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Defense Department Drafts RFID Policy
Bob Wehadababyitsaboy writes "According to CNET News, the Department of Defense has announced its new policy of requiring all suppliers to use RFID chips in all goods supplied to the military by 2005, except on bulk commodities such as sand, grit or liquids. It claims that this move will help them streamline inventory and delivery of vital supplies around the world."
Scan, scan, scan... Check one box. Scan, scan, scan. Mistakes aren't noticed for months.
SGT: Quick Private, Go get a box a gas masks for those civilians
PRVT: Hey, this box is just full of baked beans
I have no doubt the gov does not care about passed-along expenses, expecially because in theory most RFIDs are less than 4 cents each in cost, and getting cheaper.
But worse RFIDs are in cars and readable from over twenty feet away:
TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders!
Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.
A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFid chips embedded in the tire).
Yup. My brother works on them.
Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.
Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car. FYI : Technical data on common explosives chemical fingerprint "taggants" from Princeton federal reports : http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/ ~ota/disk3/1980/8017/801705.PDF (slashcode sometimes inserts spaces into urls)
I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].
It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.
Photos of chips before molded into tires:
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:TAQIKjBI01g C: www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html
(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it insertess usually into the url above to get to the shocking info and photos on the enbedded LOGI 160 chips that the us gov scans when you cross mexican and canadian borders.)
You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is very secret.
Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html
but the fact is... YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE A RADIO TRANSPONDER not counting your digital cell phone which is routinely silently pulsed in CA bay area each rush hour morning unless turned off (consult Wired Magazine Expose article). Those data point pulses are used by NSA on occasions.
The us FBI with NRO/NSA blessings, has requested us gov make this tire scanning information as secret as the information regarding all us inkjet printers sold in usa in the last 3 years using "yellow" GUID barcode under dark ink regions to serialize printouts to thwart counterfeiting of 20 dollar bills. (30 to 40 percent of ALL California counterfeiting is done using cheap Epson inkjet printers, most purchased with credit cards foolishly). Luckily court dockets divulge the existence of the E
Umm, downvote me stupid if you want, but what's a DoS on a RFID tag actualy /do/? All it does is keep you from reading the tag reliably, which isn't all that useful. Also, the point from which you're DoSing is easy to trace -- just follow the hot/cold signals of energizer signal strength.
Much more worring is the possibilty of enemy troups scanning for RFID tags. Sure, there's range issues -- it would work both ways, and you get more warning on one end then the other, but it's still worrying.
Of course, if the tags are only on packaging, or are nutered prior to going into dangerous teritoriy, it becomes less of a problem. It's still a problem, becuase you could probably fly over field bases and spot "hidden" supply depos.
Of those don't happen so much in desert combat, I was thinking in more of a jungle combat mode (I've seen too many Nam movies.) OTOH, in urban combat...
Dunno about Iraq, but the sandbags we had in Saudi/Kuwait had to be filled with imported sand. Much of the "sand" in the middle east is more like fine dust. It's nasty. It gets everywhere. It leaks right out through the mesh of MilSpec sandbags like water through a sieve. We had truckloads of sand coming in from Who Knows Where when I was there in '91.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I used to work as a military logistician, and we were doing this all the way back in 1995 during the Haiti intervention and the refugee crisis at Guantanemo Bay.
The Army recongnized the need for RFID all the back in 1990-1991 in Desert Sheild/Desert Storm. Back then they were sitting on thousands of 20 foot and 40 foot shipping containers in Saudi Arabia. But the paperwork was so bad that they couldn't tell what was inside the containers and the database system they used to keep track of shipments was a 1973 vintage punch card system (no really.. it was). So they spent thousands of man-hours opening the boxes and recording the contents and figuring out where it was supposed to go. The actually had a man killed when all the crap fell out on top of him while he was opening up one of the boxes. Meanwhile, forward deployed units were languishing without supplies or spare parts. So they knew they had a problem. The answer was to improve the tracking paperwork with an oracle based system called WPS (WorldWide Port System) and they started doing experimental use of RFID on vehicles and shipping containers. The RFID transmitters were based on the ones used by the railroads and were about the size of a book (approx 8x6x3 in). The were bolted onto the exteriors of the shipping containers and short range transmission towers were built in the ports and at transportation hubs. The first chance to test them in the real-world was the Haiti crisis. All the supplies to GITMO and Haiti were flowing through the port at Jacksonville Florida. The tests were a moderate success (sometimes the tags fell off or data was bogus because somebody was too lazy to key the right values). Overall, the military was very pleased because it finally afford military commanders "Intransit Visibility" or ITV. Commanders were very happy to know where their supplies and equipment was. During the last several years, the tag technology has gotten better and better and they started installing them in vehicles whenever they were deploying.
The apparent facts in your post are very interesting. I try not to forget things like this once I read them; only by putting together related facts can we make a rational judgment about the truth.
However...
The general attitude with which you present this information easily dominates the readers' perception of you *and* the information itself. Much of the post is somewhat incoherent, jumping between topics (related topics, but different nonetheless) and occasionally repeating facts. This creates an image of frantic paranoia.
While I believe that you do need to calm down in order to convince others that you speak the truth, I can (on a smaller scale) relate to your situation:
Practically everyone here on Slashdot would agree that legislation like the Patriot Act and programs like TIA are at least very Big-Brother-ish or even blatantly evil. However, when I speak of such things to more 'ordinary' people, I am met with, at best, mild surprise but overall disinterest. The general attitude is "oh, well, that's bad, but what can we do about it?" These are people who only watch the news to hear Arnold Schwarzenegger make jokes about Hummers during the recall debates. In light of these responses, I have stopped discussing such topics except when others bring them up -- and even then, I have to be sure that I don't get worked up about it. Getting too excited makes people stop taking me seriously.
Similarly, I think you need to consider your audience and realize that you are hurting your case until you tone down the language and make an effort to appear more coherent. I would suggest that you not use caps-lock, exclamation points, or cliche phrases like "top secret."
Furthermore, there are statements in your post which are not necessarily fact, although you present them as such. For example, your claim that government agents mod down your posts seems completely unprovable to me. While I cannot say that it is false, it seems to be only your suspicion, not fact. In my opinion, such a statement constitutes excessive paranoia, unlike your healthy concern over the possibility of mandatory tags in all tires in the country.
[Note that healthy concern becomes unhealthy when it dominates your life... unless you are a true resistance fighter, and in that case you would have to be living under something more akin to the Nazi government to justify calling yourself that. I do not claim that the Anglo-American governments will never reach that state, but currently it is not *nearly* that bad, as far as I can tell.]
Thus, your claim of government Slashdot accounts, your suggestion to use google cache or proxies, and your suggestions for removing tag tires seem excessive and unnecessary to me. I (and most readers of Slashdot) have no reason to fear the government's knowledge of our web surfing or driving habits. Those who do have a reason to fear it are hopefully intelligent enough to determine these methods on their own (and I should remind the critics reading this that criminals are not the only ones who need to fear the government).
Lastly, the tendency of your posts to be modded down is most likely due to the problems I have listed here, not government agents.
I hope my post itself is not incoherent, but thankfully, I have run out of things to say....