VeriChip’s Merger With Credit Monitoring Firm Worries Privacy Activists

Wired | Dec 9, 2009

By Penn Bullock

Remember VeriChip, the Florida company that once dreamed of injecting its human-implantable RFID microchips in everyone from immigrant guest workers to prison inmates?

We haven’t heard much from the company since a dipping stock price nearly got it delisted from the NASDAQ in March. But it’s still alive, and in November it pulled off a seemingly incongruous acquisition. Now called PositiveID, the new company is a merger between VeriChip and Steel Vault, the people behind NationalCreditReport.com.

With a human-implantable microchip maker now running a credit-scoring and identity-theft-protection website, privacy activists are worried again. “The attraction to investors is the potential for synergies,” says Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “You have to anticipate over time there will be an attempt to integrate the services.”

“Sci-fi wise, you could have a chip read by a scanner that determines your credit-worthiness,” says Evan Hendricks, editor of Privacy Times. “Or you could have a credit card implant.”

VeriChip and its former owner Applied Digital have been drawing fire since 2004, when the FDA approved the rice-sized injectable RFID for human use. While the company primarily pushed the chip as part of a system to index medical records — a kind of subcutaneous MedAlert bracelet — Richard Sullivan, then-CEO of Applied Digital, had a penchant for wantonly confirming every nightmare of cybernetic social control.

After 9/11, it was Sullivan who announced the VeriChip would be perfect as a universal ID to distinguish safe people from the dangerous ones. He dreamed of GPS-equipped chips being injected into foreigners entering the United States, prisoners, children, the elderly. He thought the VeriChip would be used as a built-in credit or ATM card.

Indeed, in 2004, one of VeriChip’s earliest deployments was at a Barcelona nightclub, where VIP patrons could pay 125 euro to get the chip installed in their arms as a debit card for drinks.

But today, Sullivan’s replacement says the company has no plans to market the VeriChip as a path to instant credit, despite the recent acquisition.

With his white-buttondown shirt open at the chest, PositiveID CEO Scott Silverman spoke about the merger in an interview at the company’s office suite in Delray Beach, Florida. “Using the chip to relate to the credit-reporting services of NationalCreditReport.com, or even using it for financial transactions … has not been a part of our business model for five years or more, since Sullivan’s been gone, and is not part of our business model moving forward,” he says.

Silverman also backed away from some of the Orwellian ideas floated by his cyberpunk predecessor. “I can tell you that … putting [the chips] into children and immigrants for identification purposes, or putting them into people, especially unwillingly, for financial transactions, has [not] been and never will be the intent of this company as long I’m the chairman and CEO,” he says.

Yet in 2004, Silverman told the Broward-Palm Beach New Times that the VeriChip could be used as a credit card in coming years. And in 2006, he went on Fox & Friends to promote the chipping of immigrant guest workers to track them and monitor their tax records.

And ahead of the recent merger, VeriChip gave a presentation to investors hinting there would be some cross-pollination between the two sides of the business. It plans to “cross-sell its NationalCreditReport.com customer base” (.pdf) the Health Link service and vice-versa. So, Americans with implanted VeriChips will be encouraged to divulge their finances to PositiveID, while credit-monitoring customers will be marketed the health-record microchip.

Critics of chipping are moved by a variety of concerns, ranging from the pragmatic to the religious — anti-RFID crusader Katherine Albrecht believes the technology is the Mark of the Beast predicted in the Book of Revelation, but also doubts its efficacy as a medical tag: VeriChip’s instruction manual warns that the chip may not function in ambulances and areas where there are MRI and X-ray scanners.

Security is another issue. RFIDs can generally be scanned from distances much greater than the official specs suggest. Nicole Ozer at the ACLU of Northern California notes that after Wired magazine writer Annalee Newitz experimentally cloned her VeriChip in 2006, the company continued calling it secure.

But human chipping has high-profile fans as well, including former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, who left his job as overseer of the FDA in 2005 — a year after VeriChip’s approval — to join the company’s board of directors. Thompson announced he would personally join the 700 to 900 Americans who have the chip installed in their bodies. (He later reportedly reneged.)

Whatever its plans for the future, PositiveID is focused on its original mission for now: implants tied to medical records. On December 1, the new company announced it’s collaborating with Avocare, a Florida health care business, in the hopes of bringing its “health care identification products” to 1 million patients.

