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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."
Yah... illegal search & seizure and all that jazz.
Think how cool it would be for the individual though. You could instantaneously inventory your belongings. Lost your keys... just whistle up the RFID embedded in your keychain.
What I'd like to see is a way to uniquely setup "ownership" of RFIDs. Like you enter your uid and pwd into a scanner, and all of "your" RFIDs in range reply.
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Break the rules. Keep the faith. Fight for love.
RFIDs, like bar codes, are not emitting devices, meaning that they don't send out signals. They interact with an external data source, like a scanner, to retreive data and to respond to data requests.
As such, they can easily be evaded. In fact, it's easier to tamper with RFIDs than barcodes simply because of the fact that tampered RFIDs are as not visually identifiable as barcodes (i.e. The naked eye can see if someone's ripped out the barcode or taped something over it). Any man with motivation can buy a RFIDs reprogrammer on EBay, walk into Walmart, and effectively make all boxes of whole wheat cheerios identify as gold-pressed latinum. Imagine the riots that could occur at the checkout lines when old ladies have to pay thousands of dollars to satisfy their daily intake of fibre.
All that tampering can be done without drawing attention to the culprit: you can hear a person cut or rip a box apart, but you can't hear binary code being reprogrammed through a contactless RFIDs programmer.
There are greater dangers than old ladies not getting their recommended daily intake of fibre.
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Amadaeus
The last bastion of Mathie-ism
I'm still working on how to get them dried and folded.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
How much power would it take to fry the RFID tags? I doubt they could survive a couple of seconds in a microwave oven. Simply nuke your clothes right after you buy them, and you'll be free.
That means you accept students SSN as a valid proof of identity? I work for a healthcare organization and we come across this issue all the time.
SSN is a wonderful identifier. The problem isn't that someone knows my SSN, the problem is that far too many organizations use it as a password. That, IMHO, is a very bad thing.
As for radio tags, I think of them as cookies in the physical world. If they were encrypted properly, you could even block other people from knowing what the tag really says. All you'd know is that there were x items with tags on it, but only the person with the private key could see what it was.
Not that I think it's necessarily a good idea, except possibly if they were required to be removed before leaving the store.
They will be used in high value items that are widely counterfeited. This is what corporations are interested in. I know because I research these issues for a huge company.
You need a way to help detect fake or shoddy products before they get sold to consumers, These tags are one way that will be accomplished during international shipping. Also they can be used in the case of a product defect to identify when the product was manufactured and where, which is immensely valuable.
Nobody cares what you have in your house.
Is this another blown out of proportion nothing? Don't we have enough REAL issues to face that we don't need to make up new ones? One poster below talks about how only the geek community knows about this stuff. Fine. But shouldn't the geek community also be able to filter out the real threats from the piffle? If someone has any reliable information that a privacy threat from RFID exists, I'd happily review it, but all I have found is stuff on websites devoted to the black helicopter set that requires these devices to do things that are quite basically impossible.
It all sounds like the scare a few years back about the metal wires in the new dollar bills that were supposed to magically transmit their values from hundreds of feet away, through walls, to any G-man with a Dick Tracy scanner-watch. I think those people moved on to believing airplane contrails are full of poison chemicals or something.
So far all I see is a way to get out of a store without having to wait while Grandma writes a check for a pair of socks.
--- Ban humanity.
We do not know what functionality these "remotely controllable mini computer devices" offer today; we do not know what functionality they will offer in the future. But we do know that the functionality will evolve toward the functionality desired by the people who create them. And we know it likely won't be you or I building them.
Do you want to live in an environment swarming with millions of little computers all working to fulfill the desires of someone-who-is-not-you?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Not just privacy, basic rights as well.
Couple years back when I was in high school, the school officials and the police liason officer did a school-wide locker search one day. I stood in front of mine, asking to see a search warrant for my particular locker. They had none. I asked if they had any evidence that there were drugs in my locker. They had none. I said you can't search my locker. They said they could do want they want, it's school property. I said, fine, look through the locker, but not the bag and jacket, which were my property. They restrained me, *thoroughly* searched my bag and jacket, found nothing, and let me go.
