Thread: The RFID Chip: Benefit to Commerce or New Tool for Government Surveillance?

By Ed Hiserodt Published: 2007-07-30 14:03
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ARTICLE SYNOPSIS:

For more than a dozen years large retailers who must keep up with shipments and inventories have encouraged their suppliers (often with ultimatums) to provide radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on their products. But is there a dark side to this technology that government snoops can use to collect more information on citizens?
Follow this link to the original source: "The RFID Chip: Benefit to commerce or new tool for government surveillance?"

COMMENTARY:

One of the most useful tools for air traffic safety is the transponder — used by all commercial airlines and most private aircraft. When the air traffic control radar scans the airplane, the transponder does more than just act as a reflective target. Its electronics sense the radar signal and send back its own highly informative message giving such data as the airplane's altitude. RFIDs at Wal-Mart do essentially the same thing, but when interrogated by a scanner, the tags send back information on product codes, shipment dates, destinations — whatever information is required for tracking.

The main groups of RFIDs are passive and active with the difference being the way power is supplied to the outgoing signal. Passive devices, such as price tags that have the RFID printed on them, take the tiny amount of power collected by the antenna, and reflect it back to the scanner along with bits of information. Active RFIDs, like those used to identify cars as they pass through a toll booth, have some type of battery power allowing them to send back a much stronger signal with more information.

Some RFID chips are now being inserted into people. A July 22nd story in Wired News by Todd Lewan describes how a surveillance company, CityWatcher.com, embedded microchips and antennas — described as being "as long as two grains of rice, as thick as a toothpick" — in the forearms of two workers involved in protecting high security police data files.

Like wealth, information is power. Early writers on the Holocaust wondered how so few Nazis could round up, imprison, and murder so many Jews. Later it was found that the Third Reich knew names, addresses, relatives, friends, and even ancestors of their victims before the first Gestapo agent knocked on a door in the middle of the night. Without such important data available to the killers, any attempt at mass murder would have be total chaos.

No doubt embedded RFIDs would be "voluntary" at the outset, somewhat like "voluntary drug tests" and "voluntary compliance" with tax laws. Inexorably, once the camel's nose was under the tent, we could see arguments for inserting the chip at birth - hey, no more hospital mix-ups! And the information would doubtlessly escalate: today, health information; tomorrow political affiliations, income, "anti-State activities." While there may be cases where such devices are warranted, e.g. medical alert data for emergency responders or identifying child molesters, the use by government of these devices should be opposed with at least the same tenacity used in opposing restrictive gun laws.

Ed Hiserodt

Ed Hiserodt, an aerospace engineer, lives in Maumelle, Arkansas and has been president of Controls & Power, Inc. since 1983. He is the author of Underexposed: What if radiation is actually GOOD for you?

If RFID's go through, I think we'll have lost all sense of what is to be human. Unfortunately there'll be a few people who will volunteer to use it. They will then be the promoters for the RFID who will boast all it's glorious benefits. Some states will start to mandate it linking it to all these benefits. Once it snowballs, they'll take advantage of the system. I refuse to be tagged like sheep.