RFID chips: saving you or enslaving you?

July 19, 3:02 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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Chris Paget, "ethical hacker," uses a Matrics antenna and a laptop to pirate
people's identities by intercepting RFID emissions in San Francisco without
leaving the comfort of his car. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg).

American government controlcrats are absolutely in love with RFID chips.

They want to embed radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in everything, passports, "enhanced" driver's licenses (ELD), PASS cards required for travel to nearby countries, other types of identity documents and credentials, and in the ears of all farm animals (but that latter is an article for another day).

The justification for all of this emanates from Homeland Security. They just want to speed up border crossings, foil counterfeiters and identity thieves, and keep terrorists from sneaking into the country.

But that's just the "for your own good" news. One major drawback is that GPS-equipped "spy chips" make everyone trackable without their knowledge.

As a recent AP article put it, "Putting a traceable RFID in every pocket has the potential to make everybody a blip on someone's radar screen."

An even bigger problem is that the signals emitted by these chips can easily be intercepted by anyone with just a little tech savvy.

That same AP article tells the tale of a techie who equipped his Volvo with an off-the-shelf tag detecting antenna, an RFID reader and a laptop, and proceeded to scan and download unique serial numbers, some from as far away as 20 feet, from the documents of a half dozen or so locals and tourists.

Libertarians and other privacy advocates have been warning folks about this for years. Real ID Rebellion, for example, was set up in May of 2005 to track the downward spiral of freedom and privacy wrought by the US government's version of "Your papers, please."

In 2006, the Dutch discovered that their biometric passports could be cracked from 10 meters away and individual security data could be harvested.

Meanwhile, hackers cloned a human-implanted RFID chip that uses essentially the same technology as Real ID cards even though its maker, VeriChip, claimed it couldn't be counterfeited.

Yet in spite of these blatant failures the supposedly "Rugged Individualist" state of Texas has now "entered into agreements with the federal government to offer chipped licenses" so its citizens can be treated like electronically ear-tagged cattle (which is still an article for another day).

And there seems to be no end to the implications of RFID snooping.

If you have a programmable thermostat in your house the settings can be read with a simple drive-by. In the near future (meaning this will affect you, not just your grandchildren), if you don't keep your temperature at the government dictated green-friendly levels the Envirocops can, depending on their mood, (a) knock on your door and ticket you, or (b) Bash in your door and arrest you.

(As for those grandkids, you might want to buy them copies of The Computer Connection, a 1974 science fiction novel by Alfred Bester in which ID and monitoring chips called skull bugs are implanted in everyone at birth.)

So why is the government steamrolling ahead with chipping every living breathing American human being (and farm animal too, but that's that different story)?

Apparently, they know all of the negatives and just don't care. The fact that it may screw up your life immensely seems to be irrelevant. God-like control is everything.

They keep telling us, of course, that technology improvements will solve these problems. But bureaucracies bumble along at the speed of a tropical garden slug while teenage techies living in their parent's basements are staying light years ahead of the power creeps.

What the crats can create the geeks can crack.

So maybe it's time to take the tinfoil hat Looney Tunes seriously and recommend that everyone adopt their favorite headgear.

But the jury is still out on whether Reynolds Wrap will or won't block RFID signals.

Still, there are always those blindly trusting small town American Pollyannas with their malt shop and hayride worldviews who blithely tell us, "If you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to fear from the government."

Which is likely what millions of good trusting law-abiding Jewish citizens living in Europe in the 1930s used to say.