I was repeatedly asked why I made such a stink even though I had nothing to hide. I always responded "Where does it end? Would you let them search your car or home at anytime, without provocation, even if you had nothing to hide." Sadly most people didn't seem to care.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
So Are all RFID's Unique? Or is the ID more generic to the product.
Is the number unique to my new pair of shoes, or is the number the same for all size 12 brown hush puppies.
-Windchill2001 The One, The Only, The Cold...
This group, CASPIAN - Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering has information on RFIDs including Auto-ID: Tracking everything, everywhere. The group is also against loyalty shopping cards for similar reasons.
Apparently you haven't heard of Catalina Marketing... They're one of the companies behind those store cards that get you discounts. In return for getting that discount, you're letting them put your buying habits into a giant database (250 million transactions per week for Catalina). It's already tied to who you are, and it already tracks what you've bought and when and where. The government doesn't have to get a search warrant for every store you visit, they just need one for the giant corporation that collects all that info from its clients.
I'm sure they can come up with an algorithm for when you sell/give something. Say you're always carrying 15 RFID's at a time, if one of those shows up on another person then it'll get flagged as being shared.
The more you think they can't do it, the more they're able to do it without you noticing.
Privacy is not a crime.
I'm as paranoid as the next guy about RFID tags, but folks, remember this -- there isn't an RFID tag on the planet that can survive fifteen seconds, probably much less, in your househould microwave oven. Most of the goods to which they are attached, on the other hand, would be largely unaffected.
Now mind you, it's theoretically possible that microwaving your shoes would then violate the DMCA, but prosecution is practically unlikely unless Hilary Rosen is sitting inside your microwave right now.
In which case, set it to maximum intensity for an hour.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I wish I could agree. I think that terrorism, and most serious crimes, happen because some people are, for lack of a better description, innately evil. Perhaps they are responding to injustice, but their response is to amplify it, not to fix it. There have always been people like this, who are frequently incorrigible in their behaviors. Unfortunately, they do not respond to kindness, even though nearly everybody does. We will always have to have ways of controlling these people, and I will resign myself to that.
Whether a threat to those who run a society is a threat to the society as a whole depends on how just the society is to begin with. I like to think I live in a pretty just society, even if there are some exceptions.
And even though the American Revolution produced great benefits for the American people, it is not hard to find counterexamples of revolutions and revolutionaries who subjected countless people to death and misery. I'm thinking of such leaders as Hitler, Mao, and Castro. I hope we never reach such a low point where social revolution is the only option for us, because it has such unpredictable outcomes. There are always people around that think that social revolution is the only way to fix whatever they think is wrong with society, but they often fail to realize that it comes at a terrible price. In most cases, allowing them to have their way would be to distort the priorities of society away from just goals, not towards. Therefore I am opposed to revolution in general and I do not think it is reasonable for it to be possible in modern America. If our society were falling apart at the seams, I might think differently, but to be realistic means to see that it is not.
All sorts of things are inevitable, but the decline of our society due to increasingly rigid control by those in power is not. Enough of the populace is well educated and alert to this kind of thing to prevent true abuses. We have extrapolated very far in this discussion, with only the glimmer of a possibility raised by a technology as a stimulus. Other people think of these things too, I assure you, and don't like them any more than we do. That keeps me from worrying too much.
Good job! Seriously! Our rights only get trampled on because of apathy. Human decency/manners/rules of safety are regularly broken for convenience in this world and it'll only get worse as long as people don't stand up to it.
A few nights ago while shopping some lady in front of me brought at least 50 items to the express lane, I was behind her. I followed her out to the parking lot and told her that if I ever caught her doing that again she'd pay for my time with her blood. That's one less asshole in the express lane FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE because I stood up to her and put fear into her.
A few days ago someone was double-parked at the mall. It was quite apparent that she decided that since a shopping cart was taking half the space she wanted she could take two spaces. I parked my car right where I should have, between the lines, but it was under two inces from her door, she was totally blocked in. I watched her climb though the passenger side from the mall,, and approaced my car just as she was pulling out. She asked why I blocked her in and I gave her a nice explanation about RULES and how to use the 'P' on her transmission to leave the car and move a blocking cart. There's another asshole of the world who will probably NEVER double park again because it's not worth the trouble I made it.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Small ones could become a problem for store owners who try to rely on RFID to catch shoplifters though.