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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."
With improved inventory controls, how the hell am I going to get my hands on a 'surplus' tank now?
Beep beep.
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
High-Powered Aircraft-Based RFID Transmitters
with Super-Sensitive Receivers...
The Easiest Way to Count Your Enemy's Resources
(Or are all these RFID's only in the packaging,
or only with the items they label until
they have been checked-in the first time?
These high-tech barcodes are becoming commonplace if you like it or not.
are the RFID tags gonna cost taxpayers $6k each?
This space available.
Build a RFID detector into a mines, boobytraps etc. If your in RFID range your in the killzone
It may be required by suppliers in 2005, but that doesn't necessarily mean the military will successfully implement the technology by then. From my personal experience, IT tends to move incredibly slowly. It has taken more than 6 years and counting to implement Public Key Infrastructure; it has taken more than 10 years and counting for the Defense Message System. I won't be holding my breath on RFID.
Isn't the way this is worded a bit odd? Instead of a policy of buying only RFID'ed stuff, they are actually mandating that the RFID be put in?
except on bulk commodities such as sand, grit or liquids.
Soldier: Hey these grits taste like sand!
Cook: Don't yell at me, we aint got those fancy smancy RFID tags in all our stuff so we can tell our shirts from our underwear!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The potential dangers go further than merely allowing "the enemy" (LOL) to check your inventory. It's pretty easy to forecast that denial of service attacks will be used against this system as well as mere snooping, and there's no way that it'll be hardened against them because RFID is marketed as a cheap and simple way of reducing your costs, which eliminates hardening entirely.
By the way, there's no need for the sledgehammer aircraft-based transmitter approach. I would expect inventory snooping to be done by dropping small scanners into delivery trucks or air vents, or getting them positioned properly by the most powerful weapon, namely insider help, either voluntary or under duress.
Even worse, this is not just an inventory issue. Once RFID tags are accepted, live hardware will employ them, and the potential problems then hit another dimension altogether.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I for one, am pleased to see that they don't want to go putting any of them little RFID tags in my grits. Please pass the biscuits and gravy.
Is it fascism yet?
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
In some ways that is worse. An RFID detecting boobytrap/mine that specifically attacks the logistics chain. With a bit of intellegence work it could target specific equipment.... say fuel and explosives. No need to blow up the first truck that rolls over the mine, blow up the ammotruck thats third in line.
Thinking about it a little more, an RIFD mine would be expensive and its natural mission would be to target high value items. You would not need many to cause distuption way out of proportion to the expenditure
do you know where your rations are?
-tog
Erm my suggestion is to put the RFID detector in the mine, if it detects (any/a specific) RFID code, the mine goes bang
Just because products can be inventoried rapidly with RFID or barcodes doesn't necessarily mean that inventory control improves. There needs to be someone with a brain cell in the loop somewhere too.
As a mildly funny example, I'm pretty tired of the wholemeal pitta bread running out every day several hours before the white variety in our local supermarket. It's been happening for years, despite the perpetual roving hoards of clerks running up and down the isles with their little scanning machines. You'd think that better stock control would be used to help increase sales by ordering optimal amounts.
I bet you've all seen your own versions of this lack of a guiding intelligence in places, despite deployment of the latest technologies.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Of course when the military brass catches on that these could be programmed to trigger off of the rfids on commissioned officers insignia bought at the PX (smart fragging) this whole rfid idea will be history.
I can just see it now--some Intel-made chip somewhere starts to overheat or interfer with some other chip somewhere deep in a ammunition storage bunker. BOOM! Let's see Bush try to blame that on Al Qaeda!
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
What organization wouldn't want that?
The paranoid people of Slashdot who think that everybody is out to get them?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's simple physics. RFID signal must go both ways - from the mine to the RFID tag and back. The emissions from the boobytrap to a boobytrap detector are one way. You can detect the boobytrap before it can detect you. This is a well-known fact for counterdetection. E.g., you can detect a radar signal well-before the radar can see you.
Obviously goes with the hot liquids
on this page.
I find that they tend to have an interesting take on things.
