RFID, GPS Technology, Electronic Surveillance, Medical Implants, and Biometric Identity Checks

The Cover Charge at This Club? An RFID Implant

June 29, 2009

Yahoo Tech - The same RFID implants used to identify lost pets are now being adapted for use on you and me, and not how one might have originally expected. As with all pioneering technologies, it's leisure pursuits that are getting the first stab at the tech.

Specifically: One beach-oriented Barcelona nightclub, the Baja Beach Club, is using the implants to free customers of the burdens of having to carry their purses or wallets. Makes sense: When you're spending the day in a bikini and flip-flops, where do you keep your ID? Instead, the bouncer just scans your arm with an RFID reader, and you're in. And since you can't carry a credit card or cash either, the implants do double duty: You can pay for drinks with a quick scan of the chip. Chipped patrons also gain access to VIP areas of the club.

The implant procedure is simple and mostly painless (except for all the legal paperwork required): The area where the chip is injected is thoroughly numbed, then the glass capsule is injected beneath a layer of skin and fat on the arm.

It's an interesting experiment, and I'm intrigued to see whether the idea will catch on. The catch, of course, becomes what will happen if a lot of clubs in one area decide to do this. One RFID chip under the skin is probably an interesting conversation piece. A dozen in one arm might make you walk funny. Obviously the one-chip-per-establishment system isn't really sustainable in the long run.

Could someone come along and develop a broad human RFID chip standard? Such plans have been being talked about for years, but nothing much has ever come of it. Naturally, security implications are huge: RFID tags can be scanned, copied, and altered by savvy hackers, and it would be a simple matter for a wily crook to scan people en masse as they pass through, say, the entrance of a mall. It's one thing if they're making off with free drinks on your dime, another if they can suck your life away with the wave of a wand.

Pro or con? Well... it's something to think and talk about while you're doing all that drinking!

Inside the Military’s Secret Terror-Tagging Tech

June 3, 2009

Wired - ...If you’re carrying around a phone or some other mobile gadget, you can be tracked – either through the GPS chip embedded in the gizmo or by triangulating the cell signal. Defense contractor EWA Government Systems, Inc. makes a radio frequency-based “Bigfoot Remote Tagging System” that’s the size of a couple of AA batteries. But the government has been working to make these terrorist tracking tags even smaller...

CIA and Pentagon Deploy RFID “Death Chips,” Coming Soon to a Product Near You!

June 18, 2009

Aftermath News - First it was cattle. Then it was pets. Then Mexicans. Now the tribal areas of Pakistan where the CIA is equipping Pakistani tribesmen with secret transmitters to call in airstrikes targeting al-Qaida and Taliban militants. A drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles scattering body parts everywhere. Will Americans and the rest of the “free world” be next? Long perceived as a crazy conspiracy theory, radio-frequency identification chips (RFID) have surreptitiously penetrated every aspect of society and may soon literally get under our skin for ubiquitous surveillance. Back to Orwell … “The future is now” as Burghardt admonishes...

Hybrid Tag Includes Active RFID, GPS, Satellite and Sensors

February 24, 2009

RFID Journal - Numerex, an Atlanta-based provider of fixed and mobile machine-to-machine wireless solutions and network services, and RFID systems supplier Savi Technology have unveiled an intelligent hybrid tag that combines active RFID, satellite communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies. The tag is designed to track goods anywhere within a global supply chain, whether they are waiting in a warehouse, being loaded onto a ship or sitting in a desert at a bare-bones military outpost.

The tag, known as the ST-694 GlobalTag, has been in development since the summer of 2007, as part of a cooperative research and development contract for the U.S Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) group responsible for creating and implementing global deployment and distribution solutions for the U.S. military and government.

"The DOD has a mandate for an asset tag that can be used to track assets end-to-end," says Pierre Parent, Numerex's VP and general manager of satellite solutions, "which includes the entire time that asset is in the supply chain—from the time it is packed up in a container, loaded onto a ship, unloaded and delivered."

Radio frequency identification works well to track goods, Parent says, as long as there are RFID interrogators located at various points along the supply chain to capture tag reads. But the U.S. military shipments are often beyond the reach of an RFID reader—the typical RFID read range for the ST-694 GlobalTag, for instance, is 100 meters (328 feet). When goods are moved into desert or mountainous regions to support troops in battle, that's where they can be misplaced and become vulnerable to theft.

Therefore, Savi Technology and Numerex opted to marry satellite and GPS tracking with active RFID into a single device controlled by one microprocessor. Not only can the tag automatically and intelligently switch between active RFID and satellite communications as necessary, but the data can be viewed using a single back-end system...

Lawmaker Bachmann Vows Not to Complete Census

June 17, 2009

The Washington Times - Outspoken Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann says she’s so worried that information from next year’s national census will be abused that she will refuse to fill out anything more than the number of people in her household.
In an interview Wednesday morning with The Washington Times “America’s Morning News,” Mrs. Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, said the questions have become “very intricate, very personal” and she also fears ACORN, the community organizing group that came under fire for its voter registration efforts last year, will be part of the Census Bureau’s door-to-door information collection efforts.

“I know for my family the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home,” she said. “We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond that...”

"They will be in charge of going door to door and collecting data from the American public," she said. "This is very concerning."

ACORN has applied to help recruit workers to help conduct the census. Republican lawmakers and some public interest groups have expressed concern over their involvement. ACORN staffers have ben indicted in several states on charges of voter registration fraud stemming from the organization's efforts to register voters last year.

