Tiny ID's That Can Track Almost Anything! Actually, RFID has been around for a long time. It's already used in many ways, like security passes where you slide your card and the door or gate opens, pay-at-the-pump conveniences where you just wave your card, and in a lot of other ways, I'm sure, that we don't even know about yet. But now we are seeing implications of it at our local retailers, where we must buy the necessities of every day life, and then bring them home with us. This is called item level tagging, and so now we are being forced to deal with it on a very personal level. So, have you already taken one home with you? Some people have and that's a reality check ... so, the beginnings of it are already upon us, whether we'd like to face it or not. We must look at the facts and be informed, not only for ourselves, but for the sake of future generations to come ... our children and grandchildren. Just Remember This One Thing: RFID Tagging Is Fine For Pallets, Crates and Cases... But Not For People! These tiny RFID chips are already being used to spy on people! RFID stands for "Radio Frequency Identification." They are tiny computer chips smaller than a grain of sand that can track items at a distance. These RFID spy chips have already been hidden in the packaging of Gillette Razor Products, Pantene Shampoo Lids, and many other products that we all buy at our local retailers. These tiny tracking devices will eventually be used to secretly identify us and the things we are carrying, right through our clothes, wallet, backpack, or purse. Don't believe me? Sound impossible? Check it out for yourself! (The following links will take you off this website. You can use your browsers "Back" button to return here.) Pictures of Spychips Challenge: Spot The Spychip! In Our Clothes Too? (Photos) More Photos Of Chipped Products RFID Tagging In Texas? Companies (or Sponsors) That Use RFID Tagging Just What Exactly Is RFID Anyway? Photos - RFID Protest at a Dallas Retailer - 10/15/05 Another Protest in New Hampshire - 11/5/05 Tracking Euro Bank Notes - Our Cash Will Be Next Frequently Asked Questions About RFID Club Card Used To Track and Lead To False Arrest UPC's and EPC's Click Here to learn all about the Basics of RFID and EPC. Click on the videos on the right side of the page. The Universal Bar Code (UPC) will eventually be replaced with the Electronic Product Code (EPC), as RFID will not work without EPC's. These tags contain the RFID chip and antenna. But for now, both will be used and UPC's will stay in place until RFID and all of it's componants are tested and "tweeked". There are many trial runs now in process, that we, the general public, know absolutely nothing about. The following is a Q&A Session, with Katherine Albrecht, Founder of C.A.S.P.I.A.N., answering questions about RFID and it's many implications. She gives both the positive and the negatives. If you do nothing else, at least read the following information so you can understand both sides of the story. As Christians we are commanded to WATCH so that we will not be taken in by the deceitful practices of this world. What are the greatest threats posed by RFID technology in particular in the surveillance operations of stores? The problem with RFID has to do with the fact that the RFID tags can be so easily hidden into products ... things people buy and carry, and the reader devices can be so easily hidden into aspects of the environment. This makes it extremely easy for someone who wants to observe and watch people in these surreptitious ways to do so. We’ve identified three different arenas that the RFID threat could come from: marketers, the government, and criminals. What examples have you seen in those three areas? The Metro, the RFID industry’s showcase retail outlet in Germany, is a good example of a retailer abusing RFID in a surreptitious way. About a year and a half ago, we toured the store for over three hours. The next day I was giving a talk on privacy and RFID. We had set up a $200 reader device we had bought off the Internet to read the RFID tags off the Pantene Shampoo and the Gillette Razor Products ... and just on a lark, one of my colleagues held his frequent shopper card up to the reader device and a number appeared on the screen. We found out that they had actually tagged us ... and apparently 10,000 other shoppers at the store, by giving out these cards without being told that they contained RFID tracking devices. That’s the retailer’s dream: Instead of having to rely on all of this extremely expensive technology to follow you and watch you walk around the store, they can issue you something that you put in your wallet willingly. That way they could figure out how long you stood in front of the bread aisle or they could figure out how long your shopping trip took. They could identify you from the moment you walked in the door! They could identify your value to the store ... and then treat you differently depending on how profitable you are. Companies are actually thinking like that? Oh, absolutely. I have thousands of pages to back that up. Actually, the whole current retail environment is set up to maximize profit. There are things that have been going on long before RFID became available to retailers that are quite revolting. They’ve got shelf cameras that can zoom in and capture your expression as you look at a shelf. They’ve got fake shoppers who can literally follow you around and record what you say to the people you’re shopping with. It’s a $10 billion dollar per year industry, and it’s almost entirely invisible to the average consumer. And what can the average consumer do to fight back against this? The first thing is to become informed about it, because I think very few people have any clue at all that it’s even happening. We detail a lot of this at our nocards.org website. We’ve protested shopper cards, which are essentially a tool to get you to reveal your purchasing patterns with the aid of very sophisticated data mining filters. We recommend a multi-tier approach: educate yourself, educate other people, boycott stores that engage in it, punish them financially by withholding your shopping dollars from them. If the punishment becomes more painful than the desired reward, just like with anything else, companies will pull back from these practices. What motivates your advocacy against RFID technology? What motivates me is an absolute resistance against the idea that we would all just be reduced to being numbers and tagged and tracked like cattle. When I see RFID and I think about a world in which the powers that be ... be they corporate or