I had planned to publish this dairy after I had done a little more work on it; however, the recent capitulation of some Democrats to the WH desires to further erode the Constitution and continue thier illegal surveillance of whomever they please, I thought it timely to publish it now.
An article byTODD LEWAN, AP National Writer brings attention to a rapidly developing and troubling technology in the area of electronic surveillance - RFID's (radio frequency identification) tagging.
CityWatcher.com, a provider of surveillance equipment, attracted little notice itself _ until a year ago, when two of its employees had glass-encapsulated microchips with miniature antennas embedded in their forearms.
The "chipping" of two workers with RFIDs radio frequency identification tags as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick was merely a way of restricting access to vaults that held sensitive data and images for police departments, a layer of security beyond key cards and clearance codes, the company said.
...continued below the fold
At the outset let me say, although I consider myself scientifically literate, I make no claims to have expertise in the field of computer electronics. But, one does not need to have extensive understanding of the electronics associated with RFID's to appreciate the impact they will have on society, for good or ill.
There are some obvious benefits to the use of RFID's that will accrue to individuals, to business and manufactures in a wide range of applications; there are also sinister or criminal uses for which the device might be used; and, the potential to destroy our rights and freedoms in the hands of the wrong government. Unfortunately, such a government lurks uncomfortably close.
Further, I am not engaging in a luddite rant on the evils of technology; technology is neutral, human beings bestow the attributes of "good or evil" in how it's used.
There are two basic types of RFID's. The passive RFID generally used in close range applications with low powered readers (key locks, gun locks, credit cards) and operate in the unregulated radio frequencies; it is short range and doesn't have its own power supply. The active RFID has a built in power supply and is capable of being detected and read at a greater distance. The active RFID generally operates in regulated frequencies including: 433 MHz, 915MHz, 2.45 GHz and 13.65 GHz
The basic design of an RFID is a microchip (about 2-2.5 mm or 1/16 inch square), an antenna, and, in the case of the active type, a power supply.
From RFID Journal
An RFID system consists of a tag made up of a microchip with an antenna, and an interrogator or reader with an antenna. The reader sends out electromagnetic waves. The tag antenna is tuned to receive these waves. A passive RFID tag draws power from the field created by the reader and uses it to power the microchip's circuits. The chip then modulates the waves that the tag sends back to the reader, which converts the new waves into digital data.
The reader in turns transfers the data to a computer/repository.
The RFID tags can expand thier abilities beyond a simple ID tag, as the microchip is progammable.
Some companies are combining RFID tags with sensors that detect and record temperature, movement and even radiation. The technology can also be used in the health-care sector. For instance, Belgium's University Hospital of Ghent has implemented a system that detects when a patient is having cardiac distress, and sends caregivers an alert indicating the patient's location
The Science Fact feature in the Sept.'07 issue of Analog Magazine has a very informative article on RFID's, Beyond This Point Be RFID's by Edward M. Lerner.
Unfortunately there is no linkable source to the article (that I could find) -Edward Lerner does have a web site.
Pro and con arguments abound on the benefits and dangers of the RFID microchip, a technology on a fast track to become a ubiquitous element in many aspects of our lives.
There are arguments for the convenience they will provide, arguments for safety and, the ever popular, sales clincher, security.
To some, the microchip was a wondrous invention _ a high-tech helper that could increase security at nuclear plants and military bases, help authorities identify wandering Alzheimer's patients, allow consumers to buy their groceries, literally, with the wave of a chipped hand.
There is, however, (as with all technology) a dark side that the optimists and advocates would ignore at thier peril.
To others, the notion of tagging people was Orwellian, a departure from centuries of history and tradition in which people had the right to go and do as they pleased, without being tracked, unless they were harming someone else
In a "strange bed fellow" moment... but with wildly divergent motives.
civil libertarians and Christian conservatives joined to excoriate the microchips implantation in people.
RFID, they warned, would soon enable the government to "frisk" citizens electronically _ an invisible, undetectable search performed by readers posted at "hotspots" along roadsides and in pedestrian areas. It might even be used to squeal on employees while they worked; time spent at the water cooler, in the bathroom, in a designated smoking area could one day be broadcast, recorded and compiled in off-limits, company databases.
Those were the sentiments expressed by the civil libertarians. The Christian conservatives approach to the issue came from a somewhat different slant.
Some Christian critics saw the implants as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that describes an age of evil in which humans are forced to take the "Mark of the Beast" on their bodies, to buy or sell anything.
Gary Wohlscheid, president of These Last Days Ministries, a Roman Catholic group in Lowell, Mich., put together a Web site that linked the implantable microchips to the apocalyptic prophecy in the book of Revelation.
"The Bible tells us that God's wrath will come to those who take the Mark of the Beast," he says. Those who refuse to accept the Satanic chip "will be saved," Wohlscheid offers in a comforting tone.
One would think almost everyone, except the truly mentally challenged or terminally stupid, would be vehemently opposed to being injected with a microchip tracking device. But, public attitudes can be influenced by a plethora of moronic ideas or well designed promotional hype.
"people are going to be too squeamish about having an RFID chip inserted into their arms, or wherever."
But that wasn't the case in March 2004, when the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, Spain a nightclub catering to the body-aware, under-25 crowd began holding "Implant Nights."
