Airport To Tag Passengers With RFID

denebian devil writes "A new technology is to be trialled in Debrecen Airport in Hungary that will involve tagging all passengers with high-powered RFID tags. From the Register article: 'People will be told to wear radio tags round their necks when they get to the airport. The tag would notify a computer system of their identity and whereabouts. The system would then track their activities in the airport using a network of high definition cameras. "[The tags] have got a long range, of 10m to 20m," said Dr. Paul Brennan of University College London's antennas and radar group which developed the tags, "and the system has been designed so the tag can be located to within a meter, and it can locate thousands of tags in one area at a given time."' The system is being touted for 'Improving airport efficiency, security and passenger flow by enhanced passenger monitoring.' BBC is also reporting this story, and brings up such hurdles to the project as 'finding a way of ensuring the tags cannot be switched between passengers or removed without notification.' As for any mention of the 'hurdle' of people's rights, the article vaguely and briefly states that 'The issue of infringement of civil liberties will also be key,' but doesn't bother to go into any pesky details."

Comments

You are talking out of your arse, sir

[CaptainZapp]

Budapest may not be the worlds busyest airport by a long shot, but talking about a few dozen passengers a day is just idiotic. Even if you engage a bit in hyperbole, you come out looking like a complete, utter moron.

As a matter of fact: BUD served roughly 8'000'000 passengers in 2005 and 4'682'163 up and including the month of July in 2006, which translates to roughly 22'000 passengers a day. It took me a whopping 20 seconds to find those statistics with a Google search.

I wouldn't even bother with a troll like you, but this has so much the reek of typical US arrogance, where the rest of the world is stuck in the middle ages and can be glad if they don't have to ride their horse carriage for longer then 20 minutes to the public toiletry center if they want to take a dump.

Re:the script on the monitoring side

[Dausha]

I'm deeply troubled that the monitoring script is written in Perl. That language isn't sexy enough anymore for _real_ programming. Besides, there's little documentation, so some maintainer will decide to change the code to make it look more active-voice. For example:

run_1984($RFID) if ($country_trust_level{$RFID->citizenship} 5);

I challenge any Perl programmers to write this in a much more obfuscated way.