (near-field communication) chips under his skin.
Latest Obama order aims to combat identity theft, data breaches. President Obama signed an executive order on Friday [10/17/2014] designed to increase Americans' financial security and strengthen protections against identity theft. The new "BuySecure" initiative is an attempt to expedite the transition away from debit and credit cards with magnetic strips, a dated technology that's more vulnerable to intrusion, and toward cards with microchips and PIN numbers, which are considered more secure. Under the order, starting next year, all government-issued cards will make use of the newer technology.
The Editor says... Once the federal government standardizes a practice of this seemingly innocuous sort, it soon becomes a federal mandate for private businesses. Mr. Obama is merely getting the ball rolling. Not by signing a law passed by Congress of course, just an exercise of his own authoritarian power. The RFID chips are in the cards for now, but I suspect that when this system is shown to be inadequate, the RFID chip will have to be in your hand or you forehead. Notice also that any action the government does not want you to notice is taken on Friday afternoons.
Is there a microchip implant in your future? You can inject one under your skin and no one will ever notice. Using short-range radio frequency identification (RFID) signals, it can transmit your identity as you pass through a security checkpoint or walk into a football stadium. It can help you buy groceries at Wal-Mart. In a worst-case scenario — if you are kidnapped in a foreign country, for example — it could save your life. Microchip implants like the ones pet owners use to track their dogs and cats could become commonplace in humans in the next decade.
Texas Schools Are Forcing Kids To Wear RFID Chips. Is That a Privacy Invasion? Two San Antonio schools have joined others in Houston and Austin in requiring students to wear cards with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in them, allowing administrators to track their whereabouts on campus.
Student Refusing to Wear RFID Chip Loses in Court. A federal court has ruled that a Texas student who refuses to wear a school-mandated RFID tracking badge must at least wear an identification badge without a tracking chip or else change to a school without such a system. John Jay High School in San Antonio, Texas began requiring students to wear badges with RFID tags to track students' on-campus movements at the beginning of the fall semester. Andrea Hernandez, 15, refused to wear the badge on religious grounds, claiming it was the "mark of the beast," according to Wired. She was suspended for disobeying the new rule and later sued the district. A temporary injunction allowed her to continue her studies untracked.
Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear RFID Chip Returns to School. A Texas girl suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip is being re-admitted to her former high school where fall classes begin Monday, her lawyers said today [8/22/2013]. The flap concerns Andrea Hernandez, who will be a junior at John Jay High in San Antonio. She was suspended in January and sued the Northside Independent School District on privacy and religious grounds. She lost the case and began attending another school that did not require pupils to wear the ID badges.
Texas school can force students to wear locator chips, judge rules. A public school district in Texas can require students to wear locator chips when they are on school property, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday [1/8/2013] in a case raising technology-driven privacy concerns among liberal and conservative groups alike.
Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips. Since October 1, [2012,] students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, have been asked to attend class with photo ID cards equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips to track every pupil's location. Educators insist that the endeavor is being rolled out in Texas to stem the rampant truancy devastating the school's funding. If the program is judged successful, the RFID chips could soon come to 112 schools in all and affect nearly 100,000 students.
Officials Kick Andrea Hernandez Out of Magnet School Over Religious Objections to RFID Tracking Program. In keeping with a court order to provide school officials with a written decision as to whether or not she will agree to wear an RFID tracking badge to school, Andrea Hernandez had asked school officials at John Jay High School to allow her to continue her "education uninterrupted" by permitting her to use her old ID badge which "does not signify participation in a program which I believe conflicts with my religious beliefs."
The Editor says... The lesson here is clear: A student's religious beliefs will not be accommodated and no exceptions will be allowed — unless the student is a Muslim!
New Obama plan calls for implanted computer chips to help U.S. troops heal. When President Obama on Tuesday [8/26/2014] highlighted 19 executive actions he says he is taking to improve the mental health of U.S. troops and veterans, one of them centered on a particularly novel effort: The development of new computer chips designed to modulate the nervous system to help with everything from arthritis to post-traumatic stress. The project is headed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon agency that develops a variety of high-tech equipment for the U.S. military. It's known as the Electrical Prescriptions program, or ElectRx (pronounced "electrics").
Establishment Pushing "Cashless Society" to Control Humanity. Proponents of the government-enforced move away from physical currency cite a wide array of potential real and imagined benefits. Among them: possible reductions in armed robbery, tax evasion, black-market commerce, the cost of printing and securing physical cash, and more. Critics, though, are warning of the dangerous and Orwellian schemes that could be unleashed in a world where out-of-control governments can monitor literally every purchase, transaction, and bit of economic activity. In light of the recently exposed NSA snooping scandal, the possibilities for abuse and total surveillance are more than hypothetical, obviously.
Contactless Credit Cards causing increase in crime. Tap-and-go credit cards contributing to increase in crime stats, Victoria [Australia] Police say. Chief Commissioner Ken Lay said the number of deceptions, including when thieves fraudulently use other people's credit cards, has increased by 11,600 and impacted on overall crime rates. "One of the main drivers over the last little while have been deceptions and these tap-and-go (credit) cards."
Will Microchip Implants in Humans Become Mandatory? [If Mac Slavo's] vision of tomorrow is correct, hardly anyone will have to be dragged kicking and screaming by jack-booted storm troopers (or robots?) into that Brave New World; rather, most people will willingly be chipped as we slouch toward Oceania. In fact, the movement is already in progress. [...] There is precedent for acceptance of such intrusion; after all, your cellphone has an RFID chip and can be used to track your every movement, and its camera can be remotely activated by authorities. And we all have Social Security numbers.
Creepy New Disney RFID Bracelet to Allow Park Mascots to Greet Your Child By Name. Frankly, Disney creeps me out, and my research affirms that those feelings are not at all misplaced. When I saw that one of the new capabilities of Disney's ever-so-magical RFID bracelet program was to allow the middle-aged guy with no background check who dresses like Goofy and wonders the park greeting kids all day to know people's children by name, I thought this definitely requires a report.
San Antonio Officials Re-Admit Expelled High School Student After Ending RFID Tracking Program. School officials with the Northside Independent School District have agreed to re-admit Andrea Hernandez to John Jay High School's Science and Engineering Academy. Hernandez, who will resume her studies at John Jay as a high school junior when school convenes on Monday, Aug. 26, was expelled from the magnet school program after raising religious freedom and privacy objections to NISD's "Student Locator Project," which relied on RFID tracking badges to enable school officials to track students' location on school property.
Is It Possible That Snowden Is A Hero? Even those who do not use the Internet or have a computer are having all their data and information collected by the government as well as political marketers. Every swipe of a credit card, supermarket card, library card, debit card, is downloaded to the Net at relatively low cost to the government. GPS in cars and smartphones, Onstar vehicles, can have their locations tracked by the Department of Defense which developed this technology. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be used to track everything from household products, casino chips, animals and even people who have them inserted under the skin at fancy VIP club to facilitate faster access to club. These RFIDs are in our passports. Authorities can place GPS devices on suspect vehicles without court orders thanks to the Patriot Act. This is not fiction. It is real and it is happening to all of us now.
When a car salesman tells you keyless entry is safe, ask about this: High-Tech Thieves Use New Gadget To Gain Keyless Access To Vehicles In Long Beach. Police are asking for the public's help in identifying three tech-savvy criminals wanted for a series of car burglaries in which they used an unknown device to gain keyless entry to vehicles.
RFID used to track school students. A court challenge has delayed plans to expel a Texan student for refusing to wear a radio tag that tracked her movements. Religious reasons led Andrea Hernandez to stop wearing the tag that revealed where she was on her school campus. The tags were introduced to track students and help tighten control of school funding.
More on suspended student refusing to wear tracking device. The district attempted to paint this "students-as-livestock/prisoners" effort as being there for the safety of students and staff. But underneath all the "safety" talk was a large pile of money that the school district hoped to pocket. The so-called "Student Locator" project Texas' Northside Independent School District was implementing put school officials within handout distance of nearly $1.7 million in state government funds.
Texas school district to require students to wear RFID chip whil [sic] on campus. A school district in San Antonio, Texas is requiring middle and high school students to wear a "tracking" chip while on campus. And not just a passive RFID (Radio-frequency identification) chip, these second generation RFID chips include a battery that transmits a radio signal for constant location monitoring of the students. District spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said, "Chip readers on campuses and on school buses can detect a student's location but can't track them once they leave school property. Only authorized administrative officials will have access to the information."
The Editor says... The school district claims they "can't track [the students] once they leave school property." Not true. Active RFID tags can be read and located wherever there is a compatible reader. The reader can be the property of the school district, or the police, an identity thief, or anybody else.
Wear radio chip or leave, school tells students. Brushing aside privacy concerns by parents and civil rights activists, a Texas school district has gone live with a controversial program requiring all students to wear a locator radio chip that will enable officials to track their every move — or face expulsion. At the beginning of the school year students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School within the Northside Independent School District were told their old student ID badges were no longer valid. During registration they were required to obtain new badges containing a radio frequency identification tracker chip.
Student Expelled for Refusing Location Tracking RFID Badge. After months of protesting a policy requiring high school students to wear an RFID-enabled ID badge around their necks at all times, Andrea Hernandez is being involuntarily withdrawn from John Jay High School in San Antonio effective November 26th, according to a letter sent by the district that has now been made public. The letter, sent on November 13, informs her father that the Smart ID program, which was phased in with the new school year, is now in "full implementation" and requires all students to comply by wearing the location-tracking badges.
Spying on school kids. School districts in Texas are using tracking chips to spy on students. That's just fine with a federal judge who ruled Tuesday [1/8/2013] against Andrea Hernandez, a 15-year-old high school sophomore in San Antonio. With the help of the Rutherford Institute, Miss Hernandez and her father filed a lawsuit arguing the creepy "student locator project" violated her constitutional rights.
Hackers Endorse Texas Student's Refusal to Wear Tracking Device. In September, two San Antonio schools began requiring their 4,000 students to wear ID badges containing radio frequency identification chips that transmit 24/7. Hernandez refused, citing her religious beliefs and right to privacy. The school threatened expulsion. So she sued. Hernandez refused even to wear a card lacking a chip and battery, though school staff offered her that option twice, her principal said. Wearing it would imply she endorsed the badges, her father said. The sophomore has been wearing her old ID around her neck, instead.
USDA Wants RFID Tracking Technology To Be Mandatory In US Food Stamp Program. The USDA is now considering biometric identification for all individuals who will want to benefit from their Food and Nutrition Services. The RFID chip may just soon be a must for everyone who does not want to starve!
Texas Students Revolt Against Mandatory RFID Tracking Chips. Students and parents at two San Antonio schools are in revolt over a program that forces kids to wear RFID tracking name tags which are used to pinpoint their location on campus as well as outside school premises. Students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School will be mandated to wear the tags from today which will be used to track them on campus as well as when they enter and leave school.
'Human barcode' could make society more organized, but invades privacy, civil liberties. Would you barcode your baby? Microchip implants have become standard practice for our pets, but have been a tougher sell when it comes to the idea of putting them in people. Science fiction author Elizabeth Moon last week rekindled the debate on whether it's a good idea to "barcode" infants at birth in an interview on a BBC radio program.
Texas District Plans to Add RFID Chips to School IDs. Depending on your point of view, RFID technology is either stuff of dystopian fantasy come to life, or a long-overdue improvement made possible by technology. Students at the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas will have plenty of opportunities to decide this issue for themselves as the officials roll out a plan to embed a Radio Frequency Identification System chip into student ID cards in order to track their location throughout the day.
Concerned About RFID Tags? You Should Be. Stores are not the only organizations to use RFIDs. Many libraries today are also using them as a way to manage their inventory. RFID systems have already replaced traditional checkout systems in a number of libraries in California, Oregon, and Nevada. Once again this raises serious concerns with privacy advocates. When a book is entered into the collection, it is given a second static ID number. Because the number never changes, a person or organization can use that ID to track the movements of certain books. This technique, called "hotlisting", when combined with traditional methods such as video surveillance, can be used to link together persons of the same group or disposition. Many believe that law enforcement agencies could easily abuse this method if RFIDs become more prevalent.
Legal Battle May Disallow Publication on Cracked RFID Chip. Researchers from the Dutch Radboud University have cracked and cloned London's Oyster travel card, after cracking the Dutch Mifare Travel card. The latter would be used in a nationwide network for billing of public transportation. Both cards use the Mifare Classic RFID tags, which relies for its security on an algorithm that can be cracked with modest effort. The troubled card provides for contact-less entrance to public transportations and office buildings worldwide. The manufacturer of the chip, NXP, follows Dutch secretary of state Tineke Huizinga in claiming that publication of the results is irresponsible.
Information could be 'robbed by radiowave' thanks to new contactless technology. Millions of credit and debit card users could be 'robbed by radiowave' because of new contactless technology being brought in by banks. Almost 20 million shoppers are now able to buy goods by simply waving their card in front of a reader at the tills, even if it is still in a wallet or a purse.
Cattle are tagged for the benefit of the farmer, not the cows. 'Big Brother' plan to fight obesity in children by tracking students with electronic tags. Parents and civil rights activists are furious at the new program that will allow school administrators to monitor the heart rates, exercise, and sleep schedules of students using electronic bracelets. A school district in Long Island, New York, announced that it would be the latest addition to the list of schools using the technology to help track students' activity and fight obesity. Unanswered questions — including which students will wear the devices, for how long, and the purpose of the gathered data — have parents concerned about the level to which the program will invade their children's privacy.
Schools 'spy' on fat kids. A group of Long Island students will soon be wearing controversial electronic monitors that allow school officials to track their physical activity around the clock. The athletics chair for the Bay Shore schools ordered 10 Polar Active monitors, at $90 a pop, for use starting this spring. The wristwatchlike devices count heartbeats, detect motion and even track students' sleeping habits in a bid to combat obesity.
NY Schools Spy on Fat Kids. Big Brother wants your kids to lose weight and be healthier. A school district on Long Island, New York is requiring a group of overweight and obese kids to wear electronic bracelets that monitor where they are and what they're doing at all times, especially if they're not active or exercising.
The black hole of Britain! One family, the Smiths, were baffled when their heating, shower, doorbell and even their cars' remote door locks refused to work and they discovered similar problems were being experienced by their neighbours in Kingsclere. They spent much of the festive season without heating and lights after the failure of household systems that rely on digital technology, specifically radio-frequency identification (RFID).
Electronic skin tattoo has medical, gaming, spy uses. A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday. The micro-electronics technology, called an epidermal electronic system (EES), was developed by an international team of researchers from the United States, China and Singapore, and is described in the journal Science.
Mexicans Get Dubious RFID Tracking Chips Implanted In Their Arms. Companies selling these chips to scared citizens are promising that they will help rescuers track them down in the event of a kidnapping. The chip, implanted in the tissue between the shoulder and elbow, sends a signal to an GPS device that the wearer carries. But Xega, the company that manufactures many of the chips, says that they can track clients even without the GPS unit, by sending radio signals directly to the implanted chip. This claim seems very unlikely to be true.
Don't steal the hotel towels... they're electronically tagged. The days of hotel guests helping themselves to towels and robes when they check out could be a thing of the past as high tech gets in to the linen. One company has come up with a way of adding miniature tags in the expensive materials which were costing hotel managements a fortune to constantly replace.
Chips for dinner: Edible RFID tags describe your food. For tracking, radio frequency identification (RFID) chips are the greatest thing since sliced bread. But what if the RFID chip was actually in the sliced bread?
Technological Advancements: A Path To Freedom Or a Path To Serfdom. GPS is being used in many business now to track employees, in the scope of the fact that it is a private business and the end result is only related to said business, that may be permissible. When a Government Body starts to track a private citizen we move into a whole new arena.
Risks of RFID car keys. Back in the good old days, if you happened to leave your key in your car, a potential thief still had to 1) know it was there and 2) locate it in order for it to do him or her any good. No more. Now thanks to handy dandy RFID technology the thief can steal the car first and then search for the key after. And, of course, finding a car whose owner has left a key in it somewhere is a simple matter of making a pinging device.
