RFID plus NIR equals big brother

I got this email as someone potentially interested in the privacy issues raised. I'm still deciding how I feel and think about it: some of it comes over as borderline paranoid; but just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you! So I'd love some thoughts from you readers; either comment-wise or more one-to-one (I know some of you don't want to sign up to comment, and I don't want to be dealing with loads of spam comments by opening up comments to all-comers).

A new system to track your movements, as they happen
Imagine a world where you are allowed no secrets.
Imagine a world where everywhere you go is logged, recorded and posted on the internet, immediately, as soon as you arrive.
Imagine that every time you enter or leave a building, you are scanned and that a full report of everything you are wearing and carrying is posted instantly on the internet - intended to be accessible, so lots of people can read it - yes, even your underwear, what you have in your pockets, your bag or briefcase. All this information will be available to corporations (or potentially anybody).
They will know what clothes you have on (and maybe who paid for them!), when you last changed them, how much soap powder you buy. They will know if you have a condom in your wallet, or a tampon in your bag, whether you are carrying an adult magazine or haemorrhoid cream. And they will have a complete record of everything you ever bought.
This isn’t science fiction, but a new European Union policy
The EU want to authorise an electronic system that would do exactly this, and may legislate within months to make it happen.
All this can be verified from the European Commission’s own website.
This can still be stopped, but you have to do something - now, today.

This is an appeal for help, to lobby MEPs, in the lead-up to the election to the European Parliament, on 4 June 2009. (This letter gives MEPs emails and all the information you need - scroll to the end).
If you forward this message to 5 friends, like a chain letter, you can help ensure this EU measure gets exposed and defeated - even if you don’t write to your MEP yourself.

So, what is this tracking system?

Welcome to RFID
RFID is a system for tracking people and their possessions 'in real time'.
Tiny radio transponder chips will be placed in everything you buy, each carrying a unique ID number. That number can be scanned from a distance of up to a few feet.
RFID is intended to replace bar-code scanners, anti-theft barriers at stores - and do a whole lot more.
The ‘Internet of Things’ (also called ‘Internet 3.0')
This is the system that will allow RFID data to be posted on the internet, immediately.
In the ‘Internet of Things’ every object will have its own internet web-page, with its RFID number being its web-address. Every time an object is scanned by an RFID reader, the time and place will be logged on its web-page, together with other information, such as purchaser, etc..
Tracking
The record of the object’s movements will also be a record of its owner’s movements, and it will be a simple matter to cross-reference to identify all a person’s belongings.
Items such as shoes and underwear generally are used by only one person and rarely swapped or shared.
Tracking these objects’ history, on the Internet of Things, they will have tracked all your movements, your entire life. In fact, IBM already have a patent on this (US #200220165758 - ‘IDENTIFICATION AND TRACKING OF PERSONS USING RFID-TAGGED ITEMS’).
Turning numbers into names - ID cards and the National Identity Register
Ultimately, the system needs a cross-reference to turn those numbers into a name and address.
Stores could capture your name if you use a bank card to pay at some time. (And some banks have experimented putting RFID in payment cards).
The ultimate answer, however, will be ID cards and the new government identity database that will go with them. Britain's (and soon, all of Europe's) ID cards will have an RFID chip implanted in them - just like new passports - that's EU policy.
Your identity will be for sale to corporations. That's going to make it child's play to identify anyone as soon as they walk in. It's so useful, you would almost think that's what ID cards were always intended to do - to identify you to corporations.
Profiling - Analysing your behaviour and personality
So, once they have gathered all of this data, what are they going to do with it?
Marketing has spawned a whole huge industry of gathering personal data, and analysis systems, to identify big-spenders (and discourage bargain shoppers) to increase stores' earnings per shopper.
Corporations have sophisticated software that can analyse your purchases and habits, to ’profile’ your personality and psychology, for marketing purposes - to assess your weaknesses and suggestibility. It works and it’s very effective.
There will be software to analyse your movements and any patterns in them. They are going to know if you go shopping with your family, or with someone else. They will be able to guess if you are seeing someone other than your wife or husband. They will be able to guess the names of all your friends, and know where they live, what they do and any affiliations they have.
All this is also going to be available to the government, your local council, your employer - and to potential blackmailers.
Employers
Imagine a world where corporations profile their staff, and every year ‘rotate’ (i.e. fire) a percentage of their employees, to get a workforce with the ‘right’ profile, the right attitudes (Some companies already do this). Imagine how RFID tracking and profiling could facilitate a corporate culture like that.
Some public employers, in USA, have already started dictating diet and lifestyle strictures to their employees, with dismissal if you don’t comply. Your employer would know what you eat, whether you drink, whether and how often you go to the gym.
Nothing will be beyond examination
Corporations even want to put RFID scanners in your home - in your fridge and other appliances - that could see who goes to the fridge, how often, and what they take out.
RFID spychips have been placed in many new domestic ’wheelie bins’. This is to facilitate proposed charging by weight, for refuse collection. That means your waste bin (and hence your refuse) will be RFID scanned at collection.
The EU want to track RFID in refuse, to help recycling (See the official EC website page How can the Tags improve your life?). Who knows, that could mean, if you have put things in the waste bin that should have been recycled, you could be fined, automatically.
And corporations already pay for information about the waste in people’s bins, so they can see how quickly you consume their products.
Nothing will be beyond examination.