Bankers move to abolish personal checks by 2018

Bounced out: The chequebook could be abolished by 2018 after the number issued every day has fallen drastically

After 350 years, cheques to be consigned to the history books

The Federation of Small Businesses said it will ’strongly oppose’ any move to get rid of cheques.

Daily Mail | Nov 23, 2009

By Becky Barrow

Cheques are to be abolished under controversial plans being drawn up by bankers.

They are widely expected to vote next month for the chequebook to be consigned to history.

Yesterday, the move was criticised by consumer groups, business lobbyists and charities representing the elderly.

They raised fears that vulnerable people, who have relied on their chequebook all their lives, will be left confused.

Many others simply prefer to pay by cheque, instead of by direct debit or bank transfer.

The Payments Council said its research shows the number of cheques being written every day has fallen dramatically in recent years.

At their peak in 1990, around 11million cheques were written every day. Latest figures show the number has dropped to around 3.8million.

Cheques, which were first used in Britain 350 years ago, are also an expensive form of payment for banks.

They cost around £1 each to process, which is four times as much as electronic payments.

The council’s 15-strong board – made up of 11 banking representatives and four independents – will take a decision on December 16.

The most likely date for cheques to be phased out in the UK is 2018.

A growing number of stores including John Lewis and Tesco have stopped accepting cheques.

Stores claim they are the most insecure form of payment and that abolishing them cuts queues at checkouts.

But cheques are still widely used for making payments to local tradesmen and for utility bills.

Government departments, such as HM Revenue & Customs and the Department for Work and Pensions, rely on cheques to make millions of payments each year.

Andrew Harrop, head of public policy at Age Concern and Help the Aged, said: ‘Many older people use cheques and cash for all their transactions and are uncomfortable with alternative payment methods, such as credit or debit cards with PIN numbers.

‘To prevent older people becoming financially excluded, any plans to end the use of cheques must ensure there are alternative ways of paying which they are happy using.’

Vera Cottrell, of the consumer lobby group Which?, said: ‘There are still no cheap, safe alternatives to cheques. Until that time, cheques should not be withdrawn.’

The Federation of Small Businesses said it will ’strongly oppose’ any move to get rid of cheques.

Sandra Quinn, a director of the Payments Council, said: ‘We are completely aware that elderly, disabled and disadvantaged people need alternatives to be in place.

‘If the decision is made [to end the cheque], there will be a long time before it comes into effect.’

VeriChip buys Steel Vault, changes name to “PositiveID”, creating micro-implant health record/credit score empire

VeriChip Buys Steel Vault, Creating Micro-Implant Health Record/Credit Score Empire

industry.bnet.com | Nov 11, 2009

By Jim Edwards

VeriChip (CHIP), the company that markets a microchip implant that links to your online health records, has acquired Steel Vault (SVUL), a credit monitoring and anti-identity theft company. The combined company will operate under a new name: PositiveID.

Related

VeriChip TV Ad Confirms Critics’ Worst fears: They Want Everyone Implanted

Novartis Chip Implant Texts Your Phone When You Need Another Pill

The all-stock transaction will leave PositiveID in charge of a burgeoning empire of identity, health and microchip implant businesses that will only encourage its critics. BNET previously noted that some regard the company as part of a prophecy in the Book of Revelation (because the HealthLink chip carries an RFID number that can be used as both money and proof of ID) or as part of President Obama’s secret Nazi plan to enslave America.

The most obvious criticism to be made of the deal is that it potentially allows PositiveID to link or cross-check patient health records (from the HealthLink chip) to people’s credit scores. One assumes that the company will put up firewalls to prevent that. PositiveID CEO Scott Silverman said:

“PositiveID will be the first company of its kind to combine a successful identity security business with one of the world’s first personal health records through our Health Link business. PositiveID will address some of the most important issues affecting our society today with our identification tools and technologies for consumers and businesses.”

Unless, of course, consumers don’t actually want to be implanted with chips, have their health records available over the internet, or have their medical records linked to their credit scores.

Vending Machines Take Finger Scans Instead of Cash

singularityhub.com | Aug 24, 2009

by Aaron Saenz

The day has arrived where all the money in the world is at your finger tips. Or rather, all the money in your credit card is in your finger veins. Biometric scanners are popping up everywhere, and now Hitachi has debuted the first vending machine that will accept a finger scan instead of cash or coins. By linking the scan to a credit card account, customers can simply place their finger in the machine and purchase whichever snack goods they desire most. It’s probably the best reward you’ll ever get for giving a vending machine the finger.

