Something new for the "tin-foil beanie"...

Something new for the "tin-foil beanie" crowd to worry about. And I admit that some of this bothers me a tad as well. This is where that RFID business gets a bit worrisome.

The Los Angeles Times has a story by Todd Lewan, of the Associated Press, about a security researcher named Chris Paget, who went cruising around the streets of San Francisco in his car, looking for electronic US passport cards (PASS cards), which have embedded RFID chips. Within an hour of driving around Fisherman’s Wharf, using a scanner built from readily available parts, he had successfully captured the serial numbers of six pedestrians’ passport cards — without their knowledge.

These PASS cards are not regular passports; they are intended for travelers to Canada, Bermuda, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Since June 1, though, you must have one of these cards, or an approved state-issued alternative, that contains the RFID chip, unless you have an unexpired conventional passport. All US passports issued since 2007 contain the RFID chip (existing passports are still good till they expire).

…Both Mr Paget’s experiments and others have shown that the RFID tags can be read from a considerable distance, perhaps as much as 10 meters. And there is still a privacy concern about having a "serial number" (of the RFID tag) associated with each individual’s personal data. One need only consider what has happened with the Social Security number (which was specifically not supposed to be used for identification) to predict that these tags will shortly be incorporated into credit bureau records, and many other private sector data bases.


Goto:

RFID Chips Enable Hackers to Sniff Passports - Watching the Watchers

These RFID chips are the ones put into many US driving licenses as well. Now, consider this. Couple these RFID chips into CCTV systems, and your "chip" would announce your presence on any camera you happened to be near.

Couple this into that post I put on here about the CCTVs in Great Britian; "Since there are approximately more than 4 million closed-circuit television cameras in use in Britain, it is estimated that the average British citizen is caught on camera 300 times a day. Other nations don’t have near the density of CCTVs that Great Britain does, maybe Japan, but still.

"I would hope that the British, who seem to be so good at irony, would find the dry humor in the situation which reveals that within 200 yards of the last residence of George Orwell (creator of Big Brother), there are 32 such cameras, capturing every move of passers-by.

There are some lines across which I am not comfortable with the government going.