Any mass-produced security system can be hacked or bypassed. How Hackers Can Use Smart Keys To Steal Cars. Modern smart keys use radio frequencies to let drivers unlock and start a vehicle without fumbling with a key fob. Now European researchers have found such systems can be hacked, letting thieves easily steal your car. ... The research by the team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology targeted a new weakness; the smart key fobs common on luxury vehicles and spreading to mainstream models that allow a driver to unlock doors and start a vehicle without touching the fob. Using radio signals, the fob and vehicle send encrypted signals to each other over short distances, and while other researchers had suggested the fobs could be vulnerable, no one had put the idea to a test.
Implanting RFID tags in U.S. passports makes stealing personal data easier than ever. In January 2006, the Dutch security firm Riscure … using a personal computer and a commercially available radio receiver … was able to read the digital information of a prototype Dutch e-passport (which uses the same RFID chip and encryption scheme as the new U.S. passports) from a distance of about 30 centimeters. With that information, Riscure cracked the e-passport's password in roughly two hours and thus gained full access to the RFID chip's contents, including a digital picture, fingerprint, and other personal information.
TSA scanners are a front to implement biometric chips. You might of heard that the TSA scanners at US airports are a front because the guy that owns part of the company also makes the rules. If you dont know who this is then dont worry, that is not the story. The same guy also claims that the TSA scanners are just a front to implement them in schools and make people used to the idea, they would rather choose the machines than being molested by TSA agents. Their plan is to see a machine in every school, shopping mall and public building. Just about everywhere.
More about the TSA's
abusive and invasive searches.
RFID passport card privacy threat debated. A passport card set to be issued by the State Department for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean doesn't require privacy protection, even though it uses a radio frequency identification chip which can be read from 20 feet away, because the chip itself doesn't contain personal information, according to the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Selective Blocking of RFID Tags for Consumer Privacy. The impending ubiquity of RFID tags … poses a potentially widespread threat to consumer privacy. The simplest RFID tag will broadcast its ID serial number — that is, its electronic product code (EPC) — to any nearby reader. The ID number, as envisioned by the AutoID Center, is unique to a given tag. It contains not only the traditional information contained in a printed barcode (indicating manufacturer and product type), but also a unique serial number for that tag. Each consumer product or item of clothing will be uniquely identified.
Did corporate lawyers put kibosh on 'Mythbusters' RFID episode? At a recent conference — it's not clear which one — Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage was asked why the show hasn't tackled the technology behind the security limitations of RFID. His eyes lighting up at the chance to talk about something that clearly was a memorable experience for him, Savage said the show had actually set out to do an episode on the vulnerabilities of RFID but encountered some very powerful resistance.
Feds Release Pass Card details. The government has dragged its feet in releasing the final details about its Pass Card technology, and now they dump it into the Federal Register on the last day of the year. The government has decided to go with a technology that is more suited to tracking inventory and can be read from up to 20 feet away.
RFID passport card privacy threat debated. A passport card set to be issued by the State Department for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean doesn't require privacy protection, even though it uses a radio frequency identification chip which can be read from 20 feet away, because the chip itself doesn't contain personal information, according to the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST director William Jeffrey said that because the RFID chips will only contain a unique reference number which points to a database entry, the passport cards don't need to be encrypted or to have other safeguards for protecting personal information.
Report Tempers RFID Fears. Those who understand the benefits of RFID are aware of its potential for abuse … Most seek to require retailers to deactivate tags at the time of purchase. They are also urging manufacturers to embed tags in the packaging instead of in the products themselves. The RFID industry and users have endorsed both approaches.
RFID Guardian. Apparently someone in the Netherlands has developed a prototype device which can
- Detect all RFID chips and scanners in its neighborhood;
- Block the reading of any RFID you carry;
- Spoof a given RFID.
Alarm over shopping radio tags. Supermarkets have already brought everything under the sun under one roof, and along the way been accused of denuding the High Street of butcher, baker and candlestick-maker. Now they are introducing a new technology that some say threatens a fundamental invasion of our privacy.
Bill aims to slow RFID in its tracks. Prompted by worries that developing technologies that use radio waves to identify both physical objects and human beings are gaining popularity in big businesses such as Wal-Mart, [New Hampshire] House and Senate members have collaborated on the language for what could be the model for legislation of its kind in the nation.
EPIC's web page about RFID Systems. RFID tags come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some tags are easy to spot, such as the hard plastic anti-theft tags attached to merchandise in stores. Animal tracking tags which are implanted beneath the skin of family pets or endangered species are no bigger than a small section of pencil lead. Even smaller tags have been developed to be embedded within the fibers of a national currency. While barcodes have historically been the primary means of tracking products, RFID systems are rapidly becoming the preferred technology for keeping tabs on people, pets, products, and even vehicles.
What is RFID? RFID stands for Radio Frequency IDentification, a technology that uses tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track items at a distance. RFID "spy chips" have been hidden in the packaging of Gillette razor products and in other products you might buy at a local Wal-Mart, Target, or Tesco and they are already being used to spy on people.
Tracking device on bins ensures residents chip in. Bin Brother is watching you. When Randwick City Council began replacing its 78,000 residential garbage and recycling bins last month, a resident, Dan Himbrechts, scratched his head. Why get rid of old ones that seemed to work perfectly well? His suspicions grew further when he noticed a small, flat, circular object hidden under the rim of his new bin. About the size of a 10-cent coin, it had the letters "TI-RFid" embossed on it. … [Local officials] say they are using the data to help identify areas where people are not recycling enough.
The Editor asks... What happens to the people who don't recycle enough?
New recycling bins with tracking chips coming to Alexandria. Alexandria residents soon will have to pay for larger home recycling bins featuring built-in monitoring devices. The City Council added a mandatory $9 charge to its residents' annual waste collection fee. That cash — roughly $180,000 collected from 19,000 residents — will pay for new larger recycling carts equipped with computer microchips, which will allow the city to keep tabs on its bins and track resident participation in the city's recycling program.
China raises the red tag. RFID tags aren't just for tracking consumer goods any more. The Chinese Communist Party is experimenting with tagging and tracking people. Delegates to the recent Communist Party Congress were required to wear an RFID badge equipped with the tiny tag, which permitted their movements around the conference to be constantly tracked and recorded.
Hacker RFID Demo Killed by Corporate Lawsuit Threat. It's a new take on an old story. Security researcher wants to demonstrate longstanding vulnerablities in a product. Product's owner gets mad and threatens to sue before the presentation. Presentation gets cancelled. This go around security researchers at IO Active wanted to show security professionals at the Black Hat conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday how easy it was to create a way to clone building entrance cards sold by HID Corporation.
RFID and Privacy. If "live" unique RFID devices pass beyond the point of sale and are carried out into the consumer's world, they pose a strong threat to privacy. The unique ID in a garment or a car could be read silently by any organization and associated with an individual, allowing subsequent re-identification by that organization (or indeed by any other organization to which the data was sold). The organization doing the surveillance need not be the manufacturer or retailer. As readers cost as little as $20, a hobbyist snoop or private investigator could even set one up near a doorway to record people who revisit an area.
RFID: the next serious threat to privacy. RFID's usage is currently undergoing a revolution, being incorporated into everything from automobile keys to product packaging to passports. With this deployment, though, have come great concerns about the technology's effect on the privacy.
RFID Viruses and Worms. Up until now, everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software, and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong. In our research, we have discovered that if certain vulnerabilities exist in the RFID software, an RFID tag can be (intentionally) infected with a virus and this virus can infect the backend database used by the RFID software.
This article was published in January 2003, hence the reference to John Poindexter. RFID tags: Big Brother in small packages. The privacy threat comes when RFID tags remain active once you leave a store. That's the scenario that should raise alarms — and currently the RFID industry seems to be giving mixed signals about whether the tags will be disabled or left enabled by default. In an interview with News.com's Gilbert … Gillette Vice President Dick Cantwell said that its RFID tags would be disabled at the cash register only if the consumer chooses to "opt out" and asks for the tags to be turned off. "The protocol for the tag is that it has built in opt-out function for the retailer, manufacturer, consumer," Cantwell said. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, says that's not the case.
VeriChip Launches IPO. Although the provider of human-implantable RFID chips scaled back the size of its IPO, demand for the company's stock seemed fairly strong, with more than 2 million shares trading hands.
Update: Human Chipping Company Omits Salient Risks from IPO Disclosure. VeriChip Corporation, the much-hated purveyor of the VeriChip human ID implant, is airing its dirty laundry this week. This is not by choice, mind you, but because the Securities and Exchange Commission required the company to disclose its "risk factors" prior to launching its initial public offering of stock (IPO) Friday [2/9/2007].
VeriChip: The VeriChip Personal Identification System is a small radio frequency identification device (RFID) that is implanted into the human body. VeriChip raises the same privacy issues as RFID tags. For an initial "chipping" fee, as well as a monthly subscription fee, customers' arms are implanted with a glass chip about the size of a grain of rice, containing a unique verification number.
Chip Implants Linked to Animal Tumors. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. … But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.
RFID is Watching You. It looks like RFID is about to come of age. In fact, with the level of backing that MIT's RFID program the Auto-ID Center now has, it could soon be as ubiquitous as money. Sun Microsystems is the latest to announce its support, joining other big brand names such as Procter and Gamble, Gillette, International Paper, Wal-Mart and Tesco. Together this industry co-operative aims to help build wireless digital identification tags into everything, from razor blades to magazines to pharmaceuticals to milk cartons.
Kodak's RFID Moment: The company recently filed a patent for a digestible radio frequency identification tag, which would monitor the ingestion of medicine, but Kodak won't divulge its commercial intentions.
W.Va. Coal Mine Tests to Locate Workers During Emergencies. The company is using active 2.4 GHz RFID tags to pinpoint miners working in a 3.5-mile series of tunnels.
In an Academic Study, RFID Fractal Antenna Wins Out. Researchers at Finland's Tampere University of Technology found that a fractal UHF RFID handheld reader antenna performed better than four traditional antenna designs.
Electronic Accountability System Uses RF Technology. An electronic accountability system developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will result in savings of more than $2 million per year at one federal facility alone and will ensure 100 percent accountability of employees.
RFID tracking: The article [above] … claims (among other things) safety benefits from knowing the locations of all employees during an emergency (of some kind that miraculously manages not to knock out any part of the tracking computers or their sensor network, or to damage anyone's RFID).
RFID Tags: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is the generic term used to describe technologies using radio waves to automatically identify people or objects. We need to be aware of the privacy implications of this technology as its use becomes more widespread.
Wisconsin Bans Forced Human RFID Chipping. Civil libertarians cheered yesterday [5/30/2006] upon news that Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle signed a law making it a crime to require an individual to be implanted with a microchip. Activists and authors Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre joined the celebration, predicting this move will spell trouble for the VeriChip Corporation, maker of the VeriChip human microchip implant.
UK considers RFID tags for prisoners. The UK government is considering implanting prisoners with RFID tags containing data on identity, address and criminal record. The RFID tags, about the size of two grains of rice, would be injected under the skin and could be scanned by a reader. There are also proposals to link the RFID tags to a larger GPS device to monitor the location of high risk prisoners.
Consumer Watchdogs Demand Recall of Spychipped Credit Cards. Consumer watchdog group CASPIAN is demanding a recall of millions of RFID-equipped contactless credit cards in light of serious security flaws reported today [10/23/2006] in the New York Times. The paper reports that a team of security researchers has found that virtually every one of these cards tested is vulnerable to unauthorized charges and puts consumers at risk for identity theft.
Wal-Mart commits billions to RFID. Wal-Mart plans to spend $3 billion over the next few years on a new inventory tracking technology that uses radio frequency signals to keep tabs on merchandise, sources familiar with the project said. The system is based on a technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID), a new breed of computer network designed to track the location of everyday objects such as razors and shoes by embedding them with special microchips. Wal-Mart has enlisted its top 100 merchandise suppliers to participate in the high-profile project, which is one of the first and largest of its kind in the retail industry.
Water vending machine uses RFID to track bottles. The new Aquaduct system, designed by S2C Global to deliver recyclable, five-gallon plastic bottles of water directly to the customer, targets a growing number of consumers who are time poor, but still have concerns over unhealthy products that damage the environment. According to the manufacturer, consumers purchase bottled water through outdoor vending machines with a credit, debit or pre-paid aqua card.
Retailers See RFID's Potential to Fight Shrinkage. A growing number of retailers are beginning to see RFID as a tool not only for improved product visibility, but also for preventing product theft — or, at least, for reducing the negative impacts of product shrinkage.
RFID Helps Car Wash Customers Cruise Through Lines. Car-wash operator Cruz Thru Express is employing an RFID system it designed itself to automate the way it provides services to its customers. ... After trying both bar-coded labels and license-plate recognition, Cruz Thru Express adopted a system last year using passive EPC Gen 2 RFID tags.
'Hardcore' crime teens to be tagged instead of locked up. Hundreds of Scotland's most serious young offenders will be allowed to stay in their communities with an electronic tag rather than being locked up.
Privacy Best Practices for Deployment of RFID Technology. There are many possible applications of RFID that do not pose major privacy concerns. But to the extent that RFID devices can be linked to personally identifiable information ("PII"), including where such devices facilitate the tracking of an individual's location, RFID raises important privacy questions.
Old Big Brother Had a Farm. If only Orwell could get a load of this. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is promoting a system that would have farm-animal owners and livestock handlers attach microchips or other ID tags to their furry and feathered charges so they could be monitored throughout their lifetimes by a centralized computer network.
RFID Meets George Orwell's Telescreen. British company Ubisense has paired the remote tracking power of Radio Frequency Identification with a modern-day version of the telescreen from George Orwell's novel 1984. Ubisense claims that it has developed a way to use RFID tags to track human beings and objects to within 12 inches of their locations and beam a real-time 3-dimensional map of it all to computer screens for live monitoring of offices, manufacturing facilities, and even retail stores.
Orwell Today compares the world George Orwell described in "1984" with the world we are living in today.
Britons 'could be microchipped like dogs in a decade'. Human beings may be forced to be 'microchipped' like pet dogs, a shocking official report into the rise of the Big Brother state has warned. The microchips — which are implanted under the skin — allow the wearer's movements to be tracked and store personal information about them.
The hands-free way to steal a credit card: Adam Laurie, an RFID security expert, used the Black Hat DC 2008 conference here, to demonstrate a new Python script he's working on to read the contents of smart-chip-enabled credit cards. As part of his presentation Wednesday [2/20/2008], Laurie asked for someone from the audience to volunteer a smart card. Without taking the card out of the volunteer's wallet, Laurie both read and displayed its contents on the presentation screen — the person's name, account number, and expiration clearly visible. Demonstrations like that show the potential misuse of RFID technology in the near future.
RFID hack could crack open 2 billion smart cards. A student at the University of Virginia has discovered a way to break through the encryption code of RFID chips used in up to 2 billion smart cards used to open doors and board public transportation systems.
RFIDIOt is an open source Python library for exploring RFID devices, written by Adam Laurie, a freelance security consultant.
Cracked it! Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?
Doubts raised over passport security. If you have an Australian passport issued in the last year, you may know that it contains a computer chip to enhance security. The Government says it's the most secure Australian passport ever. But a London computer expert has raised doubts about its operation and its vulnerability to identity fraud. Using a new Australian passport, he's easily cracked the security protection of the new computer chip and accessed information within it.
UK Biometric Passports not Secure. A security expert has cracked one of the UK's RFID-equipped passports, stealing personal data from a distance.
Medical Microchips — Risk and Uncertainty. It is a sad reality that many federal laws result in unintended consequences for the public which must abide by them. Such has been the fate of the much touted Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), a law so cumbersome it took the Department of Health and Human Services almost seven years to figure out how to implement it.
You need not be paranoid to fear RFID. If this sounds paranoid, take it up with IBM. The company filed a patent application in 2001 which contemplates using this wireless snooping technology to track people as they roam through "shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, rest rooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, museums, etc."
Chips Could Track Car Plates. A controversial plan to embed RFID chips in license plates in the United Kingdom also may be coming to the United States, experts told UPI's Wireless World.
Malaysia to embed car license plates with microchips to combat theft. Malaysia's government, hoping to thwart car thieves, will embed license plates with microchips containing information about the vehicle and its owner, a news report said Saturday [12/2/2006]. With the chips in use, officials can scan cars at roadblocks and identify stolen vehicles, the New Straits Times reported. The "e-plate" chip system is the latest strategy to prevent car thieves from getting away with their crimes by merely changing the plates, the report said.