The biometric sensor in Hitachi’s new vending machine uses light to scan and read the number and orientation of veins in your finger tip without directly touching a sensor. This provides a unique code for access to a credit card account that has to be established independently of the vending machine. While the machine is only a prototype, and Hitachi hasn’t yet decided whether or not to make a commercial version, the concept itself is more than enough to be causing a buzz. It’s far from the first use of a biometric sensor, but it has the potential to be the most commonly seen application of the technology.

Even if the vending machine industry doesn’t jump on Hitachi’s band wagon, the biometric sales option is ready to be explored. With credit card companies like Visa and Mastercard already providing a “tap and pay” system for cards, consumers may become more confident with payments that don’t require signatures or even human-human interaction. This means that finger scans could very well become a break-out technology. If you’re willing to tap a card, why not just point your finger instead?

Hollywood movies often portray biometrics as added levels of security for very expensive items or collections. Eye scans to enter bank vaults spring readily to mind. The speed of biometric verification, however, makes it just as sensible to go in the other direction. Need to pay $5? Just let the machine count the veins in your index finger. It’s faster than reaching for your wallet. Which may or may not be a good thing. It’s unclear if the hassle of paying for things has a profound affect on the way we spend money. There may be a lot more impulse purchases when you can pay for things by just tapping your finger.

Amazingly, this isn’t the only way that vending machines are getting complex. There are vendors with LCD display and touch screens, and others with conveyor belts or claws instead of those twisting springs. I think that they serve as a good testing ground for emerging commercial technologies. After all, like new high-tech ATMs, they are one of the few public machines that interact with hundreds or thousands of people each day.

With biometrics looking to identify you through your ear, or even your brain, the finger vein technology from Hitachi seems like a more acceptable option. It will be interesting to see if the concept of linking credit cards to a biometric scanner becomes widely popular. Perhaps it will be adopted somewhere else. iTunes? Kindles? Pay toilets?

High schools across the United States go casheless with finger-scanning

Digital Journal | Aug 19, 2009

High school students can now pay with their finger

By Andrew Moran

As many high schools across the United States begin the new school year, students can for their lunches with their fingers instead of cash or a student card.

“I’m just really glad I don’t have to remember a number every day or have a card or something. All you have to do is put your finger down and go,” said one 14-year-old high school student. Instead of paying with cash, a pupil can place their index finger on a scanner and be on their way with lunch, according to The Chronicle Telegram.

As of Monday, freshman students can use the lunch account finger-scan but by the end of next week all 2,100 students can access this type of system.

Another 14-year-old high school student was relieved about this finger-scanning system, “As long as there is money in my account, I won’t have to worry about anything. It’s going to make lunch that much easier.”

The school staff will also be using this latest technology.

This biometric system will cost $91,000 and be implemented by Sodexo, who will be hoping that this program will go district-wide and that parents will sign up their students at a high rate in order to recoup their losses.

At the present time there are minor kinks in the system but the general manager of Sodexo, the district’s food service provider, Bill Jett says, “When it’s really up and running it will make things go a lot smoother and faster.”

However, this is not the only amenity that students and faculty can look forward to, according to Principal Darren Conley, “The technology is already out there for us to use biometrics in a number of ways. In the future, we are looking at adding it to the media center for signing materials out or in the classrooms for attendance.”

After the present school year is complete, Elyria High School will be closed and the new building will have an air conditioner, which many people are looking forward to such as a 14-year-old student, “It is so crowded in here that sometimes it’s hard to go up the steps. I can’t wait for the new school to open. We are going to get to experience both the old school and the new school.”

Out of financial chaos, futurist predicts cashless society and robocops

“An alternative road may bypass the main path of history, shortcircuiting the organic stages of consensus, value formation, and the experiences of common enterprise generally believed to underlie political community. This relies on a grave crisis or war to bring about a sudden transformation in national attitudes sufficient for the purpose. According to this version, the [New World] Order we examine may be brought into existence as a result of a series of sudden, nasty, and traumatic shocks.”

