United RFID Article for Mute Magazine
			by Benjamin Mako Hill

Imagine pushing a shopping cart full of food out the supermarket door
without stopping -- the price of the goods in your cart is tallied and
automatically debitted from your bank account. Imagine invisible
checkpoints where police can identify you and the precise contents of
your wallet or purse -- down to the amount of cash you're carrying and
a log of when and where those notes changed hands. With the use of
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, both of these scenarios,
while still far-fetched, are becoming increasingly possible realities.

RFID tags are similar to the tags that airports and airplanes use to
identify each other. Each "tag" broadcasts unique identifying
information over radio frequencies while receivers listen for these
signals. The data stored and broadcasted by the tag is usually a
unique number (usually under 40 digits) hard-coded into the chip. This
number is associated with data in a computer to establish identity and
information about the transmitter.

In recent years, RFIDs have become small, cheap, and efficient. Modern
RFID tags are are tiny transistors and microchips that harness the
power of the receivers radio signal to eliminate the need for
batteries and bulk while reducing the cost to only a few pence.  The
smallest chips to date, "mu-chips" made by Japanese electronics giant
Hitachi, measure only a third of a millimeter across plus a hair-sized
antenna.

Over the past decades, RFID tags have quietly made their way into
library books, been sown into clothing, been placed in identification
cards and been employed in toll road "Speed Passes." Retail giant
Walmart has required that its suppliers include RFIDs in pallets
(although not individual items) by the end of 2004. In a move that has
catapulted RFID tags into the media spotlight, the European Central
Bank is considering a plan to place tiny RFID tags in each Euro note
in an attempt to cut down on counterfeiting and money laundering. As
the chips become smaller and cheaper, their potential uses rapidly
multiply.

Since their introduction, RFID tags have been the subject of debate
between privacy, consumer rights, and civil liberties groups and the
companies that produce and employ the technology. Through their near
invisibility and the fact that, unlike bar-codes and magnetic strips
on credit cards, RFIDs can be read silently and imperceptibly from a
short distance, RFID tags introduce the potential for violations of
privacy in unprecedented ways.

The most simple type of abuse is the ability for corporations and
individuals with tag readers and access to RFID databases to do silent
electronic searches without the knowledge or permission of the person
being searched.

For example, when you buy a shirt with an RFID tag sewn into the
fabric, your personal information -- through a credit card or loyalty
card -- may become associated with the unique ID broadcasted by the
tag in your shirt. Each time you walk through an RFID scanner with
knowledge of your shirts' tag, the history of your shirt -- and your
own history through association -- becomes available to anyone with
access to the information in the store database. Realistically, the
proprietary nature of most corporate databases will mediate, but not
eliminate, the danger of this type of abuse.

The more worrying type of abuse is at the hands of governments. State
programs to interconnect vast number of existing databases like the
U.S. Department of Defense's proposed "Total Information Awareness"
will be able to connect vast amount of personal and identifying data
to the physical presence location of individuals. While the presence
the of chips will not always indicate the presence of an individual,
it will be accurate enough to provide impetus for abuse.

RFID is still prohibitively expensive for most of the types of use,
and abuse, described above. Readers are only reliable within through
close proximity (2-3 meters) to a tag and the rarely capable of
reading multiple chips simultaneously. They are not connected to the
Big Brother style-systems described above. That said, each of these
limitations is only temporary.

The advocates of RFID have already demonstrated its usefulness and
desirability. In the hype, they have largely ignored or unfairly
dismissed the potential for privacy abuse introduced by the
technology. In this early stage of the technology's life, privacy,
civil, and consumer rights groups still have an opportunity to
influence the nature of how this technology is and isn't used and it's
important that these discussions happen now. Individual involvement
will be essential to these groups' success.