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."

Comments

Article has wrong focus

[corebreech]

The danger isn't in criminals scanning your home to see what you have, but rather the government installing/having access to scanners in public places that will allow them to track your movements.

Obviously, these things aren't just going to be attached to foodstuffs. They'll be used in clothing and other personal effects that you'll carry with you at all times.

The article fails to mention this. Frankly, the article reads like the sort of propaganda piece the industry would put out.

Re:Article has wrong focus

[chill]

Thank you. Is refreshing to see that there are people out there who realize the fundimental problem with government doing ANYTHING is that it takes inneumerable signatures, and approvals before it goes forward. The whole process is more bloated than an MS product.

But once all those signatures ARE in place, all it takes is one bored tech to browse through the system. It happens all the time at the IRS -- bored employees checking the financial statements of celebrities, friends and enemies. Cops doing intensive background checks on their ex-girlfriends, etc.

Government initiative are like a massive boulder. A bitch to get moving, but once it is going almost impossible to stop.

Re:Article has wrong focus

[Knife_Edge]

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.

Re:Article has wrong focus

[MunchMunch]

Chiiilll man.

I think the article sounds pretty skeptical to me. Title is "Claim: RFID Will Stop Terrorists"--already they're distancing themselves from that assertion. In fact, I'd say the article is pretty cut & dry in saying "RFID companies are trying to speciously use the issue of terrorism to push privacy-eroding RFID into nationwide use."

Re:Article has wrong focus

[Kallahar]

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.

No Supprise.

[Irvu]

Having watched the SSSCA (now CBDTPA) run through the paces this makes perfect sense. If you have a bill that you want to sell, wrap it in the current craze so that anyone who passes it can claim that "they have worked on X" where X is the issue dujour.

The way the game is played.

So if ...

[Rick.C]

a terrorist doesn't have a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup in his cupboard, then he's obviously poisoned the tomato soup supply!

Drown him!

Great... You Want Chips With That?

[spun]

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 ;-)

Yes! Ultimate Solution!

[Kenshin]

Just put an RFID tag on all terrorists. That way when they try to board a plane, you can detect them!

Or maybe not...

Hmmm...

[Robert Hayden]

So they just arrest everybody that buys the fixins to make falafels?

hmmm.

[garcia]

With Ridge's approval for RFID, the food and drug companies and retailers hope to win over a wary public. They also may get legal protection under the Safety Act of 2002 -- a tort-reform law that offers blanket lawsuit protections to makers of antiterrorism devices, should those devices fail during a terrorist attack.

What major backlash is coming from the "weary public"? I have said this a billion times before. No one outside of our geek culture has any idea what this is. If it's not on Network TV's latest reality show, it's not real. I am too lazy to find my other posts about my attempted discussions with co-workers about their privacy being invaded with Patriot I and II and how they look at me as if I am speaking Greek. "You mean you do something other than watch Paradise Hotel?" (this isn't a slight exaggeration).

People have NO FUCKING clue what is going on in the world around them. I deal w/100's of people daily who freely give out their SSN to me to look up their records. I specifically ask if they know their student ID first (even though it's a unique identifier, it's not as bad as just throwing out your SSN everywhere) and people just utter, "uhhh, no, but I know my SSN!"

So if people are so willing to just give up their nationally unique identifier, you really think that they are paying attention to RFIDs? Go outside of your cube and ask any non-geek, "do you know what an RFID and how it impacts you personally?" or possibly, "do you know what the Patriot Act is?" I guarantee that they won't have a clue what an RFID is and they will say something like "do you also talk in letters?" and they will seriously believe that the Patriot Act is something having to do with the military giving missles to another country (if they are even THAT clueful).

Post your results here please, I am seriously interested if this is just a localized phenominon here where I live (my gf, her co-workers, my friends, and my co-workers are 100% clueless when it comes to anything privacy related), I would like to know what the rest of the non-geek world sees.

Re:hmmm.

[ScrewMaster]

This comes under the heading of the "so what did you expect" department. Other national populations may be different, but we are so complacent here in the "world's only remaining superpower" that we don't want to hear anything that might upset our delicate emotional applecarts. Forget anything that might take research and some actual thinking. To be honest, the whole flapdoodle over 9/11 just astonishes me. The average Israeli or Palestinian citizen wouldn't have been particularly bothered by the attack, at least not on a personal threat level. Collectively, neither of those two societies would have allowed their entire economies to tank over a single terrorist attack. We, on the other hand, completely overreacted, have allowed the government to pass numerous Draconian laws in the name of anti-terrorism, willingly kissed our privacy good bye (if we even saw it leave) and generally behaved like headless chickens. Frankly, I'm not real impressed with how we handled ourselves in the aftermath of September 11th.

The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.

RFIDS are not invincible

[Amadaeus]

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.

Re:RFIDS are not invincible

[silas_moeckel]

Funny most of the RFID chips I have seen are a simple serial number imprinted at manufacture. The device goes through a fiield gets charged up and emits that data as an rf pulse.

