A little too much of big brother?

Jesse White’s recent post proposes embedding people’s personal information into driver’s licenses and ID cards. He’s apparently talking about an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chip.

RFID comes in two flavors: Active, as in I-PASS where the transponder in your car has a battery-powered transmitter to respond to the querying signal with its info about you and your car. Active systems work long range. Passive systems typically employ a small semiconductor chip. It has no battery or separate transmitter, so must respond by reflecting some of the querying signal’s RF energy. That makes it very short range, intended for pickup only by a nearby scanner.

These devices have a number of very beneficial uses, but one might also feel the chill of “Big Brother is Watching You” if used wrongly. The chip you get installed in your pet’s ear is RFID. In merchandising, RFID chips will be replacing bar code scanners in many warehousing and retail applications. Wouldn’t it be nice to wheel your (plastic) shopping cart past the checkout scanner and have all the items automatically rung up simultaneously?

My new passport carries an RFID chip, and so is classed as an electronic device. But its information hides in sophisticated encoding, and the passport covers contain metal foil shields to guard against “skimmers.” What? That’s an illicit device that combines a short, powerful RF signal with an extra-sensitive receiver to grab RFID information from a greater distance.

So if governments start putting personal info into RFID devices that it then requires you to carry, we better control what information, and what safeguards are in place to protect it. Do we want the name, address and phone number of next of kin potentially put in the hands of others who are not interested in your or their welfare?

Gib Van Dine

West Chicago