- A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations by Lincoln P. Bloomfield. Prepared for IDA in support of a study submitted to the Department of State, dated February 24, 1961

If you were surprised by the financial crisis, wait until you hear what’s coming next. Futurologist Richard Watson journeys into tomorrow’s world

Future trends: money as a physical object might well become extinct

Telegraph | Sep 19, 2008

Futurologist Richard Watson’s 2050 vision: Goodbye Belgium, hello brain transplants

After a week when it’s been impossible to predict which financial giant will still be standing at the end of the day, let alone the year, it would seem like a fool’s errand to talk about decades down the line.

These days, if you raise your gaze to the horizon, you’ll find experts warning of a host of problems: melting ice caps, global pandemics, terrorism, the end of oil, meteor strikes, even robot uprisings.

It’s all too easy to become paralysed by such possibilities – and yes, there are ideas, discoveries and events over the horizon that we can’t possibly comprehend. But while the future is unknown and unwritten, we can begin to trace its outline, and prepare the first drafts.

For example, the financial services industry has been in quite a state recently. Despite today’s troubles, we can say that we’ll always need banking and insurance. But will we get them from the same places? Asda and Tesco already sell insurance alongside carrots and spaghetti, and are certain to expand their offerings.

What would happen to the big banks if Wal-Mart, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Vodafone all applied for banking licences to deliver services such as electronic payment, as I believe they will? And will we still need high street branches staffed by human beings once artificial intelligence really kicks in, and you can talk to a machine that’s checking the market every second for the best loan or insurance policy?

Even the nature of how we pay for such things will be different. It is estimated that by 2020, only 10 per cent of financial transactions will be in cash. We can safely predict that the idea of money as a physical object might well become extinct not long after – especially if a global pandemic starts us thinking about all the germs on those grubby notes. Instead, digital transactions will be made through computers, or cell phones, or even chips inserted into our forearms.

Wherever you look in society, massive changes will be taking place. If my predictions are accurate, by 2050 there won’t be DVDs, or national currencies, or a monarchy, or a unified Belgium, but we might well have a ladder into space, robotic policemen and diets based on our individual genome. I’ve picked out some of the more important or exotic arrivals and departures in the list below.

If it feels slightly overwhelming, remember that too much information, twinned with not enough time, is something we will all have to get used to in the future.

However, if you want a simpler take, there are five key factors to remember.

The first is ageing. In Japan, the percentage of people aged over 75 is forecast to increase by 36 per cent between 2005 and 2015, meaning that taxes would have to go up by 175 per cent in a generation to maintain current levels of benefit.

We’re spending a record amount on pharmaceuticals, but we’ll spend more on them as we age – and on technology to replace or store our memories, and refurbish our worn-out bodies (not to mention ways of designing packaging that those with weak hands and poor eyesight can actually open).

Second, the environment will remain vitally important, but climate change won’t be the only game in town – the approach of peak oil, peak coal, peak gas, peak water, peak uranium and even peak people (a severe shortage of workers in many parts of the world) will also have an impact, and require a profound shift towards sustainability.

In political and economic terms, the shift of power to the east, and the rise of countries such as China and India, will continue – the third factor to remember.

We already know that the world is getting smaller, and the fourth idea – greater connectivity – will continue to change how people live, work and think. One billion of us are already online, and this is expected to double within a decade or so. As a result, privacy will be dead or dying – but we may get smarter at making decisions, because our connectivity will allow instant polling of a crowd whose wisdom is nearly always greater than any single member’s.

Finally, there is technology. As the “Grin” technologies converge – genetics, robotics, internet and nanotechnology – we could see self-replicating machines, with intelligence equal to or greater than our own. We might be able to download not only our memories but also our consciousness into such a machine, and live for ever inside it. And to think that in 2008 we were worried about getting too much email.

The future will not be a singular experience, and nor is it a foregone conclusion. Some of us will embrace technology and globalisation, while others will try to escape them.

If history teaches us anything, it is that revolutionary thinking can overturn so-called inevitabilities and impossibilities. But even when it feels, as it has this week, like the end of the world, it’s better at least to start thinking about the future, than not to think about it at all.

• ‘Future Files: The 5 Trends that will shape the next 50 years’ by Richard Watson (Nicholas Brearley) is available from Telegraph Books for £11.99 + £1.25 p&p. To order, call 0870 428 4112 or go to www.books.telegraph.co.uk

Visa helps man live on plastic for ten months in cashless society experiment

Earlier this year Visa found out about his quest, and offered its support as he was using one of its Visa payWave cards, which enables him to pay for items costing less than £10 simply by touching the card against a sensor.