[Why would they need roadblocks? Why not scan every car at every major intersection?] Brit License Plates Get Chipped. The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.
RFID-enabled license plates to identify UK vehicles. The UK-based vehicle licence plate manufacturer, Hills Numberplates Ltd, has chosen long-range RFID tags and readers from Identec Solutions to be embedded in licence plates that will automatically and reliably identify vehicles in the UK.
RFID ... Powder!? Word has it Hitachi's latest batch of RFID chips are so small, "you won't even know they're there."
Does Implantable RFID Need More Volunteers? There hasn't been a whole lot of positive response for the RFID chip implant business, despite the industry's clamoring for volunteers. For a while there, VeriChip's controversial implantable RFID (developed to improve the accuracy of surgery and other applications) dominated headlines. But according to Mobile magazine and other media, VeriChip has sunk a lot of its own money into making these things — but people aren't buying.
Homeland Security May Drop RFID Plans Entirely. US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a House committee hearing today [2/9/2007] that his department is dropping plans for RFID tags. Chertoff said the technology isn't the solution the Department of Homeland Security needs to keep would-be terrorists out of the United States, according to reports.
E-Passports Less Reliable Than Traditional Passports. A document obtained by EPIC from the State Department reveals that 2004 government tests found passports with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that are read 27% to 43% less successfully than the previous Machine Readable Zone technology (two lines of text printed at the bottom of the first page of a passport).
UK RFID Passport Cracked. Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?
The RFID Hacking Underground: They can steal your smartcard, lift your passport, jack your car, even clone the chip in your arm. And you won't feel a thing.
Orwellian eyes. The EZPass automated highway-toll system used by nine East Coast states, including Virginia, uses an RFID chip attached to a transponder or Smart Tag on the vehicle's windshield. The chip is read by a small machine posted at the toll booth and allows drivers to whiz past while the cost is deducted from a debit or credit card. The RFIDs already are a part of electronic vehicle identification systems used for access to military bases, airports, gated communities, hospitals, state parks and country clubs.
Boycott Gillette. Hidden cameras in Gillette spy shelves take mug shots of people who pick up their products! Consumers have asked Gillette to stop putting RFID "spy chips" in their products, but Gillette has ignored our concerns.
Department of Homeland Security Wants Beefed up RFID to silently ID people 25 feet away.
Tagging surgical sponges could prevent medical errors. Putting tiny tracking chips on sponges could help prevent the objects from being left in patients accidentally after surgery, say U.S. researchers who tested the idea.
Wal-Mart is RFID tagging in Texas. In addition to violating the call for a moratorium on RFID-tagged items in stores, Wal-Mart has begun a consumer education campaign that CASPIAN is calling unethical. "Read the FAQs at the Wal-Mart corporate web site and you'll find plenty of half truths," [Katherine] Albrecht says. "They call it consumer education, but the omissions and spin make it feel more like a calculated disinformation campaign."
Wal-Mart Radio Tags to Track Clothing. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to roll out sophisticated electronic ID tags to track individual pairs of jeans and underwear, the first step in a system that advocates say better controls inventory but some critics say raises privacy concerns.
Spychipped Levi's Brand Jeans Hit the U.S.. New information confirms that Levi Strauss & Co. is violating a call for a moratorium on item-level RFID by spychipping its clothing. What's more, the company is refusing to disclose the location of its U.S. test.
Albertsons' assets sold to CVS, Supervalue and investor group. The total value of the sale was about $17.4 billion in cash, stock and assumed debt. … No word on whether the "preferred" card is going to stick around, but with that price we suspect they are going to use every trick they can to recoup their investment.
Oakland Requires ID Chips for Dogs. City officials have drafted an ordinance that requires dog owners to have a rice-sized I.D. chip implanted in their pets. And those who don't comply could be hit with a fine of $100 for a second offense and $1,000 for subsequent infractions.
Chip and PIN – Whose goods are you paying for? The "chip and PIN" system is not automatically synchronized with the rest of the checkout, and customers may be being charged for the wrong amount on an ongoing basis if the cashier is not aware to check the receipts for consistency.
California Gov Terminates RFID ID Bill. On Saturday [10/07/2006], California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 768, the Identity Information Protection Act of 2006, which would have been the first state bill to address how RFID technology may be used in identification documents issued by state and local governments and agencies.
Pfizer's RFID Pilot Is the Start of Something Big. Pfizer, which began shipping RFID-tagged bottles of Viagra for U.S. distribution last December, is looking to the future use of RFID technology throughout the pharmaceutical supply chain. As the company approaches the one-year mark of its pilot program, McKesson, HD Smith and other wholesalers have completed 200,000 authentications of both item- and case-level tags. Of those, only 19 tags were found to be "dead" after leaving the facility, according to Peggy Staver, director of product integrity at Pfizer.
Storm building over RFID-enabled passports. As the U.S. government prepares to complete a conversion to the controversial RFID-based electronic passports, traditional paper-only IDs are still available for a few months to those listening to the raging debate over security and privacy concerns swirling around the electronic documents.
Here Come the Next-Generation Passports. The U.S. State Department has begun rolling out "e-passports," new high-tech documents that bolster border security through identity safeguards. In a dangerous world, upgrading passports is prudent policy that serves the interests of Americans at home and abroad, but not everyone is happy with them. E-passports employ the use of radio frequency identification, or RFID.
"Thief-proof" car key cracked. (Already?) According to an article in The Register, the security on RFID devices used in car keys and petrol pump payment systems has been broken (the article actually says "Researchers have discovered cryptographic vulnerabilities in the RFID technology..."
RFID access control tokens widely open to cloning. Too many systems to itemize here rely on the 'unique ID' of an RFID token to grant access to a system or building, and, in the case that these tokens are based on 125kHz or 134.2kHz standard tags, many of them may be vulnerable to relatively simple cloning attacks. … The problem is that many security system suppliers are integrating industry standard tag readers, and promoting the 'uniqueness' of the tag ID as a guaranteed certainty when it isn't, and thereby compromising the security of the entire system.
Microchips May Be Added To Passports. The federal government is planning on embedding microchips in passports this summer. The RFID chips will contain digital information printed on the passport, including a photograph of the passport user. The State Department has asked the National Institute of Standards and Technology to test the chips to ensure that hackers cannot read information from the chip. [REALLY?] In one lab test a powerful chip reader was able to pick up activity on the chip but not information.
High-tech passports are not working. The data on these chips will be readable remotely, without the bearer knowing. And — again at America's insistence — those data will not be encrypted, so anybody with a suitable reader, be they official, commercial, criminal or terrorist, will be able to check a passport holder's details. … Passport chips are deliberately designed for clandestine remote reading. The ICAO specification refers quite openly to the idea of a "walk-through" inspection with the person concerned "possibly being unaware of the operation".
Encrypt E-Passports. The State Department proposes to enhance the traditional passport by embedding in it a computer chip carrying personal information. Data stored on the chip is likely to include the passport holder's name, date, and place of birth, and a digitized photo. Machines would read the chip when travelers passed through checkpoints at ports of entry and exit. … The State Department does not plan to encrypt the data on E-Passports.
Rollout of Chip-Embedded Passports Begins: The State Department decided to ignore the overwhelming public opposition to the use of passports containing radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. The first e-passports are being distributed and the nationwide rollout will occur at the end of the year. … The new passports and the chip technology pose a serious threat to privacy and security. There remains the possibility that personal information could be "skimmed" or stolen from a distance using a chip reader. … The chips could also act as beacons that broadcast travelers' nationality to terrorists.
New UK biometric passports & identity theft: It would be fairly straightforward for a courier using a standard RFID reader to scan each passport, in its envelope, as he or she delivers it and hand the details on to an accomplice at some later time. We know that the encryption has already been broken. So. No need to steal the passport, no need even to open the envelope containing the passport. All the details taken and no evidence to show it.
The ID Chip You Don't Want in Your Passport: If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it — even if it's not set to expire anytime soon. If you don't have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don't want one of these chips in your passport.
Coalition Urges DHS to Reject Real ID Chip Mandate. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently drafting regulations to implement the REAL ID Act. We, the undersigned individuals and organizations, have a wide variety of concerns about the proposed REAL ID card and system and we have urged DHS to establish a standard that provides the greatest possible security at the most reasonable cost while protecting individual privacy. This letter addresses one of those concerns —the use of radio frequency identification chips (RFID) as the "machine readable" feature in the card.
MasterCard to begin national rollout of swipeless RFID cards. After months of testing, MasterCard is preparing for a major national rollout of its PayPass swipeless RFID credit cards, and expects to have up to 4 million of them in circulation by the end of the year. … MasterCard and its rivals insist that the new cards are as safe as traditional credit cards, and often point to the success of ExxonMobil's SpeedPass system as proof.
The Editor says... SpeedPass? Isn't that the same RFID system that has been cracked already? Would you carry a credit card with known vulnerabilities like that?
There has been other RFID spoofing work that has proven that the action of reading the card makes it more insecure.
Chip Implants: Better Care or Privacy Scare? They're here. They have FDA approval. But are Americans ready to get chipped? Getting chipped means having a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip implanted in your body. The chip — about the size of a large grain of rice — lies dormant until a special scanner is passed within six inches of the implant. Then it emits a radio signal that beams a 16-digit number to the scanner.
RFID Chips Are Here. Invented in 1969 and patented in 1973, but only now becoming commercially and technologically viable, … RFID chips cost up to 50 cents, but prices are dropping. Once they get to 5 cents each, it will be cost-efficient to put RFID tags in almost anything that costs more than a dollar.
What IT Departments Need to Look For When Deploying RFID: Before a company can take full advantage of RFID technology, an IT department needs to upgrade its infrastructure on a number of levels, including ...
Auto-ID: The worst thing that ever happened to consumer privacy. RFID employs a numbering scheme called EPC (for "electronic product code") which can provide a unique ID for any physical object in the world. The EPC is intended to replace the UPC bar code used on products today. Unlike the bar code, however, the EPC goes beyond identifying product categories — it actually assigns a unique number to every single item that rolls off a manufacturing line. For example, each pack of cigarettes, individual can of soda, light bulb or package of razor blades produced would be uniquely identifiable through its own EPC number.
RFID tag privacy concerns: Here are a few of our concerns and questions about the current media spin about Auto-ID Radio Frequency ID tags.
RFID Surveillance and Privacy: An investigation of radio-frequency identification, surveillance and privacy issues.
RSA Keeps RFID Private. RSA Security Inc. will unveil a finished version of its RFID "Blocker Tag" technology that prevents radio-frequency identification tags from being read.
RFID tag blocker: Because information stored on RFID tags can be read by anyone, they may pose privacy threats to customers when deployed in retail environments, and have already triggered a wave of consumer outcry.
RFID zapper: Some hobbyist has come up with what it takes for a paranoid person to obliterate any RFID tags that might be on consumer merchandise, or where not expected or wanted.
RFID: Proceed With Caution. Of course, tracking pallets of goods is one thing. Tracking the consumers who purchase those goods is another.
Big Brother under the skin. It's 2005 and Big Brother is not watching you; he's under your skin. A company is implanting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags in corpses in Mississippi to help identify the dead in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Homeland Security Wants to Track Spychips in Moving Cars. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is looking for beefed up RFID technology that can read government-issued documents from up to 25 feet away, pinpoint pedestrians on street corners, and glean the identity of people whizzing by in cars at 55 miles per hour.
Where's RFID Going Next? The Jacksonville Suns offer RFID-chip-embedded wristbands for cashless payments for food and drink at its minor-league ball games. It doesn't only get concession lines moving faster; a test showed a 10% increase in per-person spending. Another minor-league baseball team, the Nashville Sounds, deployed the system last month.
Return To Sender: RFID Reduces Errors For Sears. The retailer is using RFID to improve shipping accuracy and productivity at a merchandise-returns center in Atlanta.
Pinch My Ride. Ignition keys equipped with RFID chips were supposed to put car thieves out of business. No such luck. But the insurance companies are completely convinced that cars with RFID keys can't be stolen and the keys can't be cloned and the locks can't be spoofed. So when your car is stolen, they assume you're to blame.
Security Flaws Revealed in RFID Enabled Products. Students at Johns Hopkins University have discovered serious security flaws in the RFID chips which are used to protect cars from theft and prevent fraudulent use of Speedpass keys. The research shows that even RFID systems considered to be secure remain vulnerable, which only highlights the need to prioritize anaylsis of privacy and security prior to implementation of RFID technology. The potential for exploitation of the security deficiencies serves as a warning to all industries and governments that would hastily assemble RFID enabled systems in order to identify and/or track people as they cross borders.
Synopsis provided by
EPIC.
Be sure to visit Spy Chips dot com.
Students ordered to wear tracking tags. The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.
Elementary school nixes electronic IDs. Brittan Elementary School, located about 40 miles north of state capital Sacramento, is shutting off the high-tech student-tracking system because the company supplying it backed out of the deal, the school said Tuesday [2/15/2005]. The company, called InCom, put a kibosh on the project after some parents and a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union aired complaints at a school board meeting last week.
In Texas, 28,000 Students Test an Electronic Eye. In front of her gated apartment complex, Courtney Payne, a 9-year-old fourth grader … exits a yellow school bus. Moments later, her movement is observed by Alan Bragg, the local police chief, standing in a windowless control room more than a mile away. Chief Bragg is not using video surveillance. Rather, he watches an icon on a computer screen. The icon marks the spot on a map where Courtney got off the bus, and, on a larger level, it represents the latest in the convergence of technology and student security.
How RFID Will Help Mommy Find Johnny: Wannado City is helping parents keep better track of their kids with radio-frequency identification chips embedded in wristbands. The $40 million Fort Lauderdale, Fla., theme park, which opened in August, issues RFID wristbands to visitors as part of general admission. The wristbands have a microchip from Texas Instruments Inc. that wirelessly transmits a signal to antennas in reader devices from RF Code Inc. that are positioned throughout the 140,000-square-foot facility. The system combines passive and active RFID tags and readers.
Mandatory Student ID Cards Contain RFIDs. Parents in a northern California public school district and civil liberties groups are urging a school district to terminate the mandatory use of Radio Frequency Identification tags by students. A letter was sent today [2/8/2005] expressing alarm at the Brittan School District's use of mandatory ID badges that include a RFID device that tracks the students' movements. The device transmits private information to a computer on campus whenever a student passes under one of the scanners. The ID badges also include the student's name, photo, grade, school name, class year and the four-digit school ID number. Students are required to prominently display the badges by wearing them around the neck at all times.
Are new passports an identity-theft risk? Privacy advocates warn data chips can be "seen" by anyone with reader.
"Tagging" U.S. Schoolchildren. Houston's Spring Independent School District "is equipping 28,000 students with ID badges containing computer chips that are read when the students get on and off school buses," reported the November 17 New York Times. "The information is fed automatically by wireless phone to the police and school administrators." Police can monitor children from the time they leave home to their arrival on campus.
The Editor says... If you think those are the limits of such monitoring, that the monitoring begins when the kid leaves the house, that the monitoring takes place only on school days, then you are naïve indeed. If the chips can be read at the school bus stop without the assistance of the kids, then the chips can be read anywhere in town at any time of day. And apparently every kid in the school gets such an ID badge, whether he or she rides the bus or not. Nobody dares to speak out against an idea like this, because ostensibly "we're doing it for the children" (or) "it's for their safety."
Passports go electronic with new microchip. The US passport is about to go electronic, with a tiny microchip embedded in its cover. Along with digitized pictures, holograms, security ink, and "ghost" photos — all security features added since 2002 — the chip is the latest outpost in the battle to outwit tamperers. But it's also one that worries privacy advocates. The RFID (radio frequency identification) chip in each passport will contain the same personal data as now appear on the inside pages — name, date of birth, place of birth, issuing office — and a digitized version of the photo. But the 64K chip will be read remotely. And there's the rub.
RFID Threats to Privacy and Civil Liberties: RFID tags can be embedded into/onto objects and documents without the knowledge of the individual who obtains those items. As radio waves travel easily and silently through fabric, plastic, and other materials, it is possible to read RFID tags sewn into clothing or affixed to objects contained in purses, shopping bags, suitcases, and more. [Additionally,] hidden RFID readers have already been experimentally embedded into floor tiles, woven into carpeting and floor mats, hidden in doorways, and seamlessly incorporated into retail shelving and counters, making it virtually impossible for a consumer to know when or if he or she was being "scanned."