The aim of the RFID project is ‘Total Mobility’ - tracking all movement.
This is equivalent to total surveillance or total control.

Still can't believe it?
Want to read more? Here are a couple of independent articles on the subject: -
The Register
Scientific American

This is not science fiction. Some stores are already starting to fit equipment ready for RFID scanners. The only ‘science fiction’ about this is in the proposed ‘protections’ they are going to give us.

Who wants RFID?
There is an industry association, promoting RFID.
Global corporations that have wanted to introduce RFID include IBM, NCR, Intel, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Tesco, Phillip Morris, Kodak, etc..
However, industry's own research showed that 78% of the public are opposed to RFID.

What is the EU proposing to do?
The EU see this not as a nightmare but as a tremendous business opportunity.

The EU is proposing legislation and regulations, under 'harmonisation' rules.
Harmonisation means, if the EU permits RFID, then it is binding on everyone - individual member nations cannot opt-out or prohibit it. European legislation may be only months away.

Is this EU policy? Read for yourselves on the official European Commission website and a pdf here.
The EU are already financing this with millions, in support, and funding research at European universities.

This can still be stopped, but you have to do something - now, today.

EU proposed privacy protections
If you write to your MEP, they will tell you about their proposed (supposed) privacy protections. These sound great at first: -

* ‘Opt-in‘ privacy, meaning RFID tags would be automatically disabled at the check-out, unless you opt to keep them live.
* Prohibition of junk mail and marketing, unless you opt-in.
* Existing EU regulations, on the storage and processing of personal data.

These protections sound good, but are they as good as they look?

1. The privacy proposals aren’t firm yet - they are still 'evolving' and may not be confirmed.
2. One powerful reason things might change would be the proposed international treaty on data privacy, which will include USA. The US treats personal data as an important commercial commodity. Even our current protections could be up for re-negotiation.
3. The EU wants to make you carry RFID you can't disable, by putting it in all government issued documents, passports, 'entitlement cards' and ID cards. Even if RFID tags in purchased items are disabled, there will still be plenty more tags to track us.
4. You are probably already carrying RFID - in things you would never think of - library cards, photocopier cards, ‘Oyster’ cards for the London Underground, etc.. There are items industry sneaked in while you weren't looking. Let’s not build the infrastructure to track these.
5. Disabled tags may not be ‘dead’ but merely ‘sleeping’. Somebody may be able to reactivate your tags without your knowledge. RFID tags can be programmable and capable of being turned on or off, given a new number or extra new information - even viruses. RFID technology can be hijacked for unauthorised uses and by criminals.
6. The EU want to track RFID in refuse, to help recycling (See the official EC website page How can the Tags improve your life?). How will they do that, if RFID tags are disabled? The tags can’t be both turned-off and yet still working at the same time. Something’s got to give, and it’s probably going to be your privacy.
7. Turn off the RFID chips and you could lose all right of refund or product guarantee.
8. RFID tags are only the first step in a much larger plan. The EU is pouring millions into research on RFID and ‘sensor networks’ (EU - The Future of the Internet, p98). They plan for RFID in everyone's homes. Does this sound like they want to let you turn it all off?
9. The tremendous money-making business opportunity that the EU hopes RFID will bring can't happen if the tags are turned off, or if all that data just sits inert in storage - it has to be analysed and exploited, and it appears intended it will be.
10. Systems like this are fundamentally compromising. Privacy regulations are worthless in the face of hackers and organised, international cyber-crime. If we are serious about privacy, we would never allow such data to be gathered, let alone put on the internet.
11. None of these regulations will stop foreign governments looking at the data. The US bought up information about voters, from private sources, in 11 different Latin American countries. It was alleged this could be used to influence electoral rolls, hence elections (by determining unfriendly voters and having them struck off the register) as has been alleged to happen in US domestic elections. And that's before we mention Russian and Chinese hackers. Or blackmail for espionage.
12. So, you won't get junk mail. Junk mail is just one impact of your personal data being visible to marketing analysis. It's more significant if your employer may be able to track your lifestyle, through the same data, out of sight.