A man has spent the past 10 months not using cash to see if it is possible to live in a cashless society.

Telegraph | Sep 19, 2008

Man lives for ten months without cash

James Allan, 25, vowed not to handle or use any currency with the Queen’s head on it, including notes, coins and even stamps, for a year as part of a drunken bet made last December in a pub that did not accept cards.

The web content editor, who lives in London, said he wanted to see if it was possible to live a cash-free life, although he admitted that he thought his friend was the subject of the bet and not himself.

As a result he has had to rely solely on using credit and debit cards to buy goods and services.

He said: “It was all right at first because I had a very supportive girlfriend who bailed me out, but when the relationship went awry in January, I realised how difficult it was going to be.”

Mr Allan, who believes he is the only person to ever try to live without using cash for a whole year, said he had now got used to only going to places that would accept payment by card.

He has also changed many of his leisure activities from browsing the East End’s markets, to going to things that are free or clubs that do not charge you to go in.

But there have been some low points, including not being able to use supermarket trolleys because they require a £1 coin to unlock them, and having to walk past a £50 note he found lying in the street.

Another bad time was when he was forced to walk 10 miles across London one night because he could not find anywhere to top up his Oyster card, while he has often had to make extra purchases in corner shops to meet the minimum £5 spend needed to pay by card.

He said friends’ birthdays could be difficult if people decided to go to a pub or club that did not accept card payments, meaning he was not able to drink.

But Mr Allan said the thing that had upset him most was when a band his housemates were in performed in a small cafe and at the end, when a glass came around for people to make donations towards the cost, he had been unable to contribute.

He said even though everyone there knew what he was doing and were supportive of him, having to pass on the glass without putting anything in it had been a “horrible experience”.

Another problem arose when he needed to put down a £800 cash deposit on his accommodation, and he had to get his mother to come down from Oxford to handle the transaction for him.

Earlier this year Visa found out about his quest, and offered its support as he was using one of its Visa payWave cards, which enables him to pay for items costing less than £10 simply by touching the card against a sensor.
He said the best thing about having the support from Visa was that if a machine he needed to use was broken, he could ring them up and complain.

Mr Allan said he was likely to continue to live without cash when the year comes to an end.

He said: “I keep changing my mind but I find money unbelievably vulgar now. It is filthy and dirty and I have really gone off it.”

Shoppers to use fingerprints or eye scans to pay for goods

Barclaycard has announced it is investing a seven-figure sum in “contactless payment” technology  Photo: Getty Images

Shoppers could soon be able to pay for goods and services using their fingerprints, or iris identification techniques.

Telegraph | Sep 8, 2008

By Myra Butterworth

The futuristic systems, like those used by Tom Cruise in the science fiction film Minority Report, are being developed by scientists for Barclaycard.

The company has announced it is investing a seven-figure sum in “contactless payment” technology.

This allows customers to use everyday items they carry around with them – such as mobile phones, key fobs or even their eyes or fingerprints – to make payments.

It means shoppers will no longer have to rely on cards.

Barclaycard, which is part of Barclays, has already introduced a new-style cash machine in the United Arab Emirates enabling people to use their fingerprints to withdraw money and shoppers in the UK may soon be able to use the same technology.

Antony Jenkins, chief executive of Barclaycard, said: “It’s possible we’ll see an end to plastic in the next five to 10 years with new technologies to take its place emerging now. It could turn out to be one of the shortest lived payment methods in history, going from being ubiquitous to a museum piece in the same way as the video cassette.”

Barclaycard also aims to have one million customers upgraded to its contactless payment system OnePulse by the end of the year. OnePulse enables people to buy items for less than £10 by touching their card against a sensor, without even having to take it out of their wallet. It can also be used as an Oyster card on London transport.

Barclaycard said people may soon be able to hover their mobile over the price label of an item in a shop, confirm their purchase and take it away without having to go to a checkout or get a receipt.

Mr Jenkins said: “If I had said to you 10 years ago that you couldn’t pay with a cheque at the supermarket, you wouldn’t have believed me. That is now the reality, and we see plastic cards going the same way eventually.”

How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People

Average consumers may not realize how many RFID tags they carry around. The devices are embedded in personal items and even some clothing.