government ... where they can essentially watch, survey, track, manipulate, and control the people, that’s what motivates me: a desire to see that not happen, to my generation, to my children, to my grandchildren. History is going to judge us based on how we respond to this threat now. So, you walk into a store and you purchase something using the store card, or get a product with one of those RFID tag devices. Can you walk through some of the things that are going on from the surveillance perspective? Let’s say I buy a pair of size 7 women’s Nike running shoes with a credit card. Currently, most major national chains are recording information about what people are buying. In the future, however, my pair of size 7 Nike running shoes will have a unique ID number in an RFID tag embedded in the sole ... unless we stop it. So anytime that I step on carpeting or a floor tile that’s been equipped with an RFID reader, it can scan that number and know: “Hey, I’m at the Atlanta courthouse, and I just saw shoe number 308247 step by. Let me cross-reference that in the database. That’ s the shoe that was purchased by Katherine Albrecht.” And shoes are a particularly interesting example to think of in that regard because we don’t trade shoes with other people, for a variety of hygiene and fitness reasons, and most of us tend to wear only a few pairs of shoes regularly. So if you can identify a pair of shoes as belonging to an individual and strategically locate reader devices ... put them in the entrance to the airport, the entrance to the courthouse, the entrance to the Wal-Mart store ... you can pinpoint the time and place at which a person was seen entering that location. That opens up a whole new horizon of tracking capability to watch people, for marketers and homeland security folks. How might the government use this technology for homeland security? Depending on your politics, you may attend a peace rally or a gun show or a talk by a Muslim cleric or a union meeting or a particular political rally, all of which are protected by the First Amendment. But in the RFID world, federal agents could attend that meeting with a hand-held reader hidden in a backpack, mill around long enough to capture a couple thousand RFID numbers associated with the people at the meeting, upload all of that to a central database, cross- reference it, and figure out everybody who was there. Also, once you’ve got the private sector wielding all of this technology, they are at liberty to sell that information to the federal government. At that point, the government does not run a foul of Constitution restrictions for essentially spying on its own citizens. There are a lot of private sector ... government partnerships in sharing of this information once it’s been gathered, and we anticipate that there will be more and more of that in coming years. That seems to require an enormous amount of infrastructure and cooperation between these businesses and the database registration. Pieces of this are already happening. When you make a purchase, records, including your identity and all of the things you bought are collected and recorded. And there are companies that specialize in purchase-record consolidation, such as Information Resources, Inc. How far away is that future? That future is going to happen as soon as we allow them to put RFID tags on the things we wear and carry. If you ask the industry, that future is by the year 2010! When the industry gets RFID tags down to five cents, or preferably a fraction of a penny, at that point, I think we’ll begin to see them appearing on everything, and we’re really looking at a future in which every physical object on earth will be uniquely numbered and trackable in real-time all the time. How can RFID tags be used in a consumer responsible way? This is a great technology if you want to track things from point A to point B. If you run a warehouse and want to keep track of the inventory in the warehouse, RFID is a super way to do it. Conceivably, RFID could have some consumer benefits, but they absolutely pale in comparison to the risks that this technology poses. Industry will tell you, “Won’t it be great when you can waltz through a check outline without having to stop and stand in line?” If the price I have to pay for that is having all of my belongings remotely identifiable and being under the thumb of Big Brother, I would rather stand in line. The trade is just seems so ludicrously lop-sided. What alternatives do you suggest for responsible marketers? I would say let people make their own decisions without trying to manipulate them. The advice I give to professional marketers is “If you can’t tell people you’re doing it, you shouldn’t do it.” I don’t think that the marketers’ challenge is so great right now that they have to resort to these kinds of underhanded tactics to meet their objectives. I want to buy something on the merits of the product. What’s your take on the VeriChip Company and Tommy Thompson - former Secretary of Health and Human Services (under the Bush administration) and now VeriChip Board member - advocating more RFID technology for medical information? It absolutely scares the heck out of me. In the last six months to a year, this company has really stepped up its efforts to get some powerful players behind it. The fact that people listen to this with a straight face is even more extraordinary to me. You’ve got Tommy Thompson talking about linking Medical Records with a chip in your arm. You've got Senator Joe Biden in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings talking about implanting chips to track people, with a straight face. It’s unbelievable how quickly we've gone from saying, "Oh, that’s pet chipping technology, we’ll never put that in people” ... to suddenly be talking about implanting chips into American citizens, and with a straight face. It's terrifying! C.A.S.P.I.A.N. "Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering." We CAN make a difference by NOT participating in any of these programs. Founder and Directors of C.A.S.P.I.A.N. DON'T PAY GILLETTE TO SPY ON YOU! Find out how Christians are fighting back! www.boycottgillette.com Images Spychips Official Website And Other Links of Interest... EPC's and RFID VeriChip Get Involved Stop Liberal Judges No Gay Marriage Agape Press One Million Moms One Million Dads In God We Trust So, what do you think? Do we just sit back and do nothing ... or do we get involved for our children and grandchildrens' sake? Each person must decide for themselves what they will do. May God Bless You and Guide You as you seek His Truth in all things! |
|
|
|