Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
------
Amadaeus
The last bastion of Mathie-ism
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.
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.