Related

E-Passports ‘can be cloned’
Microchipped passports the Government claim are foolproof can be cloned in minutes, it has been reported.

A privacy activist argues that the devices pose new security risks to those who carry them, often unwittingly

Scientific American | August 2008

Radio-frequency identi fication (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents. Because the tags were designed to be powerful tracking devices and they typically incorporate little security, people wearing or carrying them are vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance and profiling. Worldwide, legislators have done little to address those risks to citizens.

By Katherine Albrecht

*excerpts*

If you live in a state bordering Canada or Mexico, you may soon be given an opportunity to carry a very high tech item: a remotely readable driver’s license. Designed to identify U.S. citizens as they approach the nation’s borders, the cards are being promoted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to save time and simplify border crossings. But if you care about your safety and privacy as much as convenience, you might want to think twice before signing up.

The new licenses come equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be read right through a wallet, pocket or purse from as far away as 30 feet. Each tag incorporates a tiny microchip encoded with a unique identification number. As the bearer approaches a border station, radio energy broadcast by a reader device is picked up by an antenna connected to the chip, causing it to emit the ID number. By the time the license holder reaches the border agent, the number has already been fed into a Homeland Security database, and the traveler’s photograph and other details are displayed on the agent’s screen.

Although such “enhanced” driver’s licenses remain voluntary in the states that offer them, privacy and security experts are concerned that those who sign up for the cards are unaware of the risk: anyone with a readily available reader device—unscrupulous marketers, government agents, stalkers, thieves and just plain snoops—can also access the data on the licenses to remotely track people without their knowledge or consent. What is more, once the tag’s ID number is associated with an individual’s identity—for example, when the person carrying the license makes a credit-card transaction—the radio tag becomes a proxy for that individual. And the driver’s licenses are just the latest addition to a growing array of “tagged” items that consumers might be wearing or carrying around, such as transit and toll passes, office key cards, school IDs, “contactless” credit cards, clothing, phones and even groceries.

RFID tags have been likened to barcodes that broadcast their information, and the comparison is apt in the sense that the tiny devices have been used mainly for identifying parts and inventory, including cattle, as they make their way through supply chains. Instead of having to scan every individual item’s Universal Product Code (UPC), a warehouse worker can register the contents of an entire pallet of, say, paper towels by scanning the unique serial number encoded in the attached RFID tag. That number is associated in a central database with a detailed list of the pallet’s contents. But people are not paper products. During the past decade a shift toward embedding chips in individual consumer goods and, now, official identity documents has created a new set of privacy and security problems precisely because RFID is such a powerful tracking technology. Very little security is built into the tags themselves, and existing laws offer people scant protection from being surreptitiously tracked and profiled while living an increasingly tagged life.

Beyond Barcodes

The first radio tags identified military aircraft as friend or foe during World War II, but it was not until the late 1980s that similar tags became the basis of electronic toll-collection systems, such as E-ZPass along the East Coast. And in 1999 corporations began considering the tags’ potential for tracking millions of individual objects. In that year Procter & Gamble and Gillette (which have since merged to become the world’s largest consumer-product manufacturing company) formed a consortium with Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers, called the Auto-ID Center, to develop RFID tags that would be small, efficient and cheap enough to eventually replace the UPC barcode on everyday consumer products.

But the possibility that the security of such cards could be compromised is just one reason for concern. Even if tighter data-protection measures could someday prevent unauthorized access to RFID-card data, many privacy advocates worry that remotely readable identity documents could be abused by governments that wish to tightly monitor and control their citizens.

China’s national ID cards, for instance, are encoded with what most people would consider a shocking amount of personal information, including health and reproductive history, employment status, religion, ethnicity and even the name and phone number of each cardholder’s landlord. More ominous still, the cards are part of a larger project to blanket Chinese cities with state-of-the-art surveillance technologies. Michael Lin, a vice president for China Public Security Technology, a private company providing the RFID cards for the program, unflinchingly described them to the New York Times as “a way for the government to control the population in the future.” And even if other governments do not take advantage of the surveillance potential inherent in the new ID cards, ample evidence suggests that data-hungry corporations will.

Living a Tagged Life

According to the patent, here is how it would work in a retail environment: an “RFID tag scanner located [in the desired tracking location]… scans the RFID tags on [a] person…. As that person moves around the store, different RFID tag scanners located throughout the store can pick up radio signals from the RFID tags carried on that person and the movement of that person is tracked based on these detections…. The person tracking unit may keep records of different locations where the person has visited, as well as the visitation times.”

