Slashdot Mirror
California Blocks RFID Implants In Workers
InternetVoting writes "California has passed a bill banning companies from requiring employees to have RFID chips surgically implanted. Already one company has been licensed by the federal government, implanting more than 2000 people. At least one other company — CityWatcher.com, a Cincinnati video surveillance company — already required RFID implants in some employees. 'State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) proposed the measure after at least one company began marketing radio frequency identification devices for use in humans. "RFID is a minor miracle, with all sorts of good uses," Simitian said. "But we shouldn't condone forced 'tagging' of humans. It's the ultimate invasion of privacy.'"
a state legislature that "gets" it...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I was just reading another article on Slashdot about Circuit City gestapo tactics, and thought that it is only a matter of time before large monopolistic retailers require their customers to be implanted with RFID tags.
Tin Foil hat alert? Maybe, maybe not.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
What happens when you decide to leave a company, I guess they have to remove the implant?
You work two jobs and you end up getting double implants? I wouldn't want this.
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
There are two kinds of libertarians: the ones who recognize only "the government" as a source of oppressive force, and those who realize that any group may become sufficiently powerful as to be able to prevent free exercise of one's natural rights. (The wikipedia article splits libertarians into different subsets, but I believe that my basis here is complete, if not orthogonal.)
Unfortunately, the former group gets much more press than the latter, and has largely gotten the terminology to refer only to them even among liberty dorks like us. The former group (among many other bizarre positions) would object strongly to a national credit rating system that dictated where and how you could live if it was run by the government, but have no objection against the credit system we have today simply because its officials are unelected. At the risk of igniting a flame war, Noam Chomsky's writings on anarchism should be read by libertarians or simply "people interested in freedom" just as much as Ayn Rand's.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
"Invasion of privacy" is misleading.
It's only about privacy in a euphemistic way, it's about sovereignty of ones body.
If it is forbidden on "privacy" grounds, then the privacy grounds can be addressed, resolved, objection removed and then can become a requirement for work/access-to-services etc.
It should be forbidden because the majority of the population said "No" without having to give a reason.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I was thinking of another group that used to catalog humans.
z i_camps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_in_Na
Ironically, the current people doing this are very well connected to those.
Well, it's not a joke insofar as revelation really does say that. I'm an "evangelical" atheist (I try to convert others to atheism on the weekends, not quite door-to-door, but close) - but I agree with many of the teachings in the bible. Serious distrust of authorities requiring you to have implanted "marks" to function in society is one of several things I wholeheartedly agree with the vampire cultists (christians) on.
Fortunately, the Orwellian future isn't here...yet.
If you wait until the Orwellian future is here then it will be too late to do anything about it.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
I find this trend somewhat short-sighted. RFID of course has many uses, but it is known to have several vulnerabilities when used for security purposes. I can imagine what some of them are, but I'm not a security researcher so I won't speculate. However, the reliance specifically on surgically embedded RFID chips may fall quite easily into the trap laid by "security by difficulty."
Most of us agree that "security by obscurity" is a bad thing. Relying on closed code and hidden private keys (cough DRM cough) to ensure security just doesn't work well in the end. However, there is a tendency to have more faith in security which relies entirely on the difficulty of achieving some goal. In the case of mechanical locks, this is quite obvious and locks have been designed this way for centuries, the level of "difficulty" based on current technological knowledge and the known level of skill of lock pickers.
In software, we see "difficulty" being important for public-key encryption, which is the corner stone of many cryptographic paradigms. The difficulty, in this case, is finding a pair of primes which can be multiplied to get the private key. However, in this case we can use mathematics to formally identify the time required, according to current technology, to perform this calculation. Thus, we can have some very good, provable assurance that a particular algorithm won't be broken by brute force methods. (Until the next technological breakthrough... quantum cryptography? But that, we are told, is assuredly still far in the future..)
Now, here we have a tendency to embed an identification chip in a person, so that you can be sure that this person is who they say they are. After all, once a chip is embedded surgically, there's no way it can be wrong, right?
Unfortunately this logic is way too dependent on the current idea that surgery is a difficult thing. Already there exist plastic surgeries that take less than a week to recover from. Even the procedure in question I'm sure is quite minor and takes no time at all. So how does embedding a chip in someone add to the sense of security? It's perfectly imaginable to me that in the near future there will be devices which can easily inject such chips into the skin or remove them without requiring a doctor present at all.
So that is why I fail to understand this idea. Even after considering the man-in-the-middle attacks and several other ways to break RFID security, I cannot see that relying in surgical implantation will help much in terms of security. You may as well just get a magnetic card reader so that employees can use their ID cards to get in, and be done with it. Relying on surgery or even fingerprints/retina identification will only add to a false sense of security, as any of these can be fooled. And yes, someone eager enough to break into a high-tech workplace to steal data is going to be be smart enough to have thought of several ways to do it before breakfast.
I'm afraid that when it comes to physical security, people are still better at doing it than machines, and I believe this will be the case for some time.
