| Tiny Computer Chips That Can Read 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 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? Another Protest in New Hampshire - 11/5/05 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, 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 Spychips Official Website And Other Links of Interest... EPC's and RFID Get Involved One Million Moms One Million Dads So, what do you think? Do we just sit back and do nothing, or do we get involved for our children and grandchildren's 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! |
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| Katherine Albrecht plays the part of David. The role of Goliath is being acted out by some of the world’s most powerful transnational corporations. This is an ongoing story. It was early 2003 and the outlook was bleak. The war had begun. After three years of quiet research and planning, the MIT Auto-ID Center, (a consortium of over 100 global corporations and government agencies), was set to launch the Internet of Things – a system using tiny computer chips with miniature antennas to tag, number, and track every object on the planet. Major companies were preparing to test the system in real stores - on live shoppers. Gillette had announced plans to purchase 500 million RFID tags from a company called Alien Technology for use in its shaving products. Benetton was gearing up to put 15 million spy chips in women’s clothing. Other companies would quickly follow suit. And yet the world’s people knew nothing. The experts behind the system expected little resistance from the public. Though their research found that 78 percent of people surveyed, objected to RFID technology on privacy grounds, it also indicated they could hope for apathy, provided no one stepped forward to lead the public in opposition. The coast looked clear for a full-scale rollout. The world would be invaded by this technology before people even knew what had hit them. But we changed all of that. In a David vs. Goliath style miracle, a small band of committed individuals armed with little more than the truth and a big dose of faith foiled the plans of some of he world’s richest and most powerful corporations. In March 2003..., CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering) launched a worldwide boycott campaign again Benetton that brought media coverage from as far away as Tasmania and Sweden. The company was inundated with calls and letters from angry consumers around the globe protesting its planned use of spy chips in clothing. Within a few short weeks, Benetton canceled its plans to turn women’s clothing into tracking devices and promised consumers that their clothes would be spychip free. Other companies took the hint and went underground with their RFID spy chip plans, but CASPIAN pursued them. This summer I found a Gillette smart shelf that uses a hidden camera to take mug shots of consumers as they pick up products. The shelf had been quietly installed in a Wal-Mart store in Brockton, Massachusetts, just an hour from my home. When word of the trial got out, Wal-Mart was inundated with customer complaints. While both Gillette and Wal-Mart initially denied the existence of the shelf, I bought a disposable camera and took a few photos for posterity. When I shared these photos with the media, suddenly Wal-Mart and Gillette remembered the shelf, but claimed it had never been activated. As soon as it found itself in a public relations firestorm, Wal-Mart assured consumers that RFID technology would not be appearing on the retail floor of its stores, and Gillette claimed it would not be tagging any more products “for ten years.” When we later checked, sure enough, the photo-snapping shelf in Brockton had vanished. Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, had backed down, beating a hasty retreat from a controversial technology. Consumers had won their second enormous victory. Soon after saving American consumers from spy shelf technology, we were dismayed to learn that Gillette was taking pictures of unsuspecting British customers at a chain called Tesco. Tesco is Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, similar to our familiar Wal-Mart. CASPIAN got the word out to UK citizens by working for over a month with a reporter from The Guardian newspaper to uncover documents and get the evidence published. After the resulting outcry led to protests at Tesco stores, those spy shelves, too, disappeared. As these scandals were unfolding, the proponents of RFID were working on a top-secret public relations plan to “pacify” the public. The folks at the MIT Auto-ID Center (who had promised that data collected through their global spy system would be safe in their control), had left dozens of sensitive internal documents accessible on their website. We were able to access these directly over the World Wide Web by simply typing the word “confidential” into their public search engine. These confidential documents revealed the Center’s strategies to “drive adoption” and “neutralize opposition” to RFID, while depending on consumer “apathy” to minimize their troubles. They also listed by name several lawmakers, privacy advocates, and others whom they hoped to “bring into the Center’s ‘inner circle’”. A flurry of critical media stories followed, busting the RFID issue wide open. Companies hastily canceled longstanding plans to test RFID tags on consumers. Almost overnight their focus shifted from tracking people and purchases, to tracking inventory in back room warehouses, far from public scrutiny. Since that time, no company has dared to publicly attempt live RFID tests involving consumers in the United States. Any trials that had already taken place have been buried and quietly covered up. Companies have not been entirely successful in destroying evidence of their trials, however. Recently, it came to light that Procter & Gamble and Wal Mart used consumers as guinea pigs to test an RFID shelf holding Lipfinity lipstick. Lipfinity purchasers at a Wal Mart store in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma were observed as they interacted with the tagged lipsticks, and images of them were beamed by webcam to P&G executives 750 miles away. Again, the companies first denied the trial, but caved in the face of evidence provided by the Chicago Sun Times, which uncovered the story. Wal-Mart and P&G were forced to acknowledge the tests but said no further RFID experiments were being planned. In September, CASPIAN turned out to protest RFID’s version of a coming of age party: the official launch of the Electronic Product Code (EPC) network in Chicago. This is the event where “deputized evangelists” were enlisted to help spread the “holy grail” of RFID like a contagion to attendees. (These are real phrases, taken from actual documents and individuals promoting the event. Religious terminology abounded.) “EPC” is the official name for the RFID tags slated to replace the bar code on all manufactured products, thus turning the things we buy into tracking devices. Over 30 demonstrators turned out to protest the EPC network launch, which we planned to coincide with Gillette’s “Reasons to Believe” speech. Some took time off from work and school and others drove over two hours in Chicago’s notorious rush hour traffic to attend. I filed a civil rights lawsuit to ensure our First Amendment right to speak publicly at the event and spent a full day in federal court to plead our case. We didn’t even learn where we would be assembling until the 11th hour. A year ago, I felt powerless to fight the onslaught of MIT’s spy chip technology. What could one woman and a loosely affiliated band of consumers possibly do to slow the avalanche headed our way? I said my prayers and took a stand, armed only with a fistful of courage and a heart full of faith. And what a year it has turned out to be! To my amazement, almost one year to the day after I first vowed to fight RFID, I found myself addressing an auditorium full of scientists, engineers, business executives and reporters – on MIT’s own property – as the invited keynote speaker on RFID privacy! Truly God had prepared a table before me in the presence of my enemies! As if our blessing were not enough already, the icing on the cake was being able to present this assembled crowd with a position statement on RFID signed by over 40 of the world’s leading privacy and civil liberties organizations. See it online at: http://www.privacyrights>.org/ar/RFIDposition.htm In this document, we call for a moratorium on item-level tagging of consumer products and outline a series of unacceptable practices. The eyes of the world are now on the RFID industry. No longer can it operate in darkness and secrecy. No longer is our band of freedom-fighting consumers alone, but we have now been joined by organizations representing hundreds of thousands of consumers across the globe. God has called in the cavalry. What looked bleak last year has taken an optimistic turn. We have much to look forward to: a few more years to live and worship freely. To join the “cavalry”, go to: www.spychips.com and click on “Get Involved”. |
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