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RFID Will Stop Terrorists?
W33dz writes "Retailers and manufacturers around the world are enamored with the new radio frequency identification, or RFID, devices. The problem? What about when a thief or the police want to find out what you have in your house? Oddly enough, according to a Wired magazine article, the United States' largest food companies and retailers will try to win Dept of Homeland Security approval for radio identification devices by portraying the technology as an essential tool for keeping the nation's food supply safe from terrorists. This will give them blanket immunity from all law suits related to the product."
Drown him!
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
I can see it now... Immune from lawsuits, they start putting chips in the food, "To keep it safe" of course. Eat the food, eat the chips, instant tracking implants in everyone.
;-)
Sorry, let my paranoid side get the better of me for a minute. I'm sure it's all for the best
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Just put an RFID tag on all terrorists. That way when they try to board a plane, you can detect them!
Or maybe not...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Once again, will rolls of tin foil have RFID's in them?
has been determined to be an effective tool to prevent terroristic identity theft" says Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. "Remember, not allowing us to burn numbers into your forehead and the foreheads of your loved ones means the terrorists have won."
See???
Now how did you *know* I was wearing a tinfoil hat????
I rest my case.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
A few months back /. had an article on sewer traversing robots. Does anyone know why they made these? I mean the REAL reason why these were made?
The goverment is out to get us man, they want to know every fart let in your house. THE MAN is trying to KEEP UP DOWN. Sure they may say that these sewer traversing robots are for laying down CAT5 in the sewer, but I know the real reason.
Each of these robots is SECRETLY equipped with a miniature spectrometer, which takes your sewer water, and breaks it down to determine its chemical makeup. All this information is then passed back to the DEA to assist so they can profile which houses do, and which houses do not have drug users living in them.
Now they are preparing phase 2 of the program for use by the USDA to profile the eating habits of Americans. By secretly implanting RDIF tags into your food you poop becomes a "stool pigeon" on your eating habits. The USDA will use this information to adjust prices on certain key products to help promote growth in our sluggish economy.
Just say no to RDIF. It's worse than you can imagine.
So, you are saying that it would work like this. I go to the store, and buy a pair of shoes with a credit card. The RFID in the shoes is scanned in order to bring up a price to charge my card. So conceivably there could be a database somewhere that matches my financial info, including my name and address, etc, to an RFID tag in my shoes. Presuming the government could get access to a database like this, they could track people with some kind of device that could read the RFID tags from a distance. Thereby tracking my movements with my shoes.
With each step in this process I have detailed, things become more and more implausible. Retail store having database records of purchases, likely, I am willing to believe. Government getting access to database, not too likely but possible with warrants or something. Government having device that can read the tags from a distance great enough to use it to effectively track your movements, probably next to impossible. I doubt these things are detectable at a range that would make tracking people practical. If you are willing to believe the government has the resources to put the trackers everywhere, on every streetcorner, without anyone knowing or getting upset, for budgetary if not privacy reasons, well...
Another obvious problem is what happens if I resell my shoes, or donate them to charity, or any number of other things that could cause inaccurate information in the database.
Finally, isn't it legal to observe people in public places? That is the very definition of public, a place where you cannot control being observed by others. The government might as well be looking at you if ten or twenty people you don't know personally are. I'm not saying that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, or some other silly thing. I just think expecting privacy in public is unrealistic.
However, such a system would make this exchange possible -
Spook #1: Hey, she's going to the mall again.
Spook #2: Looks like the shoe store. Lemme see, yep, she's buying more shoes.
Spook #1: Why does she keep selling them off for cash? It makes her harder to track.
Spook #2: Dunno, maybe she likes to keep up with shoe trends.
Spook #1: I think she's a goddamn terrorist.