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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.
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 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
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
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.
that my tax dollars are not being used to ship sand around the world. Especially to Iraq.
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
They've already done more than you believe in this area. We have very good ways of identifying friendly tanks. I should know since I just finished working for a tank division.
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.
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!'
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.