Countering Big Brother or Disrupting Society?
Can you say, "Accessory Before the Fact"? Knew you could.
In the latest attempt to undermine our commerce system, people have discovered a way to disable RFID chips. RFID chips are small wire coils embedded into everything from passports to consumer products to Mobil Speedpass cards. It allows a consumer to conveniently swipe their RFID chip in front of a panel and debit one's account, identify the user, identify the product, etc.
RFID chips are also the subject of conspiracy theorists and Big Brother watchers as the new Mark of the Beast. In the eyes of these nutjobs, RFID would allow the government to track you from space, read all your credit card purchases, and basically spy on you from the time you left your house to the time you came home at night. (At which point, your house's internal microphones would switch on, apparently...)
Well, engineers have created a small EM pulse device that will permanently disable these RFID chips and allow us to "not be tracked by Big Brother". It copies the microwave-oven-method, but in a much smaller scale. It generates a strong EM field with a coil, which should be placed as near to the target RFID tag as possible. The RFID tag then will receive a strong shock of energy comparable with an EMP and some part of it will blow, most likely the capacitor, thus deactivating the chip forever. From the manufacturer's website:
The TagZapper is being developed to be a light weight, handheld, device for deactivating RFID transmitting devices.
This is intended to fulfill consumer demand for a means to protect their privacy.
Proposed scenario:
A consumer purchases a six-pack of beer at a convenience store.
After exiting the store the consumer uses her TagZapper to disable the RFID tags.
At this point the consumer is able to transport and consume her purchase without being monitored by any commercial or government agency.
Once again, can you say "Accessory Before the Fact"? If a business is using RFID technology to counter shoplifting, I can walk into the store, zap the RFID chip inside that six-pack, and walk out of the store without tripping the alarms. If caught shoplifting, I could then turn around and sue the RFID Zapper company for giving me the equipment that enabled me to steal. That's a liability that the company is going to have to deal with if they're going to put a product like this on the market.
Better yet, what about RFID chips used to track medical conditions? I could zap somebody's medical history.
Of course, conspiracy theorists are going to cry that RFID technology can be used to track individuals. And that this product is a counter to the growing ease at which the US police state watches every move we make.
Obviously RFID manufacturers will need to figure out how to defeat something like this. Similarly any chip on board a satellite needs to be "hardened", be able to take the abuse of space such as radiation and extreme temperatures. How soon will we have hardened RFID tags? RFID has been around for ten years; have we really been that exposed for that long?