Mrs. Bachmann, who is in her second term in the House, has become a lightning rod for criticism from Democrats and liberal talk show hosts for her unapologetic conservative views. She said she considers that "a badge of honor." "It's clear when a person speaks out against those policies they become a target, and that should be concerning to everyone," she said.

The Techniques of Fascism #1: A Missile at Your Door
GPS Coordinates Being Taken for Every Residence in Nation
Census 2010 Address Canvassing: Coming to Your Neighborhood
Obama and ACORN GPS Marking Every Front Door in America?

British Court Orders Singer Get “Medical Implant” for Drug Addiction

June 12, 2009

Infowars - Pete Doherty, singer for the English indie rock band Babyshambles, has been ordered to have a medical implant to prevent the use of drugs, according to the Associated Press. Doherty appeared in a Stroud, western England court today where he entered a plea of guilty to heroin possession and driving without a license or insurance.

It is not specified what sort of implant the British state demanded the rock singer receive.

Naltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist, is often used for heroin addiction. Some practitioners use a naltrexone implant placed in the lower abdomen. The implant has not been shown scientifically to be successful in “curing” the subject of their addiction.

Implants are used for “medication compliance reasons.”

Britain Leads World in Police State

June 1, 2009

The Register - A recent survey from internet security consultancy, Cryptohippie, suggests that the UK is setting the pace in at least one area - though being classified as the West’s most repressive regime when it comes to electronic surveillance might not be a title that this government is entirely happy to wear.

This result emerges from Cryptohippie’s recently published Electronic Police State 2008 (pdf). This is the first in what are intended to be a series of annual reports that will audit the "state use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens."

The audit focusses on 17 factors, ranging from requirement to produce documents on demand, through to the extent to which states force ISP’s and phone companies to retain data, the blurring of boundaries between police and intelligence work and ultimately the breakdown of the principles of habeas corpus.

A simple five-point scoring system is used for each factor, with results totalled to produce an overall score. Some 52 major states are looked at, with final ranking apparently influenced by two quite different factors. On the one hand, states that are simply repressive are likely to score highly – and they do. The top four places in the survey are occupied by China, North Korea, Belarus and Russia.

However, electronic policing also requires some degree of technological sophistication – so it is not surprising to find the UK dropping in at no. 5 and the US at no. 6. France and Germany arrive a few places below that.

This result echoes warnings issued repeatedly by Lords and the Information Commissioner – most recently in an official report last month – that Britain is slowly sleepwalking toward becoming a surveillance society. Equally predictable was the government response that it takes all such criticisms seriously and needs to strike a balance.

However, as both Cryptohippie and other government critics have argued, the government response is disingenuous, relying on a rejection of straw men, rather than engaging with genuine fears.

The report expands on its subject thus:

"The usual image of a "police state" includes secret police dragging people out of their homes at night, with scenes out of Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR. The problem with these images is that they are horribly outdated. That’s how things worked during your grandfather’s war – that is not how things work now.

"An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine."

Britain is Paving the Way Toward a Surveillance Society

Brain Scanning May Be Used in Security Checks

May 12, 2009

Guardian - Distinctive brain patterns could become the latest subject of biometric scanning after EU researchers successfully tested technology to verify ­identities for security checks. The experiments, which also examined the potential of heart rhythms to authenticate individuals, were conducted under an EU-funded inquiry into biometric systems that could be deployed at airports, borders, and in sensitive locations to screen out terrorist suspects.

Another series of tests fitted a “sensing seat” to a truck to record each driver’s characteristic seated posture in an attempt to spot whether commercial vehicles had been hijacked.

Details of the Humabio (Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behaviourial Analysis) pilot projects have been published amid further evidence of biometric technologies penetrating everyday lives.

The Foreign Office plans to spend up to £15m on fixed and mobile security devices that use methods including "Facial recognition (two and/or three dimensional), fingerprint recognition, iris recognition and vein imaging palm recognition."
The biometric sensors and systems, it appears, will primarily be deployed to protect UK embassies around the world. The contract, about which the FCO declined to elaborate further, also mentions "surveillance" and "data collection" services.

The Home Office, meanwhile, has confirmed rapid expansion plans of automated facial recognition gates: 10 will be operating at major UK airports by August. Passengers holding the latest generation of passports travelling through Manchester and Stansted are already being checked by facial-recognition cameras.

Biometric identity checks are also becoming more common in the world of commercial gadgets. New versions of computer laptops and mobile phones are entering the market with built-in fingerprint scanners to prevent other people running up large bills and misusing pilfered hi-tech equipment.

Among security experts there is a preference for developing biometric security devices that do not rely on measuring solely one physiological trait: offering choice makes scanning appear less intrusive and allows for double-checking.

The holy grail of the biometrics industry is a scanning mechanism that is socially acceptable in an era of mass transit and 100 per cent accurate. Researchers are eager to produce 'non-contact' biometric systems that can check any individual's identity at a distance.

The US government's secretive IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) is seeking development proposals to enhance such technologies. Insisting that it is not interested in 'contact-type' biometrics, it asks for ideas that will "significantly advance the intelligence community's ability to achieve high-confidence match performance ... [for] high fidelity biometric signatures".

The Humabio project, based in Greece, is involved more in blue-sky scientific thinking than in intelligence work. Its research, highlighted in the latest issue of Biometric Technology Today, is at a "pre-commercial, proof-of-concept stage."