I know you're playing Devil's Advocate, but that's a strange notion of "election". Most "elections" that distributed significantly different voting powers to people would not be considered such!
The idol of the free market is relatively new in libertarian thought (modulo the terminology battles again, of course.) Libertarians you can historically connect with the strands today were around well before robust theories of the free market. I think if you time-translated some of the "founding fathers" you'd find they considered the free market a powerful tool, not a good in itself.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
They would not support this kind of 'efficiency'. I'm afraid that in the world, the excuse of using technology because "it's just easier this way" has in fact lead to atrocities that will be remembered for a thousand years.
It starts out as a labor issue and they tell you it's ok because you don't have to work there. Then they give them to all convicts. Then mental patients, then the ex-sex offenders, then bullshit pot bust people, then the DUIs, then the green card holders then it becomes an automatic step in the arrest process then your car insurance needs it then your health insurance then your bank and still they keep telling you that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. And if you don't want to use a bank no one is making you. Then everyone in the armed forces gets one then everyone on the public service payroll then all the welfare recipients, then all the school children, then everyone working for a company that has any government contract, then any passport holder. And whoever's left is corralled into special camps. Trust me, I've seen this before.
I think they will see a surge in "volontary implants" in the near future....
Manager - "Do you like your job ?"
Worker - "Yes, It is very fullfilling to work with so many geniuses..."
Manager - "Well...", waving an implant gun, "...would you like to keep it ?"
Worker - "...I do this volontary...of free will...without any one or anything forcing me..."
*Pang!*
And if companies X, Y and Z agree together to all require them, and are the only companies reachable by you to buy eg. food, you're fucked. And a new company which *doesn't* support them won't appear overnight. Given the pure laziness of the general population, 99% of people would probably prefer an implant to an extra 5 minutes on their shopping trip.
Free market philosophy falls flat on its face when you introduce the real-world scenarios of monopolies, cartels, and other dirty practices.
Employees are not owned by their employers. If being employed means surrendering the sovereignty of your body to an employer by accepting an implant then this equates employees with cattle or sheep that are being tagged for identification before slaughter.
The problem is, it doesn't work like that. If you give the rich and powerful enough unchecked power, freedom of choice is either (A) taken from you, because they make a deal, or (B) meaningless, as it went down a spiral where everyone does the same things.
As an example of the former, you can see the last centuries of Rome and the introduction of serfdom. The rich clique that formed the senate:
1. proclaimed themselves not subject to tax
2. raised taxes on everyone else, especially the free peasants (land was the most common pension for soldiers and recruitment incentive, so they eventually had quite a few) to support the ever increasing costs of warfare and the luxury in Rome
3. tried to fix prices _and_ devalue the coin, by law. There goes some of your freedom right there, as a free peasant or small landowner: they already tell you what your produce is worth, and it just became half of what you got for it last year.
4. when people started moving away as a result, they just forbade everyone to move, effectively turning all free peasants into serfs of the empire. In one fell swoop.
I'm sure those peasants still thought they have a choice before step 3. Unfortunately after step 4 it started going downhill fast, and eventually they were not only tied to the land and taxed, but had to work 3 days a week for the local noble too, and some 15 centuries later it had become 6 days a week and no land of their own at all. In some places (e.g., some Polish revolts were against that), serfs could not only be sold, but also rented by burghers, merchants, whatever. The long and painful slide from a free peasant class back to effective slavery, eh?
As a _probable_ example of the latter, well, you can learn a lot about what problems a society had, by the laws they give. That Moses forbade working on Sabbath on penalty of _death_, should tell you that they probably had a _major_ problem there. It also gives you the idea that probably nothing else worked, choice be damned.
At some point, even if you forbid by law to _require_ working on the Sabbath, people will just find weasel ways to require "volunteering" for it. (See the recent EA scandal.) So at some point your choice becomes picking one of X potential employers, all of which require it. You have a choice to take it or starve.
The death penalty on workers on Sabbath is, if you think about it, the ultimate way to stop asking for it right in its tracks. There is no reward someone can promise you, in exchange for maybe getting stoned to death, and no threat they could use to make anyone accept that. Maybe religion could work to motivate someone to go to death, but here religion is what forbade that in the first place. Basically it attacked the supply side of labour, not the demand side.
It makes me wonder how bad it had got, at the very least.
At any rate, sometimes you have to restrict people's "choice" to accept being kicked in the head, because otherwise it can very soon degenerate into something where you have no choice to refuse it.
Finally, don't get me wrong, I'm not against the rich or capitalism... as such. It's just that when one side has disproportionately more bargaining power and power to subvert the system, at some point you have to restrict what they can do with it. Otherwise, if left unchecked, they'll just figure out a way to turn everyone else into their serfs. See, the Romans again.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is right in theory, until it becomes impossible to do that due to everyone requiring it.
Let's go back about 50 years. Back then, it was normal here to get your wage cash on hand at the end of the month. Then gradually checking accounts became usual. And more and more people had them, because they're convenient, and more and more companies realized it's less hassle (and less danger) to simply transfer the money instead of handing out cash.