The EU has a bad track-record on privacy and rights -
The EU has introduced a series of privacy-invading surveillance and ‘security’ measures

* A new five year plan for justice and home affairs that emphasises the surveillance state and keeping digital records of all citizens' activities
* Plans for database registration of all citizens and universal biometric ID cards, with RFID
* The EU directive (2006/24/EC) on 'data retention', creating a database recording all communications, phone calls and emails (incidentally, approved by the European Parliament)
* Introducing databases tracking political activists even before 9/11.
* The willingness of the EU to compromise to the US on privacy, shown in the release of airline passenger data to USA, with inadequate privacy protection.
* Plans to fingerprint all children, compulsorily over the age of 12
* An EU initiative to continuously track the speed and position of vehicles, about to go on trial in the UK
* An EU-funded pilot scheme in Romania to put RFID into all government documents

The EU wants to know everything about you
- but you aren't allowed to know anything about them!
The EU has a poor record of transparency.
EU decisions are taken in secret.
Votes at the Council of Ministers are secret - you aren’t allowed to know if your nation has voted for or against a new law.
EU finance is secretive. It has been plagued by fraud and corruption. It has failed audit for several years.

So, what can you do?

1) Tell your friends
This is the most important thing you can do.
If you have friends in (or from) other EU nations, it is especially important that you forward this message to them, so they can lobby MEPs in their own country.

But please, please try not to pass your friends' email addresses to strangers -
put people’s addresses ‘bcc’ and, before forwarding, delete any addresses that shouldn’t be seen.

2) Write to your MEP
Follow the steps on this website - it will tell you how to contact them
UK Office of the European Parliament
http://www.europarl.org.uk/section/your-meps/your-meps
Unlike the British Parliament, each Euro-constituency in Britain has three MEPs, not just one. We each have three different MEPs representing us, perhaps from three different parties.

Here’s a hint : - We have seen lots of replies from MEPs - most just waffle, and avoid any commitment to doing anything. When you write to your MEPs, it is important to use language that does not allow evasion.

Here is a suggested text: -

Dear MEP,

I am appalled by the European Union’s proposals for RFID and the Internet 3.0. This is unacceptable privacy-invading technology.
I am very concerned that neither you nor any other MEP has spoken out about this.
Unless you promise to vote against this, I won’t vote for you. And I'll tell my friends.
In fact, to believe in your sincerity, I want to hear pro-active proposals to block and prohibit RFID product tagging. I don't want RFID to be put in government documents.
I also want to hear you will stop EU funding for research on RFID and the Internet of Things.
Yes, I have heard about the EU proposals for privacy protection and, No, I am not impressed. Even 'Opt-in' is not enough to preserve our privacy. We should not be building an infrastructure for tracking people.
Yours,


3) Consumer protest
Supermarkets and corporations are hoping to introduce RFID with or without government help. Yes, we need to defeat the EU proposal, but we also need to stop the supermarkets.

Supermarkets and corporations may be powerful multi-billion dollar enterprises, but they are really scared of consumer pressure - and that’s where you come in.

Consumer protest has already stopped RFID in USA, the home of corporate power. That's why industry has now turned to Europe instead.

So, what is ‘consumer protest’?
It can be as little as telling your friends about a boycott of a store or a product that has introduced RFID.

4) Join CASPIAN (it’s Free!)
CASPIAN - Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering - is the main campaign against RFID

The CASPIAN newsletter (by email, monthly, free) will tell you what‘s going on and give you suggestions about what you can do.

You can sign-up for the newsletter on the same site as CASPIAN membership: -

CASPIAN is a consumer group rather than a political organisation, even though this issue has a political dimension. CASPIAN is not aligned to any political party.
If you want more information, have a look at their website www.nocards.org


Sent by: Nathan Allonby
nathan.allonby(at)tiscali.co.uk