[I always learn something from John Gilmore, and this is no exception. Although parts of his dystopia are already true: I travel with a cell phone, 802.1x devices, and Bluetooth devices that broadcast my identity (to a sufficiently savvy adversary) even more efficiently than an RFID tag would... --Declan] -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Politech] Computerworld falls for RFID "sniper rifle" hoax? Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 13:21:35 -0700 From: John Gilmore To: Declan McCullagh CC: politech@politechbot.com References: <408F2D74.8040301@well.com> Nice hoax. But the opposite is more likely to come true. Rather than shooting RFID chips into people, people with RFID chips already in or on them will be shot. People with RFID chips in their clothing, books, bags, or bodies could be targeted by "smart projectiles" that will zero in on that particular Smart. Today's "smart bombs" already self-guide toward laser-identified or RF-identified or heat-identified targets. The technical challenges involved in guiding a missile toward an RFID chip would probably relate to the speed of the missile compared to the range at which the RFID chip can be made to respond and the agility with which the missile can change course. Such a missile could probably more easily be designed to *arm* or *trigger* its explosion when a particular RFID chip is in range. That way, if fired at innocents, it would be a dud that would only cause minimal damage, but if fired at the right person, it would blow up. But we need not get so science-fiction about it. Rather than bring the mountain to Mohammed, let's let Mohammed come to the mountain. Let's see what this technology would do for an everyday practice of today's freedom fighters who are defending their country by opposing one of the US Government's current wars of occupation. In order to comply with government labeling mandates resulting from the huge Firestone tire recall, Michelin has announced that it plans to put RFID chips in every tire it sells to car makers (and eventually in every tire they sell). Similar plans are afoot for many other automotive and personal products. Imagine being able to bury an explosive in a roadway -- that would only go off when a particular car drove over it. You could bury these bombs months in advance, in any or every major or minor roadway. You could change the targeting whenever you liked (e.g. via driving a radio-equipped car over it and transmitting new instructions to it). You could give it a whole list of cars that it would explode for, or a set of cars and dates. If you put such bombs throughout a metropolitan area, a car could drive through the area for months without triggering anything -- taking evasive routes, etc. But on the appointed day, each the bombs surrounding the area would know to go off when that same car passed. Without the responsible parties having to visit the sites later than days or weeks beforehand (making them hard to catch or deter). Such explosives would be detectable by their radio emissions -- RFID pings. But in a world where RFID pings are being transmitted by everything around you, including every cellphone and doorframe and cash register and ATM machine and camera and car and computer and palmtop and parking meter and cop car ... you won't even notice. Places with "congestion pricing" like central London, or any toll road anywhere, would even have plenty of active RFID readers buried in the roadway already. And I'm sure the cops anywhere would love to have them for tracking where everybody is driving -- individually. Welcome to automated personal death. Courtesy of RFID and leading shortsighted global corporations, with government encouragement. John _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'