Today, you cannot get a job here without an account. You want cash? Why? You don't have an account? Sorry, but no job for you. No kidding. No account, no job.
It's a big problem for homeless people here. You don't have a home, you won't get an account. No account, no job. No job, no money to rent an apartment (not to mention that you pretty much need an account to rent one, too). A bank here actually started a service for homeless, sponsored by the city, to get them back onto their feet.
Crazy? Sure, but gradually, piece by piece, we got there. Think it's so impossible that the same might happen with tagging? Today a company requires it, tomorrow you need it to get a passport, then to get a bank account, and you need a bank account... you get the idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's very insightful, but unfortunately, it's even worse than that. (If one can really say worse than the plague.)
1. Not for all. Eastern Europe, for example, was already sparsely populated enough that the plagues had no major impact. So there serfdom continued to be a downwards slide until the 19'th century. I've already given the example of Poland, but things got even worse in Russia, for example.
2. It took some very bloody revolts to really get a positive change, even with the plague. The ruling class didn't just start giving better salaries and conditions when western Europe depopulated. The first (and second and third) attempt again was to fix prices and try to force everyone to work more for less pay, so they can keep their luxury and privileges with less population.
As an example of it, in England and France which were having a jolly good 100 years war, the first effect of the population halving was that the levies on each peasant doubled.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's somewhat inaccurate, though:
1. Roman "democracy" was by and large a democracy of the rich. When they voted on anything, the entire population of Rome was divided into 193 centuries, by economic class, and they voted by century. One vote per century. And 98 centuries were made of the senators and the equites. So they may have had a lot of poor, but the rich had the majority of votes by definition. Furthermore, voting stopped completely when they had a majority of 97 centuries either for or against, so quite routinely the poorest never had a chance to cast any vote.
That's democracy of the rich for you, seriously.
2. You have to remember that welfare and populism were limited to the city of Rome itself. No more, no less. If you wanted to vote to tax Egypt or the Gaul to hand out more bread in Rome, everyone would be for it.
Fixing prices for the peasants outside Rome to give cheap bread to the plebs in Rome would have been insanely popular at any point.
3. The only political office I can remember offhand that _required_ one to be a plebeian, was the Tribune Of The Plebs. The requirement seemed to be very flexible however. Remember that Octavian Augustus, among the many titles he accumulated in one hand as Imperator was also a Tribune Of The Plebs. If you can genuinely believe that he was a poor commoner, I have some logging rights to sell in Sahara. They were also routinely bribed by the rich.
4. The late Western Roman Empire was more... weird. Not everything you learned about the peak of the republic still applied. They had increasingly deranged emperors, the praetorian guard started installing and removing emperors itself, they had a _major_ civil war over who gets to be Augustus (emperor) and who gets to be Caesar (vice-emperor) in the tetrarchy, etc. Basically the Western Roman Empire in the 3-4th century AD isn't quite what you've learned about the Roman Republic.
5. Well, just because some people argue nonsense, it doesn't mean they can really rewrite history. What happened, well, already happened, whether the right-wing think-tanks like it or not. Plus, there are a lot of people who are disillusioned with the present and retreat in some rose-tinted illusion that the past was some gentle and noble utopia. (And I don't mean only in modern times, but also see the Renaissance.) Unfortunately, it never really was that great. Even more unfortunately, that sanitized illusion makes them easy to manipulate by those think-tanks I've already mentioned.
And yes, I'm not surprised that the rich in the USA, who want more political power for themselves, would try to paint it that way. "See, giving us more power is good, giving power to the poor is bad." It's only expected, I guess. Unfortunately that's not what actually happened in the real history.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
* Mass communications subordinate to the government
It's no secret that the media is increasingly controlled by a few dominant business interests. Neither is it a secret that government is increasingly controlled by business interests.
* Television the major means of thought control
This has been true for as long as I can remember - television is for now, the most powerful mass-populace informational tool. In those areas where the media is controlled by business interests, television is the media they want to control the most. This could be why they hate internet radio so much.
* Population controlled by perpetual war and its attending material shortages
Raised oil prices have a knock-on effect on every aspect of the world economy. There's also outsourcing and automation, which could be viewed as a domestic kind of war against the workers of the Western nations. The beauty of these approaches versus full-scale conventional war is that it has all the advantages (creation of a new poor working class to repress, nice exploitation opportunities for companies) and few of the disadvantages (full-scale war disrupting the market for consumer products, risk of nuclear strike, etc).
* The war ends when the government says it does (i.e. - never)
Not only is "terrorism" a nebulous concept rather than a nation state, or a particular ethnic group, engaging in a war against it has the happy side effect that for each terrorist you squash, you are helping "them" to recruit more. It could last forever, and I suspect that could be the intent.
Now, is all this a conspiracy, or just emergent behaviour which is a natural outcome of capitalism? I think the latter. But whichever it is, the social system we have sucks for allowing it to happen.