ACLU Urges Virginia Legislators Not To Put Radio Computer Chip in Driver's Licenses. The ACLU has urged Virginia not to become the first state in the nation to place radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in its driver's licenses.
Proposed "Enhanced" Licenses Are Costly to Security and Privacy. A so-called "enhanced" driver's license or identification card contains more data and different technology than current licenses and ID cards. Citizenship designations and wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) technology chips will be added to the cards.
More information about The Proposed National ID Card.
"Homeland Security" may be used as excuse for RFID. Facing increasing resistance and concerns about privacy, the United States' largest food companies and retailers will try to win consumer approval for radio identification devices by portraying the technology as an essential tool for keeping the nation's food supply safe from terrorists. The companies are banding together and through an industry association are lobbying to have the Department of Homeland Security designate radio frequency identification, or RFID, as an antiterrorism technology.
RFID Privacy Dustup: A pro-consumer privacy group opposed to tagging products with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips says it has made its point after discovering a security hole in the website of the Auto-ID Center, the MIT-based organization working with companies on industry standards for RFID and electronic product codes (EPCs).
RFID: Tracking everything, everywhere. Supermarket cards and retail surveillance devices are merely the opening volley of the marketers' war against consumers. If consumers fail to oppose these practices now, our long-term prospects may look like something from a dystopian science fiction novel.
Jamming Tags Block RFID Scanners. RFID tags combined with access to commercial databases could give the government great power to monitor people's interests and activities. For example… RFID tags in shoes could create a data trail of who wearers are and where they go.
Mediamatic RFID workshop. "RFID and The Internet of Things" is a workshop for a maximum of 16 designers and artists who want to learn more about RFID and its possible (cultural) effects and uses. In this workshop you'll make your own prototype where the virtual and the real world come together by using RFID tools.
DHS border chief: Ask me about potato chips, not RFID chips. We already know that some aging politicians and bureaucrats are prone to less-than-coherent ramblings about the technological topics that fall within their job descriptions. … You can imagine what goes through their minds: I really need to show the public that I get it. The only problem is that it doesn't always work. RFID and Gillette: RFID stands for Radio Frequency IDentification, a technology that uses tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track items at a distance. RFID "spy chips" have been hidden in the packaging of Gillette razor products and in other products you might buy at a local Wal-Mart, Target, or Tesco - and they are already being used to spy on people.
Transportation Department will use RFID for road nannying. With government funding [of course] and access to a large swath of radio spectrum, four RFID developers are starting work on a new generation of products aimed at bringing greater safety and new wireless applications to U.S. roads. Any system of this type would require this technology to be built into new vehicles.
The Editor says... Let me make a prediction: This system can and will be used to determine the location and the speed of every car on the highway. And just like air bags, you'll have to pay for this feature in your new car, whether you want it or not. I further predict it will be optional at first, and eventually become mandatory — in the interest of "safety", of course.
U.N.'s Universal Postal Union Gears Up for Large RFID Pilot. Three Middle Eastern countries — Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — joined together in a three-month pilot earlier this year to test the suitability of employing radio frequency identification as a tool for measuring the performance of mail delivery services. The pilot, led by Qatar's General Postal Corp. (Q-Post) and also including Saudi Post and Emirates Post, leveraged both passive EPC Gen 2 tags and active tags placed on approximately 3,120 test letters that circulated among the three nations.
New York to offer enhanced driver's license. New York drivers can begin applying today for an enhanced driver's license that will comply with tighter travel controls adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The state becomes the nation's second, after Washington state, to offer licenses that can be shown at the U.S. border instead of a more expensive passport.
Farmers See 'Mark of the Beast' in RFID Livestock Tags. A group of community farmers, some of them Amish, are challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are a "mark of the beast." Michigan and federal authorities say the radio frequency identification devices (RFID) will help monitor the travels of bovine and other livestock diseases.
Road Tolls Hacked: Hacking the FasTrak wireless transponders. A researcher claims that toll transponders can be cloned, allowing drivers to pass for free.
RFID Compliance Monitoring as a Condition of Federal Supervised Release. Some states have moved to chemically castrating certain types of sex offenders, while others have considered implementing lifetime GPS monitoring. And, for the better part of two years, the chipping of convicted sex offenders has lingered in the minds of concerned citizens and government officials alike, mutually frustrated with the serious inadequacies of existing sex offender punishment and registration regimes.
Electronic Vehicle Registration Picks Up Speed. In South Africa, at least 500,000 RFID tags are now being affixed to metal license plates to automatically identify vehicles and verify they are properly registered. Within the next two years, 10 million cars in that country are expected to sport electronic license plates.
RFID to keep a watch on your reading habits in public waiting rooms. So the next time you visit your doctor for your appointment and flip through the pages of the magazines kept in the reception room unknowingly to kill time you might not be aware of the fact that a watch is being kept on your reading habits using RFID.
Hidden Healthcare Reform Objective: Feds Want to Know Your Number. Imagine, if you will, that you are living in a changed America, or in President Obama's words, an America that begged "re-making." In this now-changed America, hope is in big government and her closest ally, big science. Now imagine that you and your spouse give birth to a child in this brave, new America, in a hospital linked by law to the federal citizens database. Immediately upon your child's birth, a hospital clerk assigns your newborn with a "Unique Health Identifier" (UHI), a specially coded number, which is then put into a national electronic database, along with your newborn's fingerprints and any other identifiers the bureaucrats in D.C. have demanded. ... Imagine that it is even required that your newborn, before leaving the hospital, be fitted with a surgically implanted microchip, the way babies are now, in many states, required to be vaccinated and blood-typed.
The Editor says... When people are implanted with RFID chips, where will the chips be placed? I predict they will be in the hand or in the forehead. Not everyone has hands, but everyone has a forehead. The insertion of the RFID chip in the forehead or in the hand will leave a visible mark, without which you will not be able to buy or sell anything. Years of over-reliance on debit cards and ATMs will lead to a cashless society, and the next step after that is to have all your digital money reside on your implanted RFID chip. My advice is this: DO NOT ACCEPT THE MARK ON YOUR HAND OR FOREHEAD. Life will be tough without it, but eventually you will be better off for refusing it.
California Students Get Tracking Devices. California officials are outfitting preschoolers in Contra Costa County with tracking devices they say will save staff time and money.
Obamacare's secret surveillance: Blog sites have been buzzing about the National Medical Device Registry, a new office in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that was created in the Obamacare reconciliation package. Concern centers on the registry's authority to conduct "postmarket device surveillance activities on implantable medical devices," including those that feature radio-frequency identification. The word "surveillance" conjures ominous images of government tracking and reporting. Some have suggested the law lays the groundwork for compulsory microchip implantation so the state can keep tabs on everyone — for their own good, naturally.
Man infects himself with computer virus. University of Reading researcher Mark Gasson has become the first human known to be infected by a computer virus. The virus, infecting a chip implanted in Gasson's hand, passed into a laboratory computer. From there, the infection could have spread into other computer chips found in building access cards.
Rebuttal: Re: Scientist Infects Himself With Computer Virus. I'd think that for this to be at all possible, it would have to be a very specific attack against a particular vendor's hardware or RFID communication stack. The idea of an RFID chip infecting arbitrary equipment is about as believable as the virus Jeff Goldblum used to bring down the alien mothership in Independence Day.
Digital Totalitarianism — The Conspiracy to Abolish Cash. For many years figures on the political fringe, especially on the right, have claimed that the government and its corporate owners want to transform us into a cashless society. Their warnings about the conspiracy against paper money fell on deaf ears, primarily because the digitalization of financial transactions seemed more like the result of organic business trends than the manifestation of some sinister conspiracy. Now, however, those who want to do away with liquid currency are stepping out of the shadows.
Privacy No More! You may think this is crazy, but the Green Police are coming to a town near you! I am serious! Many think the [advertisement] put out by Audi during the 2010 Superbowl is funny and cannot happen here in the United States — think again; it is happening now! Seriously, your garbage and recyclables are being monitored (in some cities in the USA) via RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) either put on your garbage containers/recycling bins or on your garbage bags. Plus, there are people who are called "Green Police" or the "Eco Police" that can then give you a fine of $25-$100 for not recycling or not recycling correctly. In other countries in Europe you can go to court if you do not recycle correctly or not enough — these RFID can even weigh how much garbage is being picked up at each address and then it is used to see if each address is doing enough to recycle.
Latest things in the Mark of the Beast Venue:
The Fatherland Card implemented for Social Behavior in Venezeula, Complements of the Chinese
Australia inserting microchips into Money
China Microchipping Student Uniforms
Radio Frequency Identification technology, or RFID, is being used in a number of settings from grocery stores and other retail outlets, to keeping track of pets and cattle, to license plates and passports. But the RFID systems are a clear threat to privacy, and recent history has shown that over-reliance on any kind of computer technology can be a disaster when the computers replace common sense.
More recently, many people have become convinced that it won't be long until everyone is required to accept RFID tags embedded in their skin. When the chips are implanted, they will leave a mark, and without that mark, many people believe that it will be impossible to buy or sell anything.
Before that day arrives, RFID systems will be used in a number of supposedly beneficial applications so that we can see what a great tool it could be for fighting terrorism and illegal immigration and all sorts of other problems. But remember, cattle are branded for the benefit of the farmer, not the cows. And when government officials assure you that RFID tags can't be copied, cloned or read by unauthorized snoops, don't believe it.
While barcodes have historically been the primary means of tracking products, RFID systems are rapidly becoming the preferred technology for keeping tabs on people, pets, products, and even vehicles. One reason for this is because the read/write capability of an active RFID system enables the use of interactive applications. Also, the tags can be read from a distance and through a variety of substances such as snow, fog, ice, or paint, where barcodes have proved useless.*
A parallel technology involves the widespread use of license plate readers.
You may voluntarily forfeit your privacy by the use of a supermarket discount card, but you may not be aware of other technology working to identify who buys what, and where it all goes. Unlike barcodes, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) chips make it possible to identify someone or something at a considerable distance from the reader. That could be really convenient at the grocery store, or it could be a real problem if you don't like to be followed, probed and audited wherever you go.
Another way to sacrifice your privacy, inadvertently or not, is through the use of OnStar, which is like asking — no, paying — a benevolent Big Brother to follow you around in case you have a wreck or get lost in a strange city. That's all perfectly okay, but the integrity of the system depends on people doing the right thing all the time, which (obviously) isn't always the case. If Uncle Sam (the IRS, FBI, or CIA) wanted to follow you around, the OnStar system would be the handiest tool to use.
If you are interested in RFID issues, you may consider Toll Road RFID Tags and license plate scanners to be a threat to privacy, anonymity and individual liberty. Unfortunately, the courts have ruled that there can be no expectation of privacy or anonymity on the highway.
Is 'Biochipping' A Good Idea? [Jowan] Österlund's Biohax is already making progress on a small scale. It has "chipped" more than 4,000 people in Sweden as well as others across Europe. Though many biochip projects are focused on health uses like heart-rate or blood-sugar monitoring, Österlund is so far marketing his chips to people with no medical ailments. Applications range from making purchases to opening locks to passing through security barriers — anything, really, that we're already doing with chips on plastic cards.
Australia Inserting Nano-Chips in $50 & $100 Bills to Track Underground Economy & Coming Barter System. While the BitCoin people have hated me for not agreeing with them that a private currency could displace the currencies of all nations and BitCoin would be the new "reserve currency" killing the dollar, to me they are in serious need of help. They have ZERO comprehension of governmental power and ZERO understanding of what is going on behind the curtain. The IMF has come out and stated that each nation should issue their own cryptocurrency and these fools cheers claiming I am not with it and do not get this new age of technology. Sorry, but these people are really clueless if not perhaps undercover people with a mission to get people willing to surrender their final liberty — paper money.
Schools in China introduce 'smart uniforms' with GPS chips to track students' movements and stop napping. Schools in China have created uniforms with tracking chips to monitor students' whereabouts and stop them playing truant. The so-called "smart uniforms", which have been criticised on social media, record the time and date a student enters the school and a short video parents can see through a mobile app. Eleven schools in the southwest province of Guizhou have introduced the uniforms, developed by local tech firm Guizhou Guanyu Technology. Skiving off classes triggers an alarm to notify both teachers and parents of the student's absence and an automatic voice alarm is activated if a student leaves school without permission.
How many passwords can you remember? Get ready to remember more. Got too many passwords to remember? Just wait. It's going to get a lot worse. Average consumers five years from now may face double the demands for passwords, said Emmanuel Schalit, chief executive of Dashlane, a consumer password security company. Schalit and other experts predict that passwords will explode in further use before they eventually fade, replaced by new technology. Digital devices in homes are growing more numerous, but Schalit said the real driver behind the steady increase in the need for passwords are the sprawling number of accounts for consumers to obtain public services, interact on healthcare and education websites and deal with retailers.
The Editor says... As digital transactions become more ubiquitous and less anonymous, and data breaches become more likely to affect more users, and cash is accepted in fewer places, the pressure will build to adopt some sort of digital verification, most likely in the form of a National ID number, carried on an RFID chip in your hand or your forehead. The convenience will only be temporary. The repercussions will last literally forever, according to Revelation, the last book in the Bible:
Revelation, Chapter 13: [Verse 11] And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. [...] [Verse 16] And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: [17] And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. [...] Chapter 14: [Verse 9] And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, [10] The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: [11] And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.
Wisconsin Tech Company Three Square Market Known for Microchipping Employees Rolling Out Global Tracking Chip. Last year we reported to you about the tech company in Wisconsin, Three Square Market, that created a human implantable microchip to control devices we interact with everyday. The story created a huge end times 'buzz' felt around the world as Bible believers immediatly made the connection between this and the prophesied Mark of the Beast the Bible tells us about.
In Sweden, cash is almost extinct as people implant microchips into their hands to pay for purchases. More than 4,000 Swedes have implanted microchips in their hands, allowing them to pay for rail travel and food, or enter keyless offices, with a wave. Just a few years ago, there were a couple of hundred of people in Sweden using human implantable microchips. The a thousand, then a few thousand, and now Sweden leads the world in microchip purchases. Cash in Sweden now accounts for only 1% of all transactions, and a full 50% of all Swedish banks will not accept cash deposits.
Credit Card Chips Fail to Halt Fraud, Survey Says. New chip-enabled credit cards, which were rolled out to U.S. consumers starting in 2015, were supposed to put an end to rampant credit card fraud. So much for that. A new report from the research firm Gemini Advisory has found that, of more than 60 million cases of credit card theft in the last 12 months, a whopping 93% of the stolen cards had the new chip technology. This represents a major setback for the technology, known as the EMV standard, which is named after the companies (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) that created it.
Are you ready for a chip implant? You walk into a grocery store and pick up eggs. No smartphone? No problem. You swipe your hand across a reader, and the amount is deducted from your bank account. If that sounds far-fetched, you obviously haven't been to Sweden recently, where thousands of people have reportedly had chips implanted in their bodies. A company called Biohax has already "installed" around 4,000 chips in customers, inserted just below the thumb.
This firm already microchips employees. Could your ailing relative be next? The technology company Three Square Market made headlines last year for implanting microchips in the arms of nearly 100 employees, allowing them to open doors, log on to their computers and purchase snacks from company vending machines with a simple swipe of their arm. The chips were initially little more than an innovative novelty, but now the Wisconsin-based company — which designs software for vending machines — has a more ambitious plan, according to chief executive Todd Westby. During an appearance on CNBC, Westby said his company is working on a more sophisticated microchip that is powered by human body heat and includes GPS tracking capabilities and voice activation. Microchips with GPS tracking may strike some as the first step toward handing our autonomy over to Skynet-like government overlords, and Three Square Market officials acknowledge that the chips will offer a convenient way to track people — especially those suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia.
