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RFID Industry Confidential Memos
An anonymous reader writes "Cryptome has learned www.autoidcenter.org (RFID flak) has made internal memos available for perusal at their site. Those RFID people sure have some interesting plans for the future. Who needs conspiracy theories, when you can hear it from the horses mouth? Weeeeee!"
And MAYBE they will take back democracy from those who have stolen it.
Some tags maybe built into the products that it would be impossible for us to remove them
So just dont buy anything you're not willing to throw in the microwave for 10 seconds.
--I don't want the world, I just want your half.
Other than some lingo, these memos (judging by the highlites) don't seem particularly bad. People are afraid of the health risks of RFID tags? Well, people are stupid. They're bombarded by radio waves every second of every day.
Some people will happily ignore reasonable explanations and cling desperately to their paranoid delusion. These people cannot be convinced otherwise. Rather they need to be brain-washed to get that stupid idea out of their head.
The "green tag" idea sounds like genius.
But an RFID conspiracy seems a little far to jump. The technology is in its infancy. It's not in everything, the opposite is true. But rest assured that an RFID Tag Canceler is in the works to milk money from the privacy obsessed.
I may get one myself...
I wonder if there's a patent.
-tom
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
The problem with microwaving clothing would be the shorts I have on right now, for example. They have a metal zipper. We all know what happens to AOL cd's when microwaved (if you don't know, try it. 5 seconds does wonders).
Be careful what you nuke.
----
Squirrel
The problem with opt-in is that nobody would ever opt-in. Even if you don't they will just say you did. Take all the opt-in spam I get. I never opted in for penis enlargement e-mail yet it says I did. Who are they to believe? The spammer said I opted in so I must've right? Yes, yes, I know, that's the point. Nobody would opt-in so the thing dies, but tell that to businesses. That's why opt-in will never be accepted by THEM.
Some people will happily ignore reasonable explanations and cling desperately to their paranoid delusion. These people cannot be convinced otherwise. Rather they need to be brain-washed to get that stupid idea out of their head.
That's why I fully place my trust in governments and corporations to tell me what's healthy and what's not.
After all, everyone knows that smoking is good for you. And there's no danger in mining uranium or genetically modified food or syphillis treatments or the drinking water, etc.
Yep, if a big organization says it's safe, that's good enough for me.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Assess consumer reaction if press develop scare stories and develop best messages to pacify.
This may have been modded "Funny" but it's actually quite informative. Of course us anti-corporatists have known this all along, but it's interesting to see these guys being so open and honest about their intent to "PACIFY" the "CONSUMERS". Look at any and all marketing today. It's all designed to pacify us in one way or another... to stun us, blind us, or numb our minds to what is really going on. The goal is to get us to be a bunch of nice passive cows, buying and believing everything we are fed.
When someone brings up a concern, or protests the action of a large corporation or government, the powers that be go into spin mode, "developing the best message to pacify" the people.
I'd love to see these Adolf Hitler try to run for president today. I imagine he'd hire these very same people to "construct a proactive framework to minimise negatives arising" and try to best pacify the pesky human rights folks...
Now, if you're actually upset about this, take 5 minutes and drop them an e-mail, or better yet, send them a letter (like, on real paper). Or call them. There's several feedback addresses and mailing addresses. That's what I'm going to do. Don't think "oh, 50 other people are writing, I don't need to", because those 50 other people are thinking the same thing.
Politicians don't read slashdot. Hundreds of +1, Insightful posts don't mean anything in the long run, but if a politician receives several hundred letters telling him why this is a bad idea, he might just give it a second thought. Heck, call your local news program if you want. If it's a slow day, (or if it's FOX News) I bet they might be interested...
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
Considering that the slides are not complete without the presentation:
"For privacy, we can make the RFID chips annihilate themselves."
The word "auto-destruct" leads me to this interpretation... It doesn't make sense to talk about the "auto-destruction" of privacy but it makes perfect sense to talk about RIF chips destroying themselves.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
"I know what the capabilities of the RFID systems are these days and there's not currently anything that could do what the alarmists keep saying is possible"
According to this article the 500million tags that Gillette purchased "Alien Technology says its RFID tags can be read up to 15 feet away". And that is with the LEGAL readers the store is using. How far away can they be read with my illegal jiggawatt reader and directional antenna? How long will it take people to decode the 64-bit codes to determine which bits are brand/model/size/etc. and read the codes from great distances?
They do not plan on disabling the tags when you leave the store either since one of Wal-Mart's listed benefits for RFID tags is "hassle-free returns".
How long until I can point a directional antenna at your home and fire up my jiggawatt reader to determine if you have anything worth taking?
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
It's all the other tracking. We're talking about a potential record of everyplace a person goes. The government is clearly willing to abuse such information -- organizations like the FBI have abused just about every other piece of information they are given, and have never made any attempt at reform. And there's a resurgence of suppression and punishment of dissidents, including arrests and who knows what else.
I wonder if there is a way that we could safely use this, though. Off the top of my head, here's the laws I might propose:
First, all items with RFID tags must be prominently marked. I don't care if it's a "green tag" or whatever -- so long as there's no variety, and it's directly on the item (not on a label somewhere). Second, all RFID reading machines must be in plain site of any place that they can read, and must be prominently marked. Maybe a blinking green light too, or something -- make it a little obnoxious, and make the reader's intent very clear.
Violation should result in heavy fines, but more importantly, a revokation of the RFID license -- the license to tag things with RFID sensors, to use readers, and all of that. You should not be able to simply risk it with not labeling the items properly -- because in doing it you risk being shut out of the game entirely. And obviously creating these tags should be carefully monitored, as should be fairly easy to do, since RFIDs are all about monitoring -- unauthorized ID numbers should be easy to track. The readers, though, would be harder to track... I imagine it won't be too long before you could rig up your own reader if you wanted.
So... destruction of the RFID tag should also be fairly easy. All of these would be fairly reasonable, I think.
Of course, this doesn't keep the government from breaking these rules on its own. And any law the government makes against itself will be ignored and grossly violated, because that's what the Justice Department does. So maybe this wouldn't work.
There are battery powered RFID tags. And your "reflected" description is misleading. Know what a capacitor is? And RFID could store away energy from the cell phones of the people around you, or the countless other devices that use those frequncies. then it would just have to wait for the proper signal from a reader and release the stored energy in a large burst. It only needs to transmit a tiny amount of data. I don't think it would be too hard to make one that could do hald a watt for a thousandth of a second. but you wouldn't even need a half watt to go a mile under the right circumstances. Could do with far far less for distances of 100 feet or less.
People really are hammering on this meme that "it's unconcievable RFID's can transmit with any range"
It does seem to work in pacifying people. All kinds of chickenheads now trying to "debunk" the concept of RFID past a couple feet. It's pathetic because this continues after the RFID people came right and spoke at length about several disinformation campaigns that are being implemented.
RFID is a tool. Tools can be used, tools can be abused. We can legislate controls that law abiding retailers will have to follow.
But each RFID tag is a disposable piece of electonics. To manufacture this product, a wide variety of chemicals (including powerful acids and so on) have to be used. By employing them in such a ubiquitious manner aren't we polluting the environment needlessly? I have to imagine if 50% of all products sold had RFID tags in them that we would add hundreds of tons of dangerous chemicals into the environment every year!
Perhaps the RFID tags should be obvious and recoverable so that they can be recycled! Maybe a deposit could be put on them so that the consumer can return them and get a few cents per unit back.