Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre
Nashville (US):Nelson, 2005,
Distributed in the UK by New Holland Publishers, London, at £14.99, h/b
RFIDs are acoming. RFIDs are radio frequency identification or identifiers, little chips which can be fixed to, implanted in, built into almost anything from paper money to human beings; and which can then be ‘read’ or decoded to identify the chip. The whole world becomes an inventory for the corporations and the state. That is the fear of the authors; and, looking at the evidence they present, it may not be too far away. RFID applications are so plentiful, the danger is that concerns of privacy are going to be swept aside. There is already a large RFID lobby in the US and the politicians have started taking its money. The big corporations are preparing to introduce them across the board in products; and the military is getting interested on both sides of the Atlantic. The British military are trying RFIDs in their warehouses.(1) In an article written after the book was published, (2) the authors report tell us that ‘Cincinnati video surveillance company CityWatcher.com now requires employees to use VeriChip human implantable microchips to enter a secure data centre’; and the US government has begun producing passports with RFID chips in them. (3)
This book documents the authors’ research into this field, the patents, the product trials and the campaigns against RFIDs in the US and Europe. This is important and scary stuff. Orwellian? Orwell wasn’t even close.
Notes
1 http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/wireless/0,39020348,39254956,00.htm
2 www.newswithviews.com/McIntyre/Liz. htm
3 www.engadget.com/2006/03/13/us-issues-first-rfid-passports/