Protecting the Public

If RFID tags can enable an amusement park to capture detailed, personalized videos of thousands of people a day, imagine what a determined government could do—not to mention marketers or criminals. That is why my colleagues in the privacy community and I have so firmly opposed the use of RFID in government-issued identity documents or individual consumer items. As far back as 2003, my organization, CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)—along with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, and 40 other leading privacy and civil liberties advocates and organizations recognized this threat and issued a position paper that condemned the tracking of human beings with RFID as inappropriate.

In response to these concerns, dozens of U.S. states have introduced RFID consumer-protection bills—which have all been either killed or gutted by heavy opposition from lobbyists for the RFID industry. When the New Hampshire Senate voted on a bill that would have imposed tough regulations on RFID in 2006, a last-minute floor amendment replaced it with a two-year study instead. (I was appointed by the governor to serve on the resulting commission.) That same year a California bill that would have prohibited the use of RFID in government-issued documents passed both houses of the legislature, only to be vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On the federal level, no high-profile consumer-protection bills related to RFID have been passed. Instead, in 2005, the Senate Republican High Tech Task Force praised RFID applications as “exciting new technologies” with “tremendous promise for our economy” and vowed to protect RFID from regulation or legislation.

Meanwhile the RFID train is barreling forward. Gigi Zenk, a spokesperson at Washington’s licensing agency, recently confirmed that there are 10,000 enhanced licenses “on the street now—that people are actually carrying.” That’s a lot of potential for abuse, and it will only grow. The state recently mustered a halfhearted response, passing a law that designates the unauthorized reading of a tag “for the purpose of fraud, identity theft, or for any other illegal purpose” as a class C felony, subject to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Nowhere in the law does it say, however, that scanning for other purposes such as marketing—or perhaps “to control the population”—is prohibited. We ignore these risks at our peril.

Note: This article was originally published with the title, “RFID Tag–You’re It”.

Full Story

Actor blasts school for Big Brother control over students

School fingered over ‘Big Brother’ control

Cotswold Journal | Jul 10, 2008

By Simon Crump

THE actor famous for playing Eric Catchpole in the Lovejoy television series has accused Chipping Campden School’s headteacher of planning to control her pupils Big Brother-style.

Headteacher, Annette France, responded to Chris Jury’s accusation by saying he was being alarmist and denying that new technology being installed at the school would threaten pupils’ freedom.

Mr Jury, a Blockley resident whose children attend the Cidermill Lane school, made his accusation in an open letter to Ms France.

He was responding to a letter she circulated to her pupils’ parents announcing biometric machines would be installed at the school.

Each of the 1,200 11-to-18-year-old pupils will be asked to insert a fingertip into one of the machines when arriving at school every day.

The machine will record the child’s unique digital signature to identify him or her for electronic registration – intended to improve security – and cash-less catering which will remove the need for children to carry money to purchase school meals, thus reducing the likelihood of loss, bullying and theft and eliminating stigma associated with free school meals.

This technology will also shorten the time it takes pupils to be served school meals.

Parents can opt their children out of this system, which would see the youngsters use a card-swipe alternative.

However, in his letter to Ms France, Mr Jury said he was disturbed by the introduction of the technology which he believes is the latest example of an authority seeking to infringe the public’s freedom on the grounds that people need protection from various threats.

He said pupils will be exposed to the threat of being tracked and manipulated for sinister purposes, as in the novels Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell.

Mr Jury, who has also directed episodes of the Eastenders TV soap opera, said: “I read Brave New World and 1984 while at school in the seventies, now my own children don’t have to read about it – they can experience it everyday at their delightful Cotswold school.

“The use of this technology is simply not justified by your stated aims of reducing truancy and lunchtime queues.

“I urge you to reconsider this proposal.”

Ms France said she wished Mr Jury had raised his concerns with her before going public.

She said third parties would not access the biometric data and the school already securely held the pupils’ names, addresses and dates of birth.

Saying the technology was only being introduced because it was more efficient, Ms France added: “Mr Jury’s being a bit alarmist.

“I’m not infringing human rights and I’m not managing their behaviour, I’m checking they are in lessons; it’s my job.”