Of course, with IPv6, there's enough IP addresses for all those particles of sand and grit. Not sure about the liquids, though
-kgj
-kgj
that my tax dollars are not being used to ship sand around the world. Especially to Iraq.
Quit buying the cheap tin foil at discount warehouses and once, just once, buy the good stuff at a quality store which ubdoubtedly tracks you with cameras, keeps track of your shopping cart, wants to sell you frequent buyer cards and so forth and so on... ...because I think you current tin foil hat is of inferior quality.
:s
What on Earth are you on with your 'top secret' blabber ?
This topic has been passed by on Slashdot time and again
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=tyre%20tag
And is getting about as old as the story of the McDonald's customer spilling too hot coffee over herself.
Secret my ass.
Now, the rest of your post, though, is just deliberate paranoia - the FBI mods you, an anon coward with fits of delusion, down ?
I think it's just people tired of your whining doing so.
If you want us reading your previous posts, *gasp*, point to them - better yet, just post under a username. If you think they can then easily snoop on you - guess what ? They already could regardless of your state of posting.
You're not as anonymous as you think you are.
And you're probably not as paranoid as you want us to believe you are, either.
- It's guaranteed that at some point the wrong tags will be delivered to the manufacturer
- Bureaucrats are incapable of believing that the system can ever fail
- Lower echelons do what they are told without thinking.
When the mines get labeled as missiles, the mechanics will just have to try and make them fit under the wings or get charged with insubordination. I don't care what it looks like, soldier, the tag says it's a missile.....Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
So you go to Canada, buy new tires, and are no longer seen as the same car.
It's not much of a secret government plot if
1) Everyone knows that it's possible
2) It can be foiled by changing your tires
s/grit/grits/
I think that the US Military needs to concentrate on identifying planes and tanks. Our friendly fire rate is terrible for as long as IFF has been out. Friendly Fire Insight http://www.msnbc.com/news/889594.asp?cp1=1 IFF Insight http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/air craft/systems/iff.htm
They didn't mention biscuits as being excluded. Chew carefully on any "chocolate chips" or "hazelnuts".
"I only look human.
My mother is a hafling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling"
THAT had to hurt!
Anyone here who's experienced the Army supply line can tell you this could be very useful. Right now most things are barcoded, but that still takes time. The Army needs fast, efficient inventory control as much as Wal-Mart does.
It helps solve a real problem. It's not at all uncommon for deployed units to have to unpack shipping containers just to find out what's inside. Huge hassle for everybody.
There's a constant struggle between the shipping people, who want to fill up every container, and the field logistics people, who want containers to be "single-consignee", so they go opened to the receiving unit. In the civilian world, containers are delivered to warehouses where "bulk-break" and sorting take place. (Visit any major UPS or FedEx location to see such a place.) The military has to do that under field conditions.
One word: range
There goes making a deal with the supply sergeant after losing some gear.
But think of what we're doing to the soldiers' privacy! Sure, now it's just RFID tags on the crates, but next it'll be RFID tags on every M-16, Stinger missile launcher, and grenade! The government will be able to track each individual soldier and know what they're doing with these weapons! They might even sell this information to third-party arms manufacturers for 'marketing research!'
...it sre will make it easy to local land mines!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Hey! You're on to something there... Warheads could use one set of RFIDs and decoys another. Anti-ballistic missile defense systems wouldn't have to figure out fancy-schmancy ways of telling decoy warheads from dummy warheads. An interceptor would merely need to get close enough to read the warhead's RFID and decide if it is live or memorex, and destroy the correct RFID setup appropriately.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
The way that it's written I'd say that they're expecting to have RFID tags on everything from boots to bombers.
Things like bullets are where you'd have the tags on the boxes.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Um, just curious: exactly how is the mine going to know that ID #3141592345 is say, Cartridges, 50 cal and not Boots, size 10?
Will they? As someone only half-facetiously pointed out above, switching the tags could easily go unnoticed. Especially when you scan, say, a truckload of grenades or something. Once some unscrupulous person figures out how to lift the tags what's to stop them from passing off a truck filled with 1000 grenades as a truck full of 1200?
