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RFID Injection Required for Datacenter Access
user24 writes "Security focus reports that RFID injections are now required for access to the datacenter of a Cincinnati company. From the article 'In the past, employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the bicep to gain access ... although the company does not require the microchips be implanted to maintain employment.'"
Is this the first time civilians have been required to do thing type of thing? I guess its no longer science fiction.
Mmmm-hmmm...
They won't require you to implant the chip to keep your job. But how long can you keep your job if you can't access the datacenter?
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
If not, you're likely to be tracked not just by your employer but by anyone else with an RFID scanner. There really ought to be an activator button or device that needs to be pressed or broadcasting to make such a device safe for the implanted.
I would imagine it would be just like the article stated: They can't/won't force you, but if you refuse, you don't get acccess to the datacenter. Just like the Mark of the Beast "... no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or name of the beast, or the number of his name."
This is why I keep pressing my employer to not adopt RFID badges, and keep either the magnetic swipes or move to 2D barcodes. I have an inherent distrust of anything wireless, which is why I still have cables running from my mouse and keyboard, refuse to use Bluetooth, and use wireless only when I have to and even then almost exclusively in Linux (though with WPA/WPA2 and a nice, long, random shared key, it's not so bad). My current record in a lab for cracking 128-bit WEP is about 14 minutes, start to finish.
Paranoid? Yeah, a bit. But then I've never had to worry much about someone intercepting my phone calls or passwords over the air.
On the main topic, if no one is going to be fired for refusing, but part of their job is working on equipment in the datacenter, what happens?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
It now has public attention
I don't think we can call this public attention. Seriously, if our attention actually mattered in changing any policy, don't you think Microsoft would have been extinct by now and that DRM and other things like [insert what Slashdot users think is evil here] would be under public scrutiny? The cliched Joe Sixpack will probably never hear of this; heck, I don't think Joe Sixpack knows what RFID is.
It does not surprise me at all that this is in Cincinnati, which has a horrible anti-worker culture. Employees are considered far less valuable than office fixtures, pay is below the national average in all industries, and flexible time is a foreign concept. Most employers there resent the emancipation proclaimation. Without it, they wouldn't have to pay the drones at all. This attitude has even spilled over to the sports teams, who have lost a lot more often than they have won over the years due to skinflint ownership.
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OT but,
Since the book of Revelation is in the New Testament not the Old Testament, it doesn't make sense to think 666 is as a hebrew number. Instead, you should picture it as a roman numeral, in which case it is the roman equivalent if 54321 (500+100+50+10+5+1) or DCLXVI.
I went to their web site and many time they repeat the word "secure". Now granted this could be marketing bunk destined to pointy haired boss, but a passive RFID tag without private key cannot be qualified as secure even remotely. So I will stand on a leg and state that the GP is wrong and the Parent post is right, you cannot so easily copy the tag.
p eople purport is short. For me 1 foot is short. With 5 meters/15 feet readability, then you can REALLY immagine implementing a reader everywhere and fully track a population (in a firm/company/city/country).
Veri Chip
Veri Guard Brochure
What is quite frightening is that they purport on site tracking up to 15 foot (5 meter!). This is WAAAY beyond the distance the RFID-CHip-are-ok-sleep-safely-it-won't-be-abused-
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Is this the first time civilians have been required to do thing type of thing?
This may not be exactly the same thing, but it's somewhat of a precedent: A few years ago, after a mammogram, my wife had a biopsy to check out something "suspicious". It turned out to be nothing important, though.
Some time later, she had another x-ray at a different place, and she saw that the image had a visible object at the site of the biopsy. She was told that it was a small piece of plastic left behind during the biopsy procedure, and that this was a fairly common thing. Sort of a "We were here" tag.
Whether it's an RFID chip we don't know. But at least some medical people are already implanting small "innocuous" things without mentioning it to the patient. And there have been stories of medical uses of RFID chips to help avoid the common problem of misidentifying a patient.
It's easy to put such things together. If you've had any "penetrative" medical work done in the past few years, there's a good chance that you're carrying an RFID chip now.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.