Lawmaker Proposes Implanting Microchips in People to Track Non-Violent Offenders Like "Pets". This Tuesday [8/7/2018], Toledo City Councilman Rob Ludeman suggested that criminals be implanted with microchips so they can be tracked by police and the courts. Ludeman also made comments essentially describing people charged with crimes as animals. The councilman said, "this can't be inhumane because we do it to our pets." Ludeman suggested that implantable microchips should be used instead of ankle bracelets for people doing time on house arrest because ankle bracelets don't work on the cop shows that he watches.
A Wisconsin company will let employees use microchip implants to buy snacks and open doors. A Wisconsin company called Three Square Market is going to offer employees implantable chips to open doors, buy snacks, log in to computers, and use office equipment like copy machines. Participating employees will have the chips, which use near field communication (NFC) technology, implanted between their thumb and forefinger. It's an extension of the long-running implantable RFID chip business, based on a partnership with Swedish company Biohax International. The vending kiosk company, also known as 32M, will "chip" employees at a party on August 1st. Around 50 people are supposedly getting the optional implants.
Wisconsin Company To Implant Microchips In Employees. A Wisconsin company is about to become the first in the U.S. to offer microchip implants to its employees. Yes, you read that right. Microchip implants. "It's the next thing that's inevitably going to happen, and we want to be a part of it," Three Square Market Chief Executive Officer Todd Westby said. The company designs software for break room markets that are commonly found in office complexes. Just as people are able to purchase items at the market using phones, Westby wants to do the sam thing using a microchip implanted inside a person's hand.
Chip del Repuve Obligatorio en Mexico. El Repuve (Registro Público Vehicular) es un proyecto a nivel nacional, que consiste en el Registro Público de Veh'culos previo cumplimiento de un proceso de validación de información, además de ser un instrumento de información del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública. Para todos los autos nuevos de agencia, ya salen con el registro en la base de datos, ademús de tener pegada la calcoman'a del Chip del REPUVE que es un engomado o calcoman'a, que tiene un código de barras que puede ser escaneado con un aparato de manera inmediata y saber el estatus legal en que se encuentra el automóvil. También mostrara la información del NIV.
Translation by Google: The REPUVE (Public Vehicle Registry) is a project at the national level, which consists of the Public Registry of Vehicles following compliance with a process of validation of information, in addition to being an information tool of the National Public Security System. For all new agency cars, they already come with the registration in the database, in addition to having pasted the chip sticker REPUVE which is a sticker or decal, which has a bar code that can be scanned with a device immediately and know the legal status of the car. Also it will show the information of the NIV.
The Editor says... The MX_XM logo is obviously a dipole antenna for the RFID chip — without which the chip will not work. The article above was brought to my attention by a reader in Mexico, who reports a rapidly increasing number of tag readers on the highways. This is a system that can locate a car quickly, if the car is on one of those highways; and at the very least, the system can report the last known location of a specific car. This would make "Amber Alerts" obsolete. It would also make it impossible for someone to move freely from place to place without being followed by the government. That's an idea most Americans would oppose — I hope.
They Thought She Was Crazy: Doctor Extracts RFID Chip From Sex Trafficking Victim. The patient in question was a 28-year-old woman who claimed that she had a GPS tracking device planted in her body. Normally a patient like that would be regarded as crazy, but this woman appeared totally sane, and she had an incision mark on her side. So the doctor decided to check her out anyway. The medical staff at the hospital were stunned when they finally gave her an x-ray. "Embedded in the right side of her flank is a small metallic object only a little bit larger than a grain of rice. But it's there. It's unequivocally there. She has a tracker in her. And no one was speaking for like five seconds — and in a busy ER that's saying something." It turns out that it wasn't a GPS device, but an RFID chip.
Delta Airlines to Use RFID Microchips an All Luggage: Unveils $50 Million Dollar Tracking System. Now that everyone has gotten used to having a smart device attached to them at all times, it is the perfect time to begin tagging everything we touch with RFID microchips. Once people accept that, the tagging and chipping of humans will be next.
NFL likely to insert data chips into game balls in preseason, Thursdays. The NFL is finalizing plans to insert custom-made data chips into the game balls used in the 2016 preseason and Thursday night regular-season games, a league source said Sunday night. The data would be used for research that could spark significant changes in officiating, kicking and other areas as soon as the 2017 season. The Toronto Sun reported earlier Sunday that the league would use chips in K-balls to help determine the potential impact of narrowing the goalposts sometime in the future.
FDA & VeriChip try to Spin Spy Chip Scandal. After a recent investigation by the Associated Press uncovered the fact that substantial evidence exists, linking FDA-approved, human-implantable spychips, manufactured by VeriChip Corporation, with cancers found in numerous lab animals and at least one pet dog, both the FDA and VeriChip have been in full spin mode, trying to avoid a full-scale investigation that has the potential to bring down not only VeriChip, but quite possibly former Health and Human Services Secretary, Tommy Thompson. It's important to note that Thompson, who was Secretary of the department that oversaw the FDA, at the time that VeriChip received its FDA approval for their spychip, resigned that post just two weeks after that approval and within five months, held a very lucrative position on the board of directors of both VeriChip and its parent company, Applied Digital Solutions.
Chip cards? Most small business owners unaware of upcoming credit card transaction changes. A majority of small-businesses owners are unaware of an impending shift that could leave them liable for fraud committed with a new generation of chip-imbedded credit cards.
All American Credit Cards Will Disappear in 2015 and be Replaced with RFID Chip Technology. The new EMV credit card system in the U.S. is set to be rolled out by October, 2015. Also going away is the ability to sign for your purchases, that will no longer be necessary. Instead, you will enter a PIN to verify that you are the holder of the card. Removing the human element is one more step in the march towards the Mark Of The Beast system that will be in place during the Tribulation under the Antichrist. Obviously, all this is leading to a microchip being placed inside every human being, which would be the only way to guarantee that your card will not be lost or stolen.
PayPal wants to implant passwords in your stomach and your brain. PayPal is working on a new generation of embeddable, injectable and ingestible devices that could replace passwords as a means of identification. Jonathan LeBlanc, PayPal's global head of developer evangelism, claims that these devices could include brain implants, wafer-thin silicon chips that can be embedded into the skin, and ingestible devices with batteries that are powered by stomach acid. These devices would allow "natural body identification," by monitoring internal body functions like heartbeat, glucose levels and vein recognition, Mr LeBlanc told the Wall Street Journal.
Chip and Quill: How EMV Will Increase Card Fraud in the U.S. First, while the U.S. accounts for 25 percent of global card volume, it attracts 50 percent of all card fraud — because we still rely on magnetic stripes and signatures in cursive to secure and verify card transactions. Fun fact #1: Cursive was invented to prevent lifting your quill from the page and blotting ink all over your scroll. I'm not kidding. In response to better pen and ink technologies developed decades ago (not to mention word processing), schools are finally phasing out instruction in cursive writing. Fun fact #2: In a very recent non-scientific study conducted only by me, I concluded that humans are incapable of reproducing signatures on point-of-sale (POS) terminals that don't draw their sobriety into question — not that it matters since no one's checking them anyway. And since no one's checking them, signatures are not a reliable source of identification, and they are completely useless in preventing lost-and-stolen card fraud.
Editor's note: EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, a global standard for inter-operation of integrated circuit cards (IC cards or "chip cards") and IC card capable point of sale (POS) terminals and automated teller machines (ATMs), for authenticating credit and debit card transactions.
Man embeds computer chips in hands to store Bitcoin. A Dutch entrepreneur has had two wireless computer chips implanted under the skin in his hands to allow him to store digital currencies like Bitcoin inside his body. Martijn Wismeijer is the founder of Mr Bitcoin, a company which installs and operates crypto-currency cash machines in and around his native Amsterdam and across Europe. This month he chose to undergo a painful procedure to embed NFC (near-field communication) chips under his skin.
Latest Obama order aims to combat identity theft, data breaches. President Obama signed an executive order on Friday [10/17/2014] designed to increase Americans' financial security and strengthen protections against identity theft. The new "BuySecure" initiative is an attempt to expedite the transition away from debit and credit cards with magnetic strips, a dated technology that's more vulnerable to intrusion, and toward cards with microchips and PIN numbers, which are considered more secure. Under the order, starting next year, all government-issued cards will make use of the newer technology.
The Editor says... Once the federal government standardizes a practice of this seemingly innocuous sort, it soon becomes a federal mandate for private businesses. Mr. Obama is merely getting the ball rolling. Not by signing a law passed by Congress of course, just an exercise of his own authoritarian power. The RFID chips are in the cards for now, but I suspect that when this system is shown to be inadequate, the RFID chip will have to be in your hand or you forehead. Notice also that any action the government does not want you to notice is taken on Friday afternoons.
Is there a microchip implant in your future? You can inject one under your skin and no one will ever notice. Using short-range radio frequency identification (RFID) signals, it can transmit your identity as you pass through a security checkpoint or walk into a football stadium. It can help you buy groceries at Wal-Mart. In a worst-case scenario — if you are kidnapped in a foreign country, for example — it could save your life. Microchip implants like the ones pet owners use to track their dogs and cats could become commonplace in humans in the next decade.
Texas Schools Are Forcing Kids To Wear RFID Chips. Is That a Privacy Invasion? Two San Antonio schools have joined others in Houston and Austin in requiring students to wear cards with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in them, allowing administrators to track their whereabouts on campus.
Student Refusing to Wear RFID Chip Loses in Court. A federal court has ruled that a Texas student who refuses to wear a school-mandated RFID tracking badge must at least wear an identification badge without a tracking chip or else change to a school without such a system. John Jay High School in San Antonio, Texas began requiring students to wear badges with RFID tags to track students' on-campus movements at the beginning of the fall semester. Andrea Hernandez, 15, refused to wear the badge on religious grounds, claiming it was the "mark of the beast," according to Wired. She was suspended for disobeying the new rule and later sued the district. A temporary injunction allowed her to continue her studies untracked.
Student Suspended for Refusing to Wear RFID Chip Returns to School. A Texas girl suspended for refusing to wear a student ID card implanted with a radio-frequency identification chip is being re-admitted to her former high school where fall classes begin Monday, her lawyers said today [8/22/2013]. The flap concerns Andrea Hernandez, who will be a junior at John Jay High in San Antonio. She was suspended in January and sued the Northside Independent School District on privacy and religious grounds. She lost the case and began attending another school that did not require pupils to wear the ID badges.
Texas school can force students to wear locator chips, judge rules. A public school district in Texas can require students to wear locator chips when they are on school property, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday [1/8/2013] in a case raising technology-driven privacy concerns among liberal and conservative groups alike.
Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips. Since October 1, [2012,] students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, have been asked to attend class with photo ID cards equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips to track every pupil's location. Educators insist that the endeavor is being rolled out in Texas to stem the rampant truancy devastating the school's funding. If the program is judged successful, the RFID chips could soon come to 112 schools in all and affect nearly 100,000 students.
Officials Kick Andrea Hernandez Out of Magnet School Over Religious Objections to RFID Tracking Program. In keeping with a court order to provide school officials with a written decision as to whether or not she will agree to wear an RFID tracking badge to school, Andrea Hernandez had asked school officials at John Jay High School to allow her to continue her "education uninterrupted" by permitting her to use her old ID badge which "does not signify participation in a program which I believe conflicts with my religious beliefs."
The Editor says... The lesson here is clear: A student's religious beliefs will not be accommodated and no exceptions will be allowed — unless the student is a Muslim!
New Obama plan calls for implanted computer chips to help U.S. troops heal. When President Obama on Tuesday [8/26/2014] highlighted 19 executive actions he says he is taking to improve the mental health of U.S. troops and veterans, one of them centered on a particularly novel effort: The development of new computer chips designed to modulate the nervous system to help with everything from arthritis to post-traumatic stress. The project is headed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon agency that develops a variety of high-tech equipment for the U.S. military. It's known as the Electrical Prescriptions program, or ElectRx (pronounced "electrics").
Establishment Pushing "Cashless Society" to Control Humanity. Proponents of the government-enforced move away from physical currency cite a wide array of potential real and imagined benefits. Among them: possible reductions in armed robbery, tax evasion, black-market commerce, the cost of printing and securing physical cash, and more. Critics, though, are warning of the dangerous and Orwellian schemes that could be unleashed in a world where out-of-control governments can monitor literally every purchase, transaction, and bit of economic activity. In light of the recently exposed NSA snooping scandal, the possibilities for abuse and total surveillance are more than hypothetical, obviously.
Contactless Credit Cards causing increase in crime. Tap-and-go credit cards contributing to increase in crime stats, Victoria [Australia] Police say. Chief Commissioner Ken Lay said the number of deceptions, including when thieves fraudulently use other people's credit cards, has increased by 11,600 and impacted on overall crime rates. "One of the main drivers over the last little while have been deceptions and these tap-and-go (credit) cards."
Will Microchip Implants in Humans Become Mandatory? [If Mac Slavo's] vision of tomorrow is correct, hardly anyone will have to be dragged kicking and screaming by jack-booted storm troopers (or robots?) into that Brave New World; rather, most people will willingly be chipped as we slouch toward Oceania. In fact, the movement is already in progress. [...] There is precedent for acceptance of such intrusion; after all, your cellphone has an RFID chip and can be used to track your every movement, and its camera can be remotely activated by authorities. And we all have Social Security numbers.
Creepy New Disney RFID Bracelet to Allow Park Mascots to Greet Your Child By Name. Frankly, Disney creeps me out, and my research affirms that those feelings are not at all misplaced. When I saw that one of the new capabilities of Disney's ever-so-magical RFID bracelet program was to allow the middle-aged guy with no background check who dresses like Goofy and wonders the park greeting kids all day to know people's children by name, I thought this definitely requires a report.
San Antonio Officials Re-Admit Expelled High School Student After Ending RFID Tracking Program. School officials with the Northside Independent School District have agreed to re-admit Andrea Hernandez to John Jay High School's Science and Engineering Academy. Hernandez, who will resume her studies at John Jay as a high school junior when school convenes on Monday, Aug. 26, was expelled from the magnet school program after raising religious freedom and privacy objections to NISD's "Student Locator Project," which relied on RFID tracking badges to enable school officials to track students' location on school property.
Is It Possible That Snowden Is A Hero? Even those who do not use the Internet or have a computer are having all their data and information collected by the government as well as political marketers. Every swipe of a credit card, supermarket card, library card, debit card, is downloaded to the Net at relatively low cost to the government. GPS in cars and smartphones, Onstar vehicles, can have their locations tracked by the Department of Defense which developed this technology. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be used to track everything from household products, casino chips, animals and even people who have them inserted under the skin at fancy VIP club to facilitate faster access to club. These RFIDs are in our passports. Authorities can place GPS devices on suspect vehicles without court orders thanks to the Patriot Act. This is not fiction. It is real and it is happening to all of us now.
When a car salesman tells you keyless entry is safe, ask about this: High-Tech Thieves Use New Gadget To Gain Keyless Access To Vehicles In Long Beach. Police are asking for the public's help in identifying three tech-savvy criminals wanted for a series of car burglaries in which they used an unknown device to gain keyless entry to vehicles.
RFID used to track school students. A court challenge has delayed plans to expel a Texan student for refusing to wear a radio tag that tracked her movements. Religious reasons led Andrea Hernandez to stop wearing the tag that revealed where she was on her school campus. The tags were introduced to track students and help tighten control of school funding.
More on suspended student refusing to wear tracking device. The district attempted to paint this "students-as-livestock/prisoners" effort as being there for the safety of students and staff. But underneath all the "safety" talk was a large pile of money that the school district hoped to pocket. The so-called "Student Locator" project Texas' Northside Independent School District was implementing put school officials within handout distance of nearly $1.7 million in state government funds.
Texas school district to require students to wear RFID chip whil [sic] on campus. A school district in San Antonio, Texas is requiring middle and high school students to wear a "tracking" chip while on campus. And not just a passive RFID (Radio-frequency identification) chip, these second generation RFID chips include a battery that transmits a radio signal for constant location monitoring of the students. District spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said, "Chip readers on campuses and on school buses can detect a student's location but can't track them once they leave school property. Only authorized administrative officials will have access to the information."
The Editor says... The school district claims they "can't track [the students] once they leave school property." Not true. Active RFID tags can be read and located wherever there is a compatible reader. The reader can be the property of the school district, or the police, an identity thief, or anybody else.