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.
And then make the parent poster buy me a new keyboard. Mine is covered in coffee.
Um, just curious: exactly how is the mine going to know that ID #3141592345 is say, Cartridges, 50 cal and not Boots, size 10?
With a bit of intellegence work. (Where have I seen that before....)
Nobody is saying it'll be easy to accomplish. But it would be possible to accomplish, and it's another avenue for the enemy to explore and posssibly exploit.
The big question here is, is it wise to provide that avenue to potential enemies?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
As someone only half-facetiously pointed out above, switching the tags could easily go unnoticed.
It's quite easy to attach a tag to a box in a manner that make's it's removal painfully obvious. A good example is the Shockwatch monitors (a small vial filled with sand) on the side of high dollar equipment shipping containers - they're attached with an adhesive that's almost impossible to remove without damaging the box. RFID tags could be similarly attached.
At the most basic level stick a RFID detector next to the road and read the numbers when an ammo lorry goes by, finding an ammo box and pointing an RFID detector at it, stealing an inventory list are other options. Once the numbers are know its going to be problematic (though not impossible) to change the numbers to a new permutation.
Nobody is saying it'll be easy to accomplish. But it would be possible to accomplish, and it's another avenue for the enemy to explore and posssibly exploit. The US is no longer fighting against a superpower with unlimited resources at it's disposal. We're fighting against the 3rd world now - countries that have very limited resources, who are much more likely to invest their limited supplies in areas such as Chem/Bio/Nuclear weapons, than supply chain warfare.
My first thought was I would hate to have one of the things on me still while I was on the front lines. While there are probably easier ways to detect a soldier, it's yet another thing you have to worry about masking if you wish to remain stealthy.
I very much hope they have powerful directed scanners to make sure this electronic trash is stripped off before sending anybody out in harm's way, or where an ECM like the what you or others suggested is used against them.
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Almost. Keep in mind that the device supplying the power need not be the device reading the tag. A small drone plane could send out some fairly strong pulses to power up the RFID chips, while a previously layed down network of readers could detect whatever was tagged (probable identifying criteria: kill anything stupid enough to be tagged).
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
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....
lets add spycams and bugs to the list too! The politicians are just dumb enough to slip this thru!
You're stealing the ones you tear the tags off of; the only one who will notice them missing is you (or whoever you sell them to). You can put them in a duffle bag and throw them in with the truck full of grenades; it will look like 1200 grenades and it's only 1000. You then take your 200 "surplus" grenades to your friendly neighborhood illegal arms smuggler, and profit!
Why else would you be burying your information in such paranoid rants, if not to promote the stereotype of privacy advocates as delusional conspiracy theorists? Why else would you be accusing everyone else of being a government shill, if not to throw us off your own scent? The Feds may or may not be able to afford an army of secret Slashdot Operatives who maintain moderator status and vigilantly wait to pounce on any attempts to reveal their tire monitoring schemes, but they can certainly afford to pay one or two of you "anonymous cowards" to pop in here from time to time, planting misinformation for the rest of us.
An RFID based attack makes for very good press, Turning the Great Satan Much Vaunted Technology against them etc etc you don't have to do it often just show it can be done and you get a perminant change in the US Forces SOP's
OK. So let me see if I get this. Correct me if I go wrong. The enemy uses intelligence to understand that ID #3141592345 is a pallet of cartridges and then preprograms a particular mine to blow up if, and only if, it detects that ID. Is that what you're saying? OK, so now they know how to set the mine off, they have to somehow know that that globally unique ID must pass over that mine, which means that "they" know enough about our logistics chain to be able to predict what route specific shipments are taking so they know where to put specific mines, right?
Doesn't it occur to you that any enemy having such intimate knowledge of US supply chain operations could find much, much easier ways of destroying shipments and personnel than laying a mine and hoping that it detonates without failure at some point in the future?
I sent this in to Slashdot a while ago (the article was first on Computerworld) and it wasn't accepted.