In a white lab coat, with hypodermic in latex-gloved hand, a company chipper wandered through the throng of the clubbers and clubbettes, anesthetizing the arms of consenting party goers, then injecting them with microchips.
The payoff?
Injectees would thereafter be able to breeze past bouncers and entrance lines, magically open doors to VIP lounges, and pay for drinks without cash or credit cards. The ID number on the VIP chip was linked to the user's financial accounts and stored in the club's computers.
So much for intelligent, informed decision making.
Although a complete RFID tagged population is still in the realm of dystopian science fiction novels; the technology to realize those grim SF scenarios exists today.
However, the expense and hassle of tagging people isn't really necessary, all that needs to be done is to tag their stuff: stuff in wallets, purses and backpacks (credit cards, ID's, car keys), cell phones, GPS units, Library books, clothes, shoes, cars, tires ... you know - your STUFF - this is something currently going on and is in high gear.
A few of the current tagged items are: EZ toll passes, quick scan credit cards (so you don't hold up the line), shopper's club discount cards or key fobs, many new cars, tires, high end clothing (theft protection), security car keys (only a licenced dealer can duplicate them), company and government ID cards, weapons, Nike sneakers (I have no idea why) all new passports (privacy advocates convinced the Fed to install metal sheets in the passport cover, to shield the RFID from illegal surveillance).
It will soon be near impossible to be RFID tag free, unless one is bare ass naked, living in the wilderness and surviving on squirrel meat.
The current state of the technology has not yet linked the RFID with GPS (global positioning system), but by the time one breathes a sigh of relief - it will likely be a done deal; considering the pace of innovation, development and marketing in the electronics industry, science fiction turns to fact in a matter of months.
One, current, limiting factor is cost. Active RFID's cost $1.00 and up when purchased in bulk, while passive RFID's cost just a few cents; that is, however, still to expensive to replace the UPC barcode on a can of corn, six pack of beer or almost all other consumer products; but, as mentioned RFID's are being used in high end consumer products.
One might reasonable assume that an individuals personal information would be lost in the flood of data being captured every second of the day. And that information, once captured, would pose a herculean task in extracting any meaningful information on any one individual.
For the sake of illustration, assume that in a one square mile of an urban/suburban area there are 500 sites using RFID readers (retail outlets, toll stations, ATM's, etc). The average number of readers is 10 per establishment, for a total of 5000 readers. Further assume, each reader takes a poll every 10 seconds for an eight hour period. We now have
(8 hrs X60min/hr X 60sec/min)
------------------------------ X 5000 polls =14,400,000 polls
10 sec
If each poll transferred 3 kilobytes of data we will have
3000 bytes X 14,400,000 polls = 43,200,000,000 (43 gigabytes)
Considering that a high end iPod holds 60 gigs and Apple makes millions of the things, 43 gigs is chump change. And that is raw data; when redundant, repetitive and irrelevant data is removed and the data is compressed - the storage requirement is reduced considerable, for sake of illustration I will say by half - 22 gigabytes.
But that's just one square mile - the US is around 3.5 million square miles. Fortunately, the bulk of the US population occupies only 10% of the land mass so we are down to 350,000 square miles.
22 gigabytes X 350,000 square miles = 7.7 petabytes
That is a boatload of information to store and access, but considering Moore's Law (see below), not an insurmountable task.
One might ask, how can all that information be sorted, indexed and retrieved. 5 years ago, Equifax (the largest credit reporting company), sorted 6 months of data - 67 billion database records-in 3 (three) seconds. In 2005 the FBI's new Investigation Data Warehouse (IDW) contained around 700 million records spread over 50 data bases. Prior to the IDW a search on a 1000 names and addresses would have required more than 32,000 personnel hours. With the new IDW it required only 30 minutes.
A more familiar example is Google. By 2005 Google had indexed 8 billion web objects, that includes text, photos, videos, graphics and links, and yet, it will produce a list of sites in order of relevance to ones search parameters - in a matter of seconds after one hits the "go" button.
If we consider Moore's Law, (Gorden Moore was a co-founder of Intel)
Moore's Law is the empirical observation made in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months
Which basically means that computer storage capacity and operating speeds doubles every two years without a significant increase in price. Moore has been right since 1965.
As for computers capable of sorting, indexing and searching 100's of petabytes of ever growing information in any reasonable time frame, we need look no further than IBM's "Roadrunner", a hybrid, parallel processing, supercomputer, that leapfrogs Moore's Law. Using over 16,000 commercial AMD and IBM processors it will have a throughput of 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second (1 petaflop)- in any league, that's quick.
. The Roadrunner is slated for delivery to the government in 2008, and is ideally suited to exploit even the largest of RFID repositories. Although that is not its stated purpose, as it is being delivered to the DoE Sandia labs; but, the skeptic in me says that the NSA has Roadrunner II+ on order or up and running. Lagging behind in computer technology is not one of the NSA's short comings, nor are they all that forecoming about what they have..
Is privacy, as we know and define it, becoming a quaint notion?
Is a technology that's cheap to make and has great potential profit, likely to disappear?
How secure will the databases/repositories be?
What can be done to protect what little privacy we still retain?
And, equally important, how can this technology be used in a positive, progresive way?
An industrial journal RFID Journal addresses RFID's from a technical and commercial point of view and has a FAQ on RFID's.
Web sites concerning privacy and security issues are Spy Chips, or Electronics Frontier Foundation. the EFF also has anIndex to RFID citations.
.