Wear radio chip or leave, school tells students. Brushing aside privacy concerns by parents and civil rights activists, a Texas school district has gone live with a controversial program requiring all students to wear a locator radio chip that will enable officials to track their every move — or face expulsion. At the beginning of the school year students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School within the Northside Independent School District were told their old student ID badges were no longer valid. During registration they were required to obtain new badges containing a radio frequency identification tracker chip.
Student Expelled for Refusing Location Tracking RFID Badge. After months of protesting a policy requiring high school students to wear an RFID-enabled ID badge around their necks at all times, Andrea Hernandez is being involuntarily withdrawn from John Jay High School in San Antonio effective November 26th, according to a letter sent by the district that has now been made public. The letter, sent on November 13, informs her father that the Smart ID program, which was phased in with the new school year, is now in "full implementation" and requires all students to comply by wearing the location-tracking badges.
Spying on school kids. School districts in Texas are using tracking chips to spy on students. That's just fine with a federal judge who ruled Tuesday [1/8/2013] against Andrea Hernandez, a 15-year-old high school sophomore in San Antonio. With the help of the Rutherford Institute, Miss Hernandez and her father filed a lawsuit arguing the creepy "student locator project" violated her constitutional rights.
Hackers Endorse Texas Student's Refusal to Wear Tracking Device. In September, two San Antonio schools began requiring their 4,000 students to wear ID badges containing radio frequency identification chips that transmit 24/7. Hernandez refused, citing her religious beliefs and right to privacy. The school threatened expulsion. So she sued. Hernandez refused even to wear a card lacking a chip and battery, though school staff offered her that option twice, her principal said. Wearing it would imply she endorsed the badges, her father said. The sophomore has been wearing her old ID around her neck, instead.
USDA Wants RFID Tracking Technology To Be Mandatory In US Food Stamp Program. The USDA is now considering biometric identification for all individuals who will want to benefit from their Food and Nutrition Services. The RFID chip may just soon be a must for everyone who does not want to starve!
Texas Students Revolt Against Mandatory RFID Tracking Chips. Students and parents at two San Antonio schools are in revolt over a program that forces kids to wear RFID tracking name tags which are used to pinpoint their location on campus as well as outside school premises. Students at John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School will be mandated to wear the tags from today which will be used to track them on campus as well as when they enter and leave school.
'Human barcode' could make society more organized, but invades privacy, civil liberties. Would you barcode your baby? Microchip implants have become standard practice for our pets, but have been a tougher sell when it comes to the idea of putting them in people. Science fiction author Elizabeth Moon last week rekindled the debate on whether it's a good idea to "barcode" infants at birth in an interview on a BBC radio program.
Texas District Plans to Add RFID Chips to School IDs. Depending on your point of view, RFID technology is either stuff of dystopian fantasy come to life, or a long-overdue improvement made possible by technology. Students at the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas will have plenty of opportunities to decide this issue for themselves as the officials roll out a plan to embed a Radio Frequency Identification System chip into student ID cards in order to track their location throughout the day.
Concerned About RFID Tags? You Should Be. Stores are not the only organizations to use RFIDs. Many libraries today are also using them as a way to manage their inventory. RFID systems have already replaced traditional checkout systems in a number of libraries in California, Oregon, and Nevada. Once again this raises serious concerns with privacy advocates. When a book is entered into the collection, it is given a second static ID number. Because the number never changes, a person or organization can use that ID to track the movements of certain books. This technique, called "hotlisting", when combined with traditional methods such as video surveillance, can be used to link together persons of the same group or disposition. Many believe that law enforcement agencies could easily abuse this method if RFIDs become more prevalent.
Legal Battle May Disallow Publication on Cracked RFID Chip. Researchers from the Dutch Radboud University have cracked and cloned London's Oyster travel card, after cracking the Dutch Mifare Travel card. The latter would be used in a nationwide network for billing of public transportation. Both cards use the Mifare Classic RFID tags, which relies for its security on an algorithm that can be cracked with modest effort. The troubled card provides for contact-less entrance to public transportations and office buildings worldwide. The manufacturer of the chip, NXP, follows Dutch secretary of state Tineke Huizinga in claiming that publication of the results is irresponsible.
Information could be 'robbed by radiowave' thanks to new contactless technology. Millions of credit and debit card users could be 'robbed by radiowave' because of new contactless technology being brought in by banks. Almost 20 million shoppers are now able to buy goods by simply waving their card in front of a reader at the tills, even if it is still in a wallet or a purse.
Cattle are tagged for the benefit of the farmer, not the cows. 'Big Brother' plan to fight obesity in children by tracking students with electronic tags. Parents and civil rights activists are furious at the new program that will allow school administrators to monitor the heart rates, exercise, and sleep schedules of students using electronic bracelets. A school district in Long Island, New York, announced that it would be the latest addition to the list of schools using the technology to help track students' activity and fight obesity. Unanswered questions — including which students will wear the devices, for how long, and the purpose of the gathered data — have parents concerned about the level to which the program will invade their children's privacy.
Schools 'spy' on fat kids. A group of Long Island students will soon be wearing controversial electronic monitors that allow school officials to track their physical activity around the clock. The athletics chair for the Bay Shore schools ordered 10 Polar Active monitors, at $90 a pop, for use starting this spring. The wristwatchlike devices count heartbeats, detect motion and even track students' sleeping habits in a bid to combat obesity.
NY Schools Spy on Fat Kids. Big Brother wants your kids to lose weight and be healthier. A school district on Long Island, New York is requiring a group of overweight and obese kids to wear electronic bracelets that monitor where they are and what they're doing at all times, especially if they're not active or exercising.
The black hole of Britain! One family, the Smiths, were baffled when their heating, shower, doorbell and even their cars' remote door locks refused to work and they discovered similar problems were being experienced by their neighbours in Kingsclere. They spent much of the festive season without heating and lights after the failure of household systems that rely on digital technology, specifically radio-frequency identification (RFID).
Electronic skin tattoo has medical, gaming, spy uses. A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday. The micro-electronics technology, called an epidermal electronic system (EES), was developed by an international team of researchers from the United States, China and Singapore, and is described in the journal Science.
Mexicans Get Dubious RFID Tracking Chips Implanted In Their Arms. Companies selling these chips to scared citizens are promising that they will help rescuers track them down in the event of a kidnapping. The chip, implanted in the tissue between the shoulder and elbow, sends a signal to an GPS device that the wearer carries. But Xega, the company that manufactures many of the chips, says that they can track clients even without the GPS unit, by sending radio signals directly to the implanted chip. This claim seems very unlikely to be true.
Don't steal the hotel towels... they're electronically tagged. The days of hotel guests helping themselves to towels and robes when they check out could be a thing of the past as high tech gets in to the linen. One company has come up with a way of adding miniature tags in the expensive materials which were costing hotel managements a fortune to constantly replace.
Chips for dinner: Edible RFID tags describe your food. For tracking, radio frequency identification (RFID) chips are the greatest thing since sliced bread. But what if the RFID chip was actually in the sliced bread?
Technological Advancements: A Path To Freedom Or a Path To Serfdom. GPS is being used in many business now to track employees, in the scope of the fact that it is a private business and the end result is only related to said business, that may be permissible. When a Government Body starts to track a private citizen we move into a whole new arena.
Risks of RFID car keys. Back in the good old days, if you happened to leave your key in your car, a potential thief still had to 1) know it was there and 2) locate it in order for it to do him or her any good. No more. Now thanks to handy dandy RFID technology the thief can steal the car first and then search for the key after. And, of course, finding a car whose owner has left a key in it somewhere is a simple matter of making a pinging device.
Any mass-produced security system can be hacked or bypassed. How Hackers Can Use Smart Keys To Steal Cars. Modern smart keys use radio frequencies to let drivers unlock and start a vehicle without fumbling with a key fob. Now European researchers have found such systems can be hacked, letting thieves easily steal your car. ... The research by the team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology targeted a new weakness; the smart key fobs common on luxury vehicles and spreading to mainstream models that allow a driver to unlock doors and start a vehicle without touching the fob. Using radio signals, the fob and vehicle send encrypted signals to each other over short distances, and while other researchers had suggested the fobs could be vulnerable, no one had put the idea to a test.
Implanting RFID tags in U.S. passports makes stealing personal data easier than ever. In January 2006, the Dutch security firm Riscure … using a personal computer and a commercially available radio receiver … was able to read the digital information of a prototype Dutch e-passport (which uses the same RFID chip and encryption scheme as the new U.S. passports) from a distance of about 30 centimeters. With that information, Riscure cracked the e-passport's password in roughly two hours and thus gained full access to the RFID chip's contents, including a digital picture, fingerprint, and other personal information.
TSA scanners are a front to implement biometric chips. You might of heard that the TSA scanners at US airports are a front because the guy that owns part of the company also makes the rules. If you dont know who this is then dont worry, that is not the story. The same guy also claims that the TSA scanners are just a front to implement them in schools and make people used to the idea, they would rather choose the machines than being molested by TSA agents. Their plan is to see a machine in every school, shopping mall and public building. Just about everywhere.
More about the TSA's
abusive and invasive searches.
RFID passport card privacy threat debated. A passport card set to be issued by the State Department for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean doesn't require privacy protection, even though it uses a radio frequency identification chip which can be read from 20 feet away, because the chip itself doesn't contain personal information, according to the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Selective Blocking of RFID Tags for Consumer Privacy. The impending ubiquity of RFID tags … poses a potentially widespread threat to consumer privacy. The simplest RFID tag will broadcast its ID serial number — that is, its electronic product code (EPC) — to any nearby reader. The ID number, as envisioned by the AutoID Center, is unique to a given tag. It contains not only the traditional information contained in a printed barcode (indicating manufacturer and product type), but also a unique serial number for that tag. Each consumer product or item of clothing will be uniquely identified.
Did corporate lawyers put kibosh on 'Mythbusters' RFID episode? At a recent conference — it's not clear which one — Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage was asked why the show hasn't tackled the technology behind the security limitations of RFID. His eyes lighting up at the chance to talk about something that clearly was a memorable experience for him, Savage said the show had actually set out to do an episode on the vulnerabilities of RFID but encountered some very powerful resistance.
Feds Release Pass Card details. The government has dragged its feet in releasing the final details about its Pass Card technology, and now they dump it into the Federal Register on the last day of the year. The government has decided to go with a technology that is more suited to tracking inventory and can be read from up to 20 feet away.
RFID passport card privacy threat debated. A passport card set to be issued by the State Department for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean doesn't require privacy protection, even though it uses a radio frequency identification chip which can be read from 20 feet away, because the chip itself doesn't contain personal information, according to the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST director William Jeffrey said that because the RFID chips will only contain a unique reference number which points to a database entry, the passport cards don't need to be encrypted or to have other safeguards for protecting personal information.
Report Tempers RFID Fears. Those who understand the benefits of RFID are aware of its potential for abuse … Most seek to require retailers to deactivate tags at the time of purchase. They are also urging manufacturers to embed tags in the packaging instead of in the products themselves. The RFID industry and users have endorsed both approaches.
RFID Guardian. Apparently someone in the Netherlands has developed a prototype device which can
- Detect all RFID chips and scanners in its neighborhood;
- Block the reading of any RFID you carry;
- Spoof a given RFID.
Alarm over shopping radio tags. Supermarkets have already brought everything under the sun under one roof, and along the way been accused of denuding the High Street of butcher, baker and candlestick-maker. Now they are introducing a new technology that some say threatens a fundamental invasion of our privacy.
Bill aims to slow RFID in its tracks. Prompted by worries that developing technologies that use radio waves to identify both physical objects and human beings are gaining popularity in big businesses such as Wal-Mart, [New Hampshire] House and Senate members have collaborated on the language for what could be the model for legislation of its kind in the nation.
EPIC's web page about RFID Systems. RFID tags come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some tags are easy to spot, such as the hard plastic anti-theft tags attached to merchandise in stores. Animal tracking tags which are implanted beneath the skin of family pets or endangered species are no bigger than a small section of pencil lead. Even smaller tags have been developed to be embedded within the fibers of a national currency. While barcodes have historically been the primary means of tracking products, RFID systems are rapidly becoming the preferred technology for keeping tabs on people, pets, products, and even vehicles.
What is RFID? RFID stands for Radio Frequency IDentification, a technology that uses tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track items at a distance. RFID "spy chips" have been hidden in the packaging of Gillette razor products and in other products you might buy at a local Wal-Mart, Target, or Tesco and they are already being used to spy on people.
Tracking device on bins ensures residents chip in. Bin Brother is watching you. When Randwick City Council began replacing its 78,000 residential garbage and recycling bins last month, a resident, Dan Himbrechts, scratched his head. Why get rid of old ones that seemed to work perfectly well? His suspicions grew further when he noticed a small, flat, circular object hidden under the rim of his new bin. About the size of a 10-cent coin, it had the letters "TI-RFid" embossed on it. … [Local officials] say they are using the data to help identify areas where people are not recycling enough.
The Editor asks... What happens to the people who don't recycle enough?
New recycling bins with tracking chips coming to Alexandria. Alexandria residents soon will have to pay for larger home recycling bins featuring built-in monitoring devices. The City Council added a mandatory $9 charge to its residents' annual waste collection fee. That cash — roughly $180,000 collected from 19,000 residents — will pay for new larger recycling carts equipped with computer microchips, which will allow the city to keep tabs on its bins and track resident participation in the city's recycling program.
China raises the red tag. RFID tags aren't just for tracking consumer goods any more. The Chinese Communist Party is experimenting with tagging and tracking people. Delegates to the recent Communist Party Congress were required to wear an RFID badge equipped with the tiny tag, which permitted their movements around the conference to be constantly tracked and recorded.
Hacker RFID Demo Killed by Corporate Lawsuit Threat. It's a new take on an old story. Security researcher wants to demonstrate longstanding vulnerablities in a product. Product's owner gets mad and threatens to sue before the presentation. Presentation gets cancelled. This go around security researchers at IO Active wanted to show security professionals at the Black Hat conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday how easy it was to create a way to clone building entrance cards sold by HID Corporation.
RFID and Privacy. If "live" unique RFID devices pass beyond the point of sale and are carried out into the consumer's world, they pose a strong threat to privacy. The unique ID in a garment or a car could be read silently by any organization and associated with an individual, allowing subsequent re-identification by that organization (or indeed by any other organization to which the data was sold). The organization doing the surveillance need not be the manufacturer or retailer. As readers cost as little as $20, a hobbyist snoop or private investigator could even set one up near a doorway to record people who revisit an area.
RFID: the next serious threat to privacy. RFID's usage is currently undergoing a revolution, being incorporated into everything from automobile keys to product packaging to passports. With this deployment, though, have come great concerns about the technology's effect on the privacy.
RFID Viruses and Worms. Up until now, everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software, and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong. In our research, we have discovered that if certain vulnerabilities exist in the RFID software, an RFID tag can be (intentionally) infected with a virus and this virus can infect the backend database used by the RFID software.
This article was published in January 2003, hence the reference to John Poindexter. RFID tags: Big Brother in small packages. The privacy threat comes when RFID tags remain active once you leave a store. That's the scenario that should raise alarms — and currently the RFID industry seems to be giving mixed signals about whether the tags will be disabled or left enabled by default. In an interview with News.com's Gilbert … Gillette Vice President Dick Cantwell said that its RFID tags would be disabled at the cash register only if the consumer chooses to "opt out" and asks for the tags to be turned off. "The protocol for the tag is that it has built in opt-out function for the retailer, manufacturer, consumer," Cantwell said. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, says that's not the case.
VeriChip Launches IPO. Although the provider of human-implantable RFID chips scaled back the size of its IPO, demand for the company's stock seemed fairly strong, with more than 2 million shares trading hands.
Update: Human Chipping Company Omits Salient Risks from IPO Disclosure. VeriChip Corporation, the much-hated purveyor of the VeriChip human ID implant, is airing its dirty laundry this week. This is not by choice, mind you, but because the Securities and Exchange Commission required the company to disclose its "risk factors" prior to launching its initial public offering of stock (IPO) Friday [2/9/2007].
VeriChip: The VeriChip Personal Identification System is a small radio frequency identification device (RFID) that is implanted into the human body. VeriChip raises the same privacy issues as RFID tags. For an initial "chipping" fee, as well as a monthly subscription fee, customers' arms are implanted with a glass chip about the size of a grain of rice, containing a unique verification number.
