"Chipping away at security; Radio frequency technologies are getting more powerful - and vulnerable to attack" by Mark Baard, Globe Correspondent | May 4, 2009
The same technological advances that are making personal computers smaller and phones more energy-efficient are turning gadgets that use radio frequency identification, or RFID, into appealing targets for hackers.
Radio frequency chips and antennae, which typically transmit small amounts of data in quick exchanges with reader devices, are used in E-Z Pass systems on highways. Consumers who tap their MasterCard PayPass bank cards on wireless readers are also using RFID technology.
And the authorities want to chip up all your IDs -- if not implant one in you.
But as radio frequency chips evolve to store more data and to transmit signals over greater distances, the devices can also be coaxed into giving up personal information, specialists say.
Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, is among the privacy advocates worried about RFID security. Ozer said an RFID-enabled passport card issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, called US Passport Card, is vulnerable to wireless attacks.
US citizens can use the Passport Card, instead of a passport, to enter the country from Mexico and Canada by land or from the Caribbean and Bermuda by sea. The card's RFID chip contains a number that corresponds to the bearer's photo and other personal information in a government database.
I want to know when you have had enough tyranny over a lie, America.
"The new tags have extreme read ranges," Ozer said. "They can be read up to 30 feet away, and copied and cloned, without people ever knowing."
Radio frequency technologies first got a bad rap among privacy advocates in the late 1990s, when companies, led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Procter & Gamble, along with computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began developing an RFID tag standard, called the Electronic Product Code.
Consumer and privacy advocates feared governments and marketers might use the EPC-RFID on purchased goods to secretly track shoppers - and their buying habits - by using fixed and hand-held wireless reader devices. Since then, radio frequency technologies have only grown more powerful and sophisticated....
Interesting how that is exactly what is happening with this electronic information data-gathering, isn't it? The business (and telecoms) take down the marketing info, then forward all the rest to the government.
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