Re:Prediction

[in7ane]

Once again, will rolls of tin foil have RFID's in them?

"Having numbers burned into your forehead ...

[burgburgburg]

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."

AHA!!!

[corebreech]

See???

Now how did you *know* I was wearing a tinfoil hat????

I rest my case.

I don't follow your logic

[corebreech]

So because the government isn't competent, we should allow them access to our whereabouts in real-time?

Isn't their being incompetent actually an argument for their not having access to this information?

Paranoia

[t0qer]

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.

Ron Paul R-Texas: seeing the light

[paiute]

The Wired article links to Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who is opposed to the RFID idea. Republican opposed to the wishes of big business? Who is this guy? I looked at his web site and read his latest speech:
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec 2003/cr07 1003.htm

(sorry about the URL - seems a space gets put in between the 7 and the 1 in cr071003)

Anyway, who does this guy think he is, calling the Bush gang empire-building big-gummit perpetuatin' neoconservatives?

He better watch his back out of his rear-view mirror around the two shotguns and three rifles in his pickup truck rack, the terrorist-loving pinko.

In other news...

[natet]

Wal-mart claims that RFID tags will stop ballistic missiles from striking targets in the US, and seeks dept. of homeland security sanction to deploy them in defense of the nation....

Oh how wrong you are

[zapp]

RFID tags cannot be reporgrammed. and they do send out signals (on request from scanner).

RFID tags have a very small amount of READ ONLY memory on board, which is used to store their unique ID. Furthermore, the devices to not have the functionality to write to the memory, even if it was writable. So you can be sure no one will ever buy a RFID reporgrammer on Ebay, well... maybe they will, but you can be sure it's a hoax and they got ripped off.

Secondly, they DO send out the signal. barcodes need a clear direct line of site to a scanner to be recognized. RFID tags work in a much different manner. A scanner could be put in every light post in a city to monitor the RFID tags planted in tires, and track individual cars (or general traffic patterns). Worse, due to the nature of the technology a directional antanne could be used to read an RFID tag from large distances.

In conclusion, your comment is crap.

Any skepticism? Anywhere? Bueller?

[HarveyBirdman]

I'm not trying to be flamebait here, but is there ANY evidence these things have enough range to really cause concern? Aren't these passive devices that have a range of about 4 feet after they have been activated by a scanner? Wouldn't the police have to be in the house anyway (and thus need a warrant) or the thief (thus he's already broken in and can SEE what I have)?

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.

The General Rule...

[lynx_user_abroad]

Whomever builds the computer controls the computer.

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?

Re:I design RFID stuff

[ewhac]

Right now, the trend/plan is to kill tags at the cash register when the item is purchased. You may have noticed that that is already being done to enable you to leave the store without setting off an alarm.

Uh huh, right.

Assuming the RFID has a globally unique serial number in addition to a UPC code, then all that has to happen at the register is for that serial number to be marked as, "purchased." Then when you walk out the door, the computer sees the serial number, looks it up in the database and sees that it's been purchased, and doesn't sound the alarm. A software-only solution that's much more "cost-effective" than designing the extra circuitry for a killable RFID.

It also has the added "benefit" of allowing the retailer to scan the cloud of RFID numbers coming off you as you enter the store (or even as you stroll past the entrance), thereby triggering special discounts or incentives ("We're having a special on shirts that match those pants you're wearing.").

In effect, what you're working on will afford unprecedented snooping powers to government agencies as well as corporate entities (who, unlike government agencies, don't even have to pretend to be accountable). And, of course, it will do absolutely nothing to improve public safety.

Schwab

Consumer group against RFID (CASPIAN)...

[wherley]

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.

Answers

[zurab]

Most of what you describe is quite possible and feasible as well. Here are the answers:

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.

They already have you beat on this one. Gov't can already access commercial databases without your consent when you purchase an airline ticket and get to the airport. This is a new color-coding system that they assign a color code to each passenger and to their "threat level".

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.

See above. If they do it to the airline industry, they can extend it to other industries as well. E.g. they can get your threat level before you enter a railroad station, public parade area, football game, concert, etc.

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...

They could equip FBI, local police, and maybe even security guards with such devices - I don't see a problem here. As far as privacy concerns - yes there are and will/would be a lot, but the attitude that you express doesn't help that. Even with the airline passengers color-coding system, where did these privacy concerns get? Almost nowhere with only one major admission that the gov't will not store your color-coded data for more than certain period of time.

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.

Charities that are accreditted as charitable organizations by the federal gov't could be required to report all RFID tags that they have received or transferred.

Will these types of devices draw us closer to licensing products to you and not selling them? Could it be illegal to sell an object equipped with RFID because it contains someone's IP, plus you'd probably be supporting terrorists? That's a far-fetched, yet interesting thought.

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.

This has already been answered by others. Gov't cannot invade your privacy by tracking your every move and recording it without a probable cause, at least according to the U.S. Constitution anyway. But who's paying attention to that silly thing nowadays?