Chip Implants Linked to Animal Tumors. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients' medical records almost instantly. … But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had "induced" malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.
RFID is Watching You. It looks like RFID is about to come of age. In fact, with the level of backing that MIT's RFID program the Auto-ID Center now has, it could soon be as ubiquitous as money. Sun Microsystems is the latest to announce its support, joining other big brand names such as Procter and Gamble, Gillette, International Paper, Wal-Mart and Tesco. Together this industry co-operative aims to help build wireless digital identification tags into everything, from razor blades to magazines to pharmaceuticals to milk cartons.
Kodak's RFID Moment: The company recently filed a patent for a digestible radio frequency identification tag, which would monitor the ingestion of medicine, but Kodak won't divulge its commercial intentions.
W.Va. Coal Mine Tests to Locate Workers During Emergencies. The company is using active 2.4 GHz RFID tags to pinpoint miners working in a 3.5-mile series of tunnels.
In an Academic Study, RFID Fractal Antenna Wins Out. Researchers at Finland's Tampere University of Technology found that a fractal UHF RFID handheld reader antenna performed better than four traditional antenna designs.
Electronic Accountability System Uses RF Technology. An electronic accountability system developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will result in savings of more than $2 million per year at one federal facility alone and will ensure 100 percent accountability of employees.
RFID tracking: The article [above] … claims (among other things) safety benefits from knowing the locations of all employees during an emergency (of some kind that miraculously manages not to knock out any part of the tracking computers or their sensor network, or to damage anyone's RFID).
RFID Tags: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is the generic term used to describe technologies using radio waves to automatically identify people or objects. We need to be aware of the privacy implications of this technology as its use becomes more widespread.
Wisconsin Bans Forced Human RFID Chipping. Civil libertarians cheered yesterday [5/30/2006] upon news that Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle signed a law making it a crime to require an individual to be implanted with a microchip. Activists and authors Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre joined the celebration, predicting this move will spell trouble for the VeriChip Corporation, maker of the VeriChip human microchip implant.
UK considers RFID tags for prisoners. The UK government is considering implanting prisoners with RFID tags containing data on identity, address and criminal record. The RFID tags, about the size of two grains of rice, would be injected under the skin and could be scanned by a reader. There are also proposals to link the RFID tags to a larger GPS device to monitor the location of high risk prisoners.
Consumer Watchdogs Demand Recall of Spychipped Credit Cards. Consumer watchdog group CASPIAN is demanding a recall of millions of RFID-equipped contactless credit cards in light of serious security flaws reported today [10/23/2006] in the New York Times. The paper reports that a team of security researchers has found that virtually every one of these cards tested is vulnerable to unauthorized charges and puts consumers at risk for identity theft.
Wal-Mart commits billions to RFID. Wal-Mart plans to spend $3 billion over the next few years on a new inventory tracking technology that uses radio frequency signals to keep tabs on merchandise, sources familiar with the project said. The system is based on a technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID), a new breed of computer network designed to track the location of everyday objects such as razors and shoes by embedding them with special microchips. Wal-Mart has enlisted its top 100 merchandise suppliers to participate in the high-profile project, which is one of the first and largest of its kind in the retail industry.
Water vending machine uses RFID to track bottles. The new Aquaduct system, designed by S2C Global to deliver recyclable, five-gallon plastic bottles of water directly to the customer, targets a growing number of consumers who are time poor, but still have concerns over unhealthy products that damage the environment. According to the manufacturer, consumers purchase bottled water through outdoor vending machines with a credit, debit or pre-paid aqua card.
Retailers See RFID's Potential to Fight Shrinkage. A growing number of retailers are beginning to see RFID as a tool not only for improved product visibility, but also for preventing product theft — or, at least, for reducing the negative impacts of product shrinkage.
RFID Helps Car Wash Customers Cruise Through Lines. Car-wash operator Cruz Thru Express is employing an RFID system it designed itself to automate the way it provides services to its customers. ... After trying both bar-coded labels and license-plate recognition, Cruz Thru Express adopted a system last year using passive EPC Gen 2 RFID tags.
'Hardcore' crime teens to be tagged instead of locked up. Hundreds of Scotland's most serious young offenders will be allowed to stay in their communities with an electronic tag rather than being locked up.
Privacy Best Practices for Deployment of RFID Technology. There are many possible applications of RFID that do not pose major privacy concerns. But to the extent that RFID devices can be linked to personally identifiable information ("PII"), including where such devices facilitate the tracking of an individual's location, RFID raises important privacy questions.
Old Big Brother Had a Farm. If only Orwell could get a load of this. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is promoting a system that would have farm-animal owners and livestock handlers attach microchips or other ID tags to their furry and feathered charges so they could be monitored throughout their lifetimes by a centralized computer network.
RFID Meets George Orwell's Telescreen. British company Ubisense has paired the remote tracking power of Radio Frequency Identification with a modern-day version of the telescreen from George Orwell's novel 1984. Ubisense claims that it has developed a way to use RFID tags to track human beings and objects to within 12 inches of their locations and beam a real-time 3-dimensional map of it all to computer screens for live monitoring of offices, manufacturing facilities, and even retail stores.
Orwell Today compares the world George Orwell described in "1984" with the world we are living in today.
Britons 'could be microchipped like dogs in a decade'. Human beings may be forced to be 'microchipped' like pet dogs, a shocking official report into the rise of the Big Brother state has warned. The microchips — which are implanted under the skin — allow the wearer's movements to be tracked and store personal information about them.
The hands-free way to steal a credit card: Adam Laurie, an RFID security expert, used the Black Hat DC 2008 conference here, to demonstrate a new Python script he's working on to read the contents of smart-chip-enabled credit cards. As part of his presentation Wednesday [2/20/2008], Laurie asked for someone from the audience to volunteer a smart card. Without taking the card out of the volunteer's wallet, Laurie both read and displayed its contents on the presentation screen — the person's name, account number, and expiration clearly visible. Demonstrations like that show the potential misuse of RFID technology in the near future.
RFID hack could crack open 2 billion smart cards. A student at the University of Virginia has discovered a way to break through the encryption code of RFID chips used in up to 2 billion smart cards used to open doors and board public transportation systems.
RFIDIOt is an open source Python library for exploring RFID devices, written by Adam Laurie, a freelance security consultant.
Cracked it! Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?
Doubts raised over passport security. If you have an Australian passport issued in the last year, you may know that it contains a computer chip to enhance security. The Government says it's the most secure Australian passport ever. But a London computer expert has raised doubts about its operation and its vulnerability to identity fraud. Using a new Australian passport, he's easily cracked the security protection of the new computer chip and accessed information within it.
UK Biometric Passports not Secure. A security expert has cracked one of the UK's RFID-equipped passports, stealing personal data from a distance.
Medical Microchips — Risk and Uncertainty. It is a sad reality that many federal laws result in unintended consequences for the public which must abide by them. Such has been the fate of the much touted Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), a law so cumbersome it took the Department of Health and Human Services almost seven years to figure out how to implement it.
You need not be paranoid to fear RFID. If this sounds paranoid, take it up with IBM. The company filed a patent application in 2001 which contemplates using this wireless snooping technology to track people as they roam through "shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, rest rooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, museums, etc."
Chips Could Track Car Plates. A controversial plan to embed RFID chips in license plates in the United Kingdom also may be coming to the United States, experts told UPI's Wireless World.
Malaysia to embed car license plates with microchips to combat theft. Malaysia's government, hoping to thwart car thieves, will embed license plates with microchips containing information about the vehicle and its owner, a news report said Saturday [12/2/2006]. With the chips in use, officials can scan cars at roadblocks and identify stolen vehicles, the New Straits Times reported. The "e-plate" chip system is the latest strategy to prevent car thieves from getting away with their crimes by merely changing the plates, the report said.
[Why would they need roadblocks? Why not scan every car at every major intersection?] Brit License Plates Get Chipped. The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.
RFID-enabled license plates to identify UK vehicles. The UK-based vehicle licence plate manufacturer, Hills Numberplates Ltd, has chosen long-range RFID tags and readers from Identec Solutions to be embedded in licence plates that will automatically and reliably identify vehicles in the UK.
RFID ... Powder!? Word has it Hitachi's latest batch of RFID chips are so small, "you won't even know they're there."
Does Implantable RFID Need More Volunteers? There hasn't been a whole lot of positive response for the RFID chip implant business, despite the industry's clamoring for volunteers. For a while there, VeriChip's controversial implantable RFID (developed to improve the accuracy of surgery and other applications) dominated headlines. But according to Mobile magazine and other media, VeriChip has sunk a lot of its own money into making these things — but people aren't buying.
Homeland Security May Drop RFID Plans Entirely. US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a House committee hearing today [2/9/2007] that his department is dropping plans for RFID tags. Chertoff said the technology isn't the solution the Department of Homeland Security needs to keep would-be terrorists out of the United States, according to reports.
E-Passports Less Reliable Than Traditional Passports. A document obtained by EPIC from the State Department reveals that 2004 government tests found passports with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that are read 27% to 43% less successfully than the previous Machine Readable Zone technology (two lines of text printed at the bottom of the first page of a passport).
UK RFID Passport Cracked. Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes?
The RFID Hacking Underground: They can steal your smartcard, lift your passport, jack your car, even clone the chip in your arm. And you won't feel a thing.
Orwellian eyes. The EZPass automated highway-toll system used by nine East Coast states, including Virginia, uses an RFID chip attached to a transponder or Smart Tag on the vehicle's windshield. The chip is read by a small machine posted at the toll booth and allows drivers to whiz past while the cost is deducted from a debit or credit card. The RFIDs already are a part of electronic vehicle identification systems used for access to military bases, airports, gated communities, hospitals, state parks and country clubs.
Boycott Gillette. Hidden cameras in Gillette spy shelves take mug shots of people who pick up their products! Consumers have asked Gillette to stop putting RFID "spy chips" in their products, but Gillette has ignored our concerns.
Department of Homeland Security Wants Beefed up RFID to silently ID people 25 feet away.
Tagging surgical sponges could prevent medical errors. Putting tiny tracking chips on sponges could help prevent the objects from being left in patients accidentally after surgery, say U.S. researchers who tested the idea.
Wal-Mart is RFID tagging in Texas. In addition to violating the call for a moratorium on RFID-tagged items in stores, Wal-Mart has begun a consumer education campaign that CASPIAN is calling unethical. "Read the FAQs at the Wal-Mart corporate web site and you'll find plenty of half truths," [Katherine] Albrecht says. "They call it consumer education, but the omissions and spin make it feel more like a calculated disinformation campaign."
Wal-Mart Radio Tags to Track Clothing. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to roll out sophisticated electronic ID tags to track individual pairs of jeans and underwear, the first step in a system that advocates say better controls inventory but some critics say raises privacy concerns.
Spychipped Levi's Brand Jeans Hit the U.S.. New information confirms that Levi Strauss & Co. is violating a call for a moratorium on item-level RFID by spychipping its clothing. What's more, the company is refusing to disclose the location of its U.S. test.
Albertsons' assets sold to CVS, Supervalue and investor group. The total value of the sale was about $17.4 billion in cash, stock and assumed debt. … No word on whether the "preferred" card is going to stick around, but with that price we suspect they are going to use every trick they can to recoup their investment.
Oakland Requires ID Chips for Dogs. City officials have drafted an ordinance that requires dog owners to have a rice-sized I.D. chip implanted in their pets. And those who don't comply could be hit with a fine of $100 for a second offense and $1,000 for subsequent infractions.
Chip and PIN – Whose goods are you paying for? The "chip and PIN" system is not automatically synchronized with the rest of the checkout, and customers may be being charged for the wrong amount on an ongoing basis if the cashier is not aware to check the receipts for consistency.
California Gov Terminates RFID ID Bill. On Saturday [10/07/2006], California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed SB 768, the Identity Information Protection Act of 2006, which would have been the first state bill to address how RFID technology may be used in identification documents issued by state and local governments and agencies.
Pfizer's RFID Pilot Is the Start of Something Big. Pfizer, which began shipping RFID-tagged bottles of Viagra for U.S. distribution last December, is looking to the future use of RFID technology throughout the pharmaceutical supply chain. As the company approaches the one-year mark of its pilot program, McKesson, HD Smith and other wholesalers have completed 200,000 authentications of both item- and case-level tags. Of those, only 19 tags were found to be "dead" after leaving the facility, according to Peggy Staver, director of product integrity at Pfizer.
Storm building over RFID-enabled passports. As the U.S. government prepares to complete a conversion to the controversial RFID-based electronic passports, traditional paper-only IDs are still available for a few months to those listening to the raging debate over security and privacy concerns swirling around the electronic documents.
Here Come the Next-Generation Passports. The U.S. State Department has begun rolling out "e-passports," new high-tech documents that bolster border security through identity safeguards. In a dangerous world, upgrading passports is prudent policy that serves the interests of Americans at home and abroad, but not everyone is happy with them. E-passports employ the use of radio frequency identification, or RFID.
"Thief-proof" car key cracked. (Already?) According to an article in The Register, the security on RFID devices used in car keys and petrol pump payment systems has been broken (the article actually says "Researchers have discovered cryptographic vulnerabilities in the RFID technology..."
RFID access control tokens widely open to cloning. Too many systems to itemize here rely on the 'unique ID' of an RFID token to grant access to a system or building, and, in the case that these tokens are based on 125kHz or 134.2kHz standard tags, many of them may be vulnerable to relatively simple cloning attacks. … The problem is that many security system suppliers are integrating industry standard tag readers, and promoting the 'uniqueness' of the tag ID as a guaranteed certainty when it isn't, and thereby compromising the security of the entire system.
Microchips May Be Added To Passports. The federal government is planning on embedding microchips in passports this summer. The RFID chips will contain digital information printed on the passport, including a photograph of the passport user. The State Department has asked the National Institute of Standards and Technology to test the chips to ensure that hackers cannot read information from the chip. [REALLY?] In one lab test a powerful chip reader was able to pick up activity on the chip but not information.
High-tech passports are not working. The data on these chips will be readable remotely, without the bearer knowing. And — again at America's insistence — those data will not be encrypted, so anybody with a suitable reader, be they official, commercial, criminal or terrorist, will be able to check a passport holder's details. … Passport chips are deliberately designed for clandestine remote reading. The ICAO specification refers quite openly to the idea of a "walk-through" inspection with the person concerned "possibly being unaware of the operation".
Encrypt E-Passports. The State Department proposes to enhance the traditional passport by embedding in it a computer chip carrying personal information. Data stored on the chip is likely to include the passport holder's name, date, and place of birth, and a digitized photo. Machines would read the chip when travelers passed through checkpoints at ports of entry and exit. … The State Department does not plan to encrypt the data on E-Passports.
Rollout of Chip-Embedded Passports Begins: The State Department decided to ignore the overwhelming public opposition to the use of passports containing radio frequency identification (RFID) chips. The first e-passports are being distributed and the nationwide rollout will occur at the end of the year. … The new passports and the chip technology pose a serious threat to privacy and security. There remains the possibility that personal information could be "skimmed" or stolen from a distance using a chip reader. … The chips could also act as beacons that broadcast travelers' nationality to terrorists.
New UK biometric passports & identity theft: It would be fairly straightforward for a courier using a standard RFID reader to scan each passport, in its envelope, as he or she delivers it and hand the details on to an accomplice at some later time. We know that the encryption has already been broken. So. No need to steal the passport, no need even to open the envelope containing the passport. All the details taken and no evidence to show it.
The ID Chip You Don't Want in Your Passport: If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it — even if it's not set to expire anytime soon. If you don't have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don't want one of these chips in your passport.
Coalition Urges DHS to Reject Real ID Chip Mandate. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently drafting regulations to implement the REAL ID Act. We, the undersigned individuals and organizations, have a wide variety of concerns about the proposed REAL ID card and system and we have urged DHS to establish a standard that provides the greatest possible security at the most reasonable cost while protecting individual privacy. This letter addresses one of those concerns —the use of radio frequency identification chips (RFID) as the "machine readable" feature in the card.
