Officials secretly RFID'd at Internet Summit

ewoudenberg writes "A Washington Times article reports that researchers managed to gain entrance to the Internet and technology conference in Switzerland last week only to discover that the summit's badges contained undisclosed RFID chips. The badges were handed out to more than 50 prime ministers, presidents and other high-level officials from 174 countries, including the United States."

Comments

Summary

[FTL]

To summarise the article, a group of reporters were pissed that they weren't invited to attend the conference. They disected a security card, and found (shock, horror) that it contained features designed to maintain security at said conference. Since this is the only dirt they managed to find, they spin it up into a sky-is-falling end-of-the-world privacy story.

I'd have a lot more respect for activist reporters if they would report the facts without hype. It's not the second coming, it's possibly a minor infraction of the Swiss information laws.

Countermeasures

[G4from128k]

I wonder if someone is goign to make a killing by selling little RFID chip & reader detectors. Richard Stallman suggested RFID detectors and destroyers as a challenge for privacy adocates. Perhaps clothing with conductive/dissapative threads will be the next fashion trend (just don't count on your cellphone ringing if its inside your pocket ;) ).

Re:Washington Times

[canajin56]

Everybody makes up news stories. Like when NBC needed to show that GM trucks explode when struck from the side. They said the fuel tank ruptured. But what they did was overfil the gas tank, didn't screw the gas cap on (Just left it sitting on top) and then they strapped remotely detonated explosive under the truck to ignite the gas when it spilt out! And even then, the flames went out after a few seconds, so they had to "creativly" edit it to make the fire look worse. Here is a summary Although he did get one thing wrong: NBC hasn't died yet, in the 4 years since it happened. Hmm, I also recall something about slowing down the tape, so it looked like the truck they hit it with was going fairly slow, but it was actually going really fast.

Re:Cool.

[idlemachine]

Apparently the Australian truth in advertising laws were modified to explicitly exclude politicians from being held accountable to them. Then again, they're also allowed to edit the *official* records of Parliamentary proceedings, just in case they ever stumble during a speech and actually reveal their true intentions. The more power and responsibility you have, the higher the level of accountability should be that comes with it. That we constantly absolve our politicians in this way just makes me think we're all fully aware that the way it is and the way we *say* it is are two completely different positions.