Senator Leahy Calls for RFID Technology Hearings

securitas writes "Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy has called for congressional hearings into radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The comments were made Mar. 23 to the Georgetown University Law Center's conference on video surveillance technology during a speech titled 'The Dawn of Micro Monitoring: Its Promise, And Its Challenges To Privacy And Security'. Leahy suggested that RFIDs may require federal regulation to ensure the public's privacy rights. Leahy is quoted as saying that the combination of RFIDs, sophisticated databases, networks and the Internet means that, 'We are on the verge of a revolution in micro-monitoring - the capability for the highly detailed, largely automatic, widespread surveillance of our daily lives.' He goes on to say that, 'We need clear communication about the goals, plans, and uses of the technology, so that we can think in advance about the best ways to encourage innovation, while conserving the public's right to privacy.' (Leahy's RFID speech transcript)"

Comments

Minor detail

[Anonymous Coward]

A minor detail everyone seems to be totally oblivious too from the comments in the 3 or so posts about RFID I've read. RFID tags currently and for the near term are only readable at a max of 20', hardly a usable distance for tracking people.

One of my professors is working with Wal-Mart's RFID research group and has brought in some class 0 and 1 tags, and the smallest of the tags was about 1" wide by 4" long, not something easily missed.

Re:Minor detail

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you don't need to handle something to know something about it... I'm willing to bet NASA knows something about the soil composition on Mars without every actually "handling" any dirt.

By the way... Notice this:
http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articlev iew/337 /1/1/

Re:Retailers and RFID

[Entrope]

For a retailer to use rfid on its products for anything other than loss prevention, it needs to be on every product. That means small and cheap, which in turn will drive the manufactures to make them with as low of a signal and as little storage capacity as possible to meet the retailer's needs.

The incremental cost of adding 96 bits of storage (say, going from 32 bits to 128 bits) is much lower than the benefits reaped from having the extra data. I mention 128 bits because most /.'ers have heard how much we can address uniquely in IPv6. I would be very surprised if many RFID tags were deployed with as little capacity as you suggest: it is ROM, not RAM. Burning a few bits of ROM is very very easy.

Re:Maybe not

[pair-a-noyd]

Ask, and ye shall "recieve", not.. (Ugh, bad pun!)

http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html

Re:Potential vulnerability for retailers?

[GAVollink]

It's all about how the law is written and worded.

Foremost, such a law should not specifically use the term, RFID. See my solution in another part of this discussion.

The FUD surrounding this comes from the fact that once RFIDs are in place, then the infrastructure to install a single RFID reader, and track comings and goings is minimal. Basically if WalMart starts selling RFID enabled clothing, then tracking becomes easy. Distributed tracking over many locations is so expensive as to qualify as Science Fiction. Yet, it's feasable that an influential company could do so, think McDonalds size.

Re:RFID is good tech with great abuse potential

[plover]

Actually many of the RF security tags in use today have a fusible component. When the item is sold, the cashier runs it over the "burn pad". It emits a substantially higher power level of RF signal than the door readers. The high level of RF being pumped through that tiny antenna causes a fusible link to actually burn out, rendering the tag "dead." No logic involved, and it's ultra-cheap off the shelf technology that's in widespread use today.

These RF security tags are recognizable as square paper-backed foil stickers about 3cm on a side. They sometimes have a fake barcode printed on them as camoflauge.

There is another completely different RF technology security tag that uses a rectangular plastic housing about 1cm x 4 cm x 2 mm thick. It contains a series of metal foil plates that are arranged to resonate at the RF frequencies of the door transmitters. They are deactivated by bringing a magnet to the tag causing the foil in the housing to shift to an adhesive target. This separates the metal plates which prevents it from resonating at its original frequency.