MasterCard to begin national rollout of swipeless RFID cards. After months of testing, MasterCard is preparing for a major national rollout of its PayPass swipeless RFID credit cards, and expects to have up to 4 million of them in circulation by the end of the year. … MasterCard and its rivals insist that the new cards are as safe as traditional credit cards, and often point to the success of ExxonMobil's SpeedPass system as proof.
The Editor says... SpeedPass? Isn't that the same RFID system that has been cracked already? Would you carry a credit card with known vulnerabilities like that?
There has been other RFID spoofing work that has proven that the action of reading the card makes it more insecure.
Chip Implants: Better Care or Privacy Scare? They're here. They have FDA approval. But are Americans ready to get chipped? Getting chipped means having a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip implanted in your body. The chip — about the size of a large grain of rice — lies dormant until a special scanner is passed within six inches of the implant. Then it emits a radio signal that beams a 16-digit number to the scanner.
RFID Chips Are Here. Invented in 1969 and patented in 1973, but only now becoming commercially and technologically viable, … RFID chips cost up to 50 cents, but prices are dropping. Once they get to 5 cents each, it will be cost-efficient to put RFID tags in almost anything that costs more than a dollar.
What IT Departments Need to Look For When Deploying RFID: Before a company can take full advantage of RFID technology, an IT department needs to upgrade its infrastructure on a number of levels, including ...
Auto-ID: The worst thing that ever happened to consumer privacy. RFID employs a numbering scheme called EPC (for "electronic product code") which can provide a unique ID for any physical object in the world. The EPC is intended to replace the UPC bar code used on products today. Unlike the bar code, however, the EPC goes beyond identifying product categories — it actually assigns a unique number to every single item that rolls off a manufacturing line. For example, each pack of cigarettes, individual can of soda, light bulb or package of razor blades produced would be uniquely identifiable through its own EPC number.
RFID tag privacy concerns: Here are a few of our concerns and questions about the current media spin about Auto-ID Radio Frequency ID tags.
RFID Surveillance and Privacy: An investigation of radio-frequency identification, surveillance and privacy issues.
RSA Keeps RFID Private. RSA Security Inc. will unveil a finished version of its RFID "Blocker Tag" technology that prevents radio-frequency identification tags from being read.
RFID tag blocker: Because information stored on RFID tags can be read by anyone, they may pose privacy threats to customers when deployed in retail environments, and have already triggered a wave of consumer outcry.
RFID zapper: Some hobbyist has come up with what it takes for a paranoid person to obliterate any RFID tags that might be on consumer merchandise, or where not expected or wanted.
RFID: Proceed With Caution. Of course, tracking pallets of goods is one thing. Tracking the consumers who purchase those goods is another.
Big Brother under the skin. It's 2005 and Big Brother is not watching you; he's under your skin. A company is implanting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags in corpses in Mississippi to help identify the dead in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Homeland Security Wants to Track Spychips in Moving Cars. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is looking for beefed up RFID technology that can read government-issued documents from up to 25 feet away, pinpoint pedestrians on street corners, and glean the identity of people whizzing by in cars at 55 miles per hour.
Where's RFID Going Next? The Jacksonville Suns offer RFID-chip-embedded wristbands for cashless payments for food and drink at its minor-league ball games. It doesn't only get concession lines moving faster; a test showed a 10% increase in per-person spending. Another minor-league baseball team, the Nashville Sounds, deployed the system last month.
Return To Sender: RFID Reduces Errors For Sears. The retailer is using RFID to improve shipping accuracy and productivity at a merchandise-returns center in Atlanta.
Pinch My Ride. Ignition keys equipped with RFID chips were supposed to put car thieves out of business. No such luck. But the insurance companies are completely convinced that cars with RFID keys can't be stolen and the keys can't be cloned and the locks can't be spoofed. So when your car is stolen, they assume you're to blame.
Security Flaws Revealed in RFID Enabled Products. Students at Johns Hopkins University have discovered serious security flaws in the RFID chips which are used to protect cars from theft and prevent fraudulent use of Speedpass keys. The research shows that even RFID systems considered to be secure remain vulnerable, which only highlights the need to prioritize anaylsis of privacy and security prior to implementation of RFID technology. The potential for exploitation of the security deficiencies serves as a warning to all industries and governments that would hastily assemble RFID enabled systems in order to identify and/or track people as they cross borders.
Synopsis provided by
EPIC.
Be sure to visit Spy Chips dot com.
Students ordered to wear tracking tags. The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.
Elementary school nixes electronic IDs. Brittan Elementary School, located about 40 miles north of state capital Sacramento, is shutting off the high-tech student-tracking system because the company supplying it backed out of the deal, the school said Tuesday [2/15/2005]. The company, called InCom, put a kibosh on the project after some parents and a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union aired complaints at a school board meeting last week.
In Texas, 28,000 Students Test an Electronic Eye. In front of her gated apartment complex, Courtney Payne, a 9-year-old fourth grader … exits a yellow school bus. Moments later, her movement is observed by Alan Bragg, the local police chief, standing in a windowless control room more than a mile away. Chief Bragg is not using video surveillance. Rather, he watches an icon on a computer screen. The icon marks the spot on a map where Courtney got off the bus, and, on a larger level, it represents the latest in the convergence of technology and student security.
How RFID Will Help Mommy Find Johnny: Wannado City is helping parents keep better track of their kids with radio-frequency identification chips embedded in wristbands. The $40 million Fort Lauderdale, Fla., theme park, which opened in August, issues RFID wristbands to visitors as part of general admission. The wristbands have a microchip from Texas Instruments Inc. that wirelessly transmits a signal to antennas in reader devices from RF Code Inc. that are positioned throughout the 140,000-square-foot facility. The system combines passive and active RFID tags and readers.
Mandatory Student ID Cards Contain RFIDs. Parents in a northern California public school district and civil liberties groups are urging a school district to terminate the mandatory use of Radio Frequency Identification tags by students. A letter was sent today [2/8/2005] expressing alarm at the Brittan School District's use of mandatory ID badges that include a RFID device that tracks the students' movements. The device transmits private information to a computer on campus whenever a student passes under one of the scanners. The ID badges also include the student's name, photo, grade, school name, class year and the four-digit school ID number. Students are required to prominently display the badges by wearing them around the neck at all times.
Are new passports an identity-theft risk? Privacy advocates warn data chips can be "seen" by anyone with reader.
"Tagging" U.S. Schoolchildren. Houston's Spring Independent School District "is equipping 28,000 students with ID badges containing computer chips that are read when the students get on and off school buses," reported the November 17 New York Times. "The information is fed automatically by wireless phone to the police and school administrators." Police can monitor children from the time they leave home to their arrival on campus.
The Editor says... If you think those are the limits of such monitoring, that the monitoring begins when the kid leaves the house, that the monitoring takes place only on school days, then you are naïve indeed. If the chips can be read at the school bus stop without the assistance of the kids, then the chips can be read anywhere in town at any time of day. And apparently every kid in the school gets such an ID badge, whether he or she rides the bus or not. Nobody dares to speak out against an idea like this, because ostensibly "we're doing it for the children" (or) "it's for their safety."
Passports go electronic with new microchip. The US passport is about to go electronic, with a tiny microchip embedded in its cover. Along with digitized pictures, holograms, security ink, and "ghost" photos — all security features added since 2002 — the chip is the latest outpost in the battle to outwit tamperers. But it's also one that worries privacy advocates. The RFID (radio frequency identification) chip in each passport will contain the same personal data as now appear on the inside pages — name, date of birth, place of birth, issuing office — and a digitized version of the photo. But the 64K chip will be read remotely. And there's the rub.
RFID Threats to Privacy and Civil Liberties: RFID tags can be embedded into/onto objects and documents without the knowledge of the individual who obtains those items. As radio waves travel easily and silently through fabric, plastic, and other materials, it is possible to read RFID tags sewn into clothing or affixed to objects contained in purses, shopping bags, suitcases, and more. [Additionally,] hidden RFID readers have already been experimentally embedded into floor tiles, woven into carpeting and floor mats, hidden in doorways, and seamlessly incorporated into retail shelving and counters, making it virtually impossible for a consumer to know when or if he or she was being "scanned."
ACLU Urges Virginia Legislators Not To Put Radio Computer Chip in Driver's Licenses. The ACLU has urged Virginia not to become the first state in the nation to place radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in its driver's licenses.
Proposed "Enhanced" Licenses Are Costly to Security and Privacy. A so-called "enhanced" driver's license or identification card contains more data and different technology than current licenses and ID cards. Citizenship designations and wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) technology chips will be added to the cards.
More information about The Proposed National ID Card.
"Homeland Security" may be used as excuse for RFID. Facing increasing resistance and concerns about privacy, the United States' largest food companies and retailers will try to win consumer approval for radio identification devices by portraying the technology as an essential tool for keeping the nation's food supply safe from terrorists. The companies are banding together and through an industry association are lobbying to have the Department of Homeland Security designate radio frequency identification, or RFID, as an antiterrorism technology.
RFID Privacy Dustup: A pro-consumer privacy group opposed to tagging products with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips says it has made its point after discovering a security hole in the website of the Auto-ID Center, the MIT-based organization working with companies on industry standards for RFID and electronic product codes (EPCs).
RFID: Tracking everything, everywhere. Supermarket cards and retail surveillance devices are merely the opening volley of the marketers' war against consumers. If consumers fail to oppose these practices now, our long-term prospects may look like something from a dystopian science fiction novel.
Jamming Tags Block RFID Scanners. RFID tags combined with access to commercial databases could give the government great power to monitor people's interests and activities. For example… RFID tags in shoes could create a data trail of who wearers are and where they go.
Mediamatic RFID workshop. "RFID and The Internet of Things" is a workshop for a maximum of 16 designers and artists who want to learn more about RFID and its possible (cultural) effects and uses. In this workshop you'll make your own prototype where the virtual and the real world come together by using RFID tools.
DHS border chief: Ask me about potato chips, not RFID chips. We already know that some aging politicians and bureaucrats are prone to less-than-coherent ramblings about the technological topics that fall within their job descriptions. … You can imagine what goes through their minds: I really need to show the public that I get it. The only problem is that it doesn't always work. RFID and Gillette: RFID stands for Radio Frequency IDentification, a technology that uses tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand to track items at a distance. RFID "spy chips" have been hidden in the packaging of Gillette razor products and in other products you might buy at a local Wal-Mart, Target, or Tesco - and they are already being used to spy on people.
Transportation Department will use RFID for road nannying. With government funding [of course] and access to a large swath of radio spectrum, four RFID developers are starting work on a new generation of products aimed at bringing greater safety and new wireless applications to U.S. roads. Any system of this type would require this technology to be built into new vehicles.
The Editor says... Let me make a prediction: This system can and will be used to determine the location and the speed of every car on the highway. And just like air bags, you'll have to pay for this feature in your new car, whether you want it or not. I further predict it will be optional at first, and eventually become mandatory — in the interest of "safety", of course.
U.N.'s Universal Postal Union Gears Up for Large RFID Pilot. Three Middle Eastern countries — Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — joined together in a three-month pilot earlier this year to test the suitability of employing radio frequency identification as a tool for measuring the performance of mail delivery services. The pilot, led by Qatar's General Postal Corp. (Q-Post) and also including Saudi Post and Emirates Post, leveraged both passive EPC Gen 2 tags and active tags placed on approximately 3,120 test letters that circulated among the three nations.
New York to offer enhanced driver's license. New York drivers can begin applying today for an enhanced driver's license that will comply with tighter travel controls adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The state becomes the nation's second, after Washington state, to offer licenses that can be shown at the U.S. border instead of a more expensive passport.
Farmers See 'Mark of the Beast' in RFID Livestock Tags. A group of community farmers, some of them Amish, are challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are a "mark of the beast." Michigan and federal authorities say the radio frequency identification devices (RFID) will help monitor the travels of bovine and other livestock diseases.
Road Tolls Hacked: Hacking the FasTrak wireless transponders. A researcher claims that toll transponders can be cloned, allowing drivers to pass for free.
RFID Compliance Monitoring as a Condition of Federal Supervised Release. Some states have moved to chemically castrating certain types of sex offenders, while others have considered implementing lifetime GPS monitoring. And, for the better part of two years, the chipping of convicted sex offenders has lingered in the minds of concerned citizens and government officials alike, mutually frustrated with the serious inadequacies of existing sex offender punishment and registration regimes.
Electronic Vehicle Registration Picks Up Speed. In South Africa, at least 500,000 RFID tags are now being affixed to metal license plates to automatically identify vehicles and verify they are properly registered. Within the next two years, 10 million cars in that country are expected to sport electronic license plates.
RFID to keep a watch on your reading habits in public waiting rooms. So the next time you visit your doctor for your appointment and flip through the pages of the magazines kept in the reception room unknowingly to kill time you might not be aware of the fact that a watch is being kept on your reading habits using RFID.
Hidden Healthcare Reform Objective: Feds Want to Know Your Number. Imagine, if you will, that you are living in a changed America, or in President Obama's words, an America that begged "re-making." In this now-changed America, hope is in big government and her closest ally, big science. Now imagine that you and your spouse give birth to a child in this brave, new America, in a hospital linked by law to the federal citizens database. Immediately upon your child's birth, a hospital clerk assigns your newborn with a "Unique Health Identifier" (UHI), a specially coded number, which is then put into a national electronic database, along with your newborn's fingerprints and any other identifiers the bureaucrats in D.C. have demanded. ... Imagine that it is even required that your newborn, before leaving the hospital, be fitted with a surgically implanted microchip, the way babies are now, in many states, required to be vaccinated and blood-typed.
The Editor says... When people are implanted with RFID chips, where will the chips be placed? I predict they will be in the hand or in the forehead. Not everyone has hands, but everyone has a forehead. The insertion of the RFID chip in the forehead or in the hand will leave a visible mark, without which you will not be able to buy or sell anything. Years of over-reliance on debit cards and ATMs will lead to a cashless society, and the next step after that is to have all your digital money reside on your implanted RFID chip. My advice is this: DO NOT ACCEPT THE MARK ON YOUR HAND OR FOREHEAD. Life will be tough without it, but eventually you will be better off for refusing it.
California Students Get Tracking Devices. California officials are outfitting preschoolers in Contra Costa County with tracking devices they say will save staff time and money.
Obamacare's secret surveillance: Blog sites have been buzzing about the National Medical Device Registry, a new office in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that was created in the Obamacare reconciliation package. Concern centers on the registry's authority to conduct "postmarket device surveillance activities on implantable medical devices," including those that feature radio-frequency identification. The word "surveillance" conjures ominous images of government tracking and reporting. Some have suggested the law lays the groundwork for compulsory microchip implantation so the state can keep tabs on everyone — for their own good, naturally.
Man infects himself with computer virus. University of Reading researcher Mark Gasson has become the first human known to be infected by a computer virus. The virus, infecting a chip implanted in Gasson's hand, passed into a laboratory computer. From there, the infection could have spread into other computer chips found in building access cards.
Rebuttal: Re: Scientist Infects Himself With Computer Virus. I'd think that for this to be at all possible, it would have to be a very specific attack against a particular vendor's hardware or RFID communication stack. The idea of an RFID chip infecting arbitrary equipment is about as believable as the virus Jeff Goldblum used to bring down the alien mothership in Independence Day.
Digital Totalitarianism — The Conspiracy to Abolish Cash. For many years figures on the political fringe, especially on the right, have claimed that the government and its corporate owners want to transform us into a cashless society. Their warnings about the conspiracy against paper money fell on deaf ears, primarily because the digitalization of financial transactions seemed more like the result of organic business trends than the manifestation of some sinister conspiracy. Now, however, those who want to do away with liquid currency are stepping out of the shadows.
Privacy No More! You may think this is crazy, but the Green Police are coming to a town near you! I am serious! Many think the [advertisement] put out by Audi during the 2010 Superbowl is funny and cannot happen here in the United States — think again; it is happening now! Seriously, your garbage and recyclables are being monitored (in some cities in the USA) via RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) either put on your garbage containers/recycling bins or on your garbage bags. Plus, there are people who are called "Green Police" or the "Eco Police" that can then give you a fine of $25-$100 for not recycling or not recycling correctly. In other countries in Europe you can go to court if you do not recycle correctly or not enough — these RFID can even weigh how much garbage is being picked up at each address and then it is used to